Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

by Stephen C. Meyer

Whittington, a trilobite expert, understood this as well as anyone. In 1971, he published the first comprehensive taxonomic review of the Burgess biota. In his review, he broke decisively with Walcott’s previous attempt to lump all Cambrian forms into a few preexisting taxonomic categories. In so doing, he reemphasized the morphological disparity present in the Burgess animal biota and, in the process, deprived evolutionary biologists of one part of Walcott’s two-part strategy for minimizing the Cambrian problem. By lumping all Burgess animals into existing phyla and classes, Walcott had seemingly diminished the problem of disparity by reducing the number of novel phyla for which connecting intermediates were required. By recognizing the disparity clearly on display in the Burgess, Whittington partially undercut Walcott’s solution to the Cambrian mystery and highlighted what would become its central unsolved problem: the origin of novel biological form.