Meyers book is already ancient history, heres partly why: Darwin’s Doubt is festooned with illustrations, mostly redrawn from other sources in a rather strange cartoon-like format also found in other recent ID books. However, there is never an illustration like these:
A. THE “EXPLOSION” TOOK AT LEAST 30 MILLION YEARS, AND WAS NOT REALLY “INSTANTANEOUS” NOR PARTICULARLY “SUDDEN”
Instead, we are treated to ultrasimple figures of the times of origin of “phyla”, which date back at least to the 1970s, although they’ve been endlessly copied by creationists/ID proponents and remain current in those circles because they convey the impression of “sudden” origin. Figures resembling this:
The reality is that, even on the most conservative interpretation of the fossil record which relegates all of the classic Ediacaran fossils to the stem below the bilaterian common ancestor, or to cnidarians, or to even more remote positions, we still have this sequence observed in the fossil record: |
