We’ve made sort of a hobby of collating and dissecting theories of how an explosion of complex novel life forms, the Cambrian explosion, can be explained without reference to the obvious explanation, intelligent design.
It’s almost too much to keep up with:
“Cambrian Explosion Story Hour: Oxygen as a Creative Force, Again“
“Sorry, Faster Mutation Rate Will Not Explain the Cambrian Explosion“
“Geologists Kick Out Props for Evolutionary Theories of the Cambrian Explosion“
“New Solution to Darwin’s Doubt: Earth Wandered into Cambrian Explosion“
“As an Explanation of the Cambrian Explosion, the Oxygen Theory Takes a Lethal Blow“
And more.
Now comes the yeast theory. From New Scientist:
Simple lab life makes an evolutionary leap in a few generations
Just a few generations after evolving multicellularity, lab yeasts have already settled into at least two distinct lifestyles.
The discovery suggests that organisms can swiftly fill new niches opened up by evolutionary innovations, just as the first multicellular animals appear to have done on Earth, hundreds of millions of years ago.
In the lab, yeast cells clumped together, forming larger and smaller “snowflakes.”
In short, large and small yeast morphs specialise in different settling strategies, so both can coexist.
These two distinct ecological strategies appeared almost immediately once the multicellular yeasts themselves evolved, notes Travisano.
This provides experimental proof that when evolution makes a great leap forward — such as the origin of multicellularity — organisms can diversify rapidly to take advantage of the change.
Many years ago, palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould suggested that a similar sudden ecological diversification may have led to the Cambrian Explosion in which most animal body forms arose in the fossil record within a few tens of millions of years.
“Possibly what we see here is the first step of what Gould’s talking about — the opening up of diversity due to a key innovation,” says Travisano.
Yeast cells clump together. Ergo trilobites.
“Possibly,” given a “few tens of millions of years,” this could represent a “first step” toward massive diversification.
Ann Gauger has written here about not entirely dissimilar speculations about the development of multicellularity, with Volvox rather than yeast as the illustration. “Saying that something might have happened,” she observes, “is not the same as showing that it actually could happen.”
A simple transition from clumping yeast to menagerie of beasts leaves even more “white space,” as Dr. Gauger politely puts it, to fill in with needed details.
The white space in the yeast theory is blinding. It’s a blizzard of white, obscuring all vision.
The truth is that evolutionists have no idea what produced the Cambrian explosion. Yet, knowing this is an almost immeasurably vast defect in the armature of their theory, they keep throwing speculations at it in the hope that something will stick, or clump.
The solution, though, is right before their eyes, or anyway, your eyes:
Image: Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells, by Masur (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
