BBC: Life Forms ‘Went Large’ a Billion Years Ago
Intelligent Design proponents claim that the Cambrian Explosion 540 million years ago indicates that the “designer” had a hand in developing multicellular organisms so quickly (on a geologic time scale).
IDists claim that there are no fossils of multicellular organisms, and that evolution fails to explain how such creatures suddenly appeared during the Cambrian Explosion.
In fact, there are such fossils, though the pre-Cambrian fossil record is sparse. Now, new fossil finds in China have pushed back the timescale of multicellular life another 1.5 billion years.
Or in other words, IDists are again just plain wrong.
Examples of multi-cellular life dating back more than a billion-and-a-half years have been described before. They include Horodyskia, which was shaped like a strings of beads, and Grypania, a coiled, ribbon-like organism.
But the diversity of forms and the size of the fossils from Yanshan mark them out.
The researchers say the fossils are unlikely to be of agglomerations of bacteria known as microbial mats, and instead are probably early examples of eukaryotic organisms.
If so, the organisms suggest multi-cellularity was a feature of marine life a billion years before the so-called Cambrian explosion, a rapid evolutionary event that began 542 million years ago and resulted in the divergence of major animal groups.
Some scientists partly attribute this evolutionary flowering to a rise in oxygen levels, although the causes are the matter of continuing debate.