LONG STORY SHORT: Darwin’s Biggest Question About His Own Theory of Evolution
“Science is settled” on Darwinian evolution, just as it is on how to deal with the COVID-19 Pandemic, right? Well, if your name is Charles Darwin, it’s 1859 and you’re staring at the Cambrian Explosion, everything is settled except the one big thing that isn’t settled and really has you scratching your head.
What are the odds of random mutation and random selection working on DNA to create the animals in the Cambrian Explosion (Screenshot from YouTube).
A lot has happened since 1859, of course, and a lot of issues have been settled. But the Cambrian Explosion is still the big thing that remains unaccounted for under Darwinian evolution, according to a small but growing number of scientists who are at least as smart as Darwin was.
Five of them, all PhDs in assorted scientific fields, collaborated on the videos featured in the series that gave rise to this post.
And Darwin’s theory of evolution has also evolved, so to speak, into seven different schools of thought, some of which can account partially for the Cambrian Explosion but none of which can completely.
Other things have also become unsettled, especially since the computer revolution revolutionized — is that repetitively redundant? — the ability to calculate the odds of things happening over time, including deep evolutionary time.
It’s all explained in the following eight-minute “Long Story Short” video from Discovery Science. This is the first in the series and will be followed in the days ahead by the other entries in the sequence:
That is a good video: simple yet rich, lacking in sensationalism.