Sorry, Faster Mutation Rate Will Not Explain the Cambrian Explosion

Strange ideas are percolating at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Certain biophysicists think that hot vents and boiling pools accelerated the emergence and complexity of life. Why? The hotter the water, the more the mutations. When Earth boiled soon after its birth, there were more opportunities for mistakes in the genetic code to come up with new things. As the temperature cooled over 4 billion years to modern levels in the 70-degree range, there was a "precipitous decline...