The LIBRARY of LIFE and EvoDevo: The New Option for Science Research

EvoDevo is Essentially Dead in its Tracks for Now

What is EvoDevo and what is missing in this area of scientific research?  Here is an Internet definition of EvoDevo:

  1. Evolutionary developmental biology (evolution of development or informally, evo-devo) is a field of biology that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to determine the ancestral relationship between them, and to discover how developmental processes evolved.

EvoDevo is Dead?

What puts EvoDevo into a tailspin is some of the facts that have caused real consternation in biology and evolution.  Here are just a few of the problems:

  • Embryos of animals do not exhibit a pattern across taxonomic groups that would reveal an evolutionary pathway up the developmental hierarchy posited to be the evolutionary history of life.  That is embryos of a antecedent species are not always similar to the next level of the taxonomic scale … the planes of division and pattern of development are like “apples and oranges” in their similarity.
  • The embryos drawn by Haeckel are now clearly recognized as a contrived illustration to confirm a notion and not fact
  • At the Cambrian,life appeared suddenly in a narrow, albeit several million year, time horizon.  The stratigraphy do show evidence that fossils would have been captured before the sudden appearance (as documented recently in fossil sponges found embryonic form of 8 cells or more)
  • Fossil evidence captured at the Cambrian represent unique types that serve as starting points for taxonomic groups. They start together, not one from the other.
  • The complexity of the features of each distinct group would traditionally, by conventional evolution theory require much more time than allowed by the observed data and fossil record
  • The complexity in cell types, taxonomic characteristics, and vastly different forms all point to something evolutionists gloss over … very different, specific, and complex information is required to distinguish these Cambrian life forms

In the Face of Show Stoppers

The real point here is: “Why doesn’t the current group of scientific minds accept what the raw data from fossils tell us?” Answers: Dogma? Traditional teaching? Or discomfort that evolution theory fails!

We were taught in school that science is a field that gathers data and objectively looks at that evidence to develop plausible explanations for the natural world and for life on this planet.

EvoDevo in the conceived, older, notion is’ dead (in its traditional thinking). Evolutionary biologists are coming to a point of acknowledging that natural selection working on chance (mutations) is not explanatory … evolution doesn’t work the way textbooks have reported for decades.

Look in the Library!

What EvoDevo needs to do more of is think of the Cambrian animals as distinct starting LIBRARIES of complex and specific information.  That is what initiates the complex molecules that make up biochemical pathways, structures, and all support all the inherited functions from one generation to the next. The real question is: “How complex and how deep is the library of information for each type at the Cambrian?”

If life forms appear suddenly in the history of the earth, then what information where they endowed with and how might that starting point lead to the species that appear over time?

This is the real question EvoDevo needs to address.  We need to start with the appearance of information and then see where that leads … let the evidence, not bias, lead us forward!

Director, WindowView.org

 

Share