We are mourning the recent loss of our friend and colleague Günter Bechly. Günter was a world-class paleontologist and an inspiration to many for his learned insight into the fossil record and his brave rejection of Darwinian dogma. Today we’re sharing the second half of a two-part interview with Dr. Bechly originally recorded in 2018 with host Sarah Chaffee.
You’ve likely heard of the Cambrian explosion of animal life. But what about all the other geologically sudden explosions of biodiversity in the history of life on Earth? Dr. Bechly was co-author (with Stephen C. Meyer) of the chapter titled “The Fossil Record and Universal Common Ancestry” in the book Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. In this part of the conversation, Bechly moves on from the Cambrian explosion to discuss “life’s second ‘big bang.’” He then touches on other biological explosions, including the Avalon explosion, the Triassic explosion, the origin of flowering plants, and the origin of placental mammals. “There’s no reasonable way,” Bechly concludes, “to get from bacteria to mammals via evolutionary processes.”
Dr. Bechly goes on to express his reservations about the theory of universal common ancestry, the idea that all living things descend from a single common ancestor. While that is not a weakly supported idea, Bechly questions whether it is the best explanation for the diversity of life on Earth when all the data is taken into account. “Common ancestry only makes sense as an alternative explanation,” says Bechly, “if there is a viable naturalistic confirmation process that could explain the transition from ancestral species to descendant species, the origin of new body plans, new structures, new genes, new protein folds, and so on…The neo-Darwinian process is not viable.”
Download the podcast or listen to it here. This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation. Listen to Part 1.
Dig Deeper
- To read Dr. Bechly’s chapter in full, order a copy of Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique.
- Darwin was troubled by the Cambrian explosion of animal life, and for good reason: his theory can’t explain it. Watch Dr. Meyer explain in this clip from The John Ankerberg Show: