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

by Stephen C. Meyer

35 This leap in complexity, in a relatively short span of geological time, may well exceed the explanatory resources of natural selection working on random mutations. We will return to that question in Part Two. The Ediacaran fossils therefore do not solve the problem of the sudden increase in biological form and complexity during the Cambrian. Instead, they represent an earlier, if less dramatic, manifestation of the same kind of problem. To biology’s “big bang,”36 the Ediacaran biota add a significant “pow.” As paleobiologist Kevin Peterson, of Dartmouth College, and his colleagues note, these fauna represent “an apparent quantum leap in ecological complexity as compared with the ‘boring billions’ [of years] that characterize Earth before the Ediacaran,” even if these organisms are “still relatively simple when compared with the Cambrian,” which they characterize as another “quantum leap in organismal and ecological complexity.”37 Many paleontologists now refer to the Ediacaran radiation as an explosion in its own right.38 This Precambrian “pow” makes the problem of fossil discontinuity only more acute, since credible intermediates leading to the Ediacaran layers are completely nonexistent in the even more sparsely populated strata beneath them.