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Comment by ak39 | Hacker News Reader

The reason why the Cambrian was considered special and was often referenced as an "evolutionary explosion" was because the pace/rate of speciation is abnormally high during that period only.

If you take your hypothesis for example, it may explain the explosion (rapidity) of the evolution of new species but it still doesn't offer viable reasons why the explosion was isolated to that period only.

(Just an amusing side note: my God-believing and evolution-denying BIL uses the evidence of the Cambrian explosion to suggest that no scientist can explain why there was an explosion of diverse species is such a short time - it had to be "God's hand". "Only a creator can do such a thing". I must admit, until the arrival of my BIL, the Cambrian period was of mild interest to me. I now read about it with "special interest".

Cheers!

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If he believes the the Cambrian explosion is due to God then he believes in the fact of the event, but has a different causal agent (vs don't know)

Correctly assessed.

He uses the very same evidence of the existence of the explosion and the absence of evidence to explain the explosion part of the evidence as reason to believe that "it is God". I usually end the dinner conversation when I keep asking "how?". On some very rare but weaker moments he might trip and admit "I don't know". At which point I end it by saying, that's a very scientific thing to say. :-)

He adds colour to our lives.

Taking as an axiom that God exists and loves us, we can deduce that God wants us to be free because you do not want someone you really love to be your slave. If there was a way to prove the existence of God, we would not be free to believe or not. As a result, if "God exists and loves us", there is no way we can prove he exists.

> Taking as an axiom that God exists and loves us

I think the axioms you need for this kind of argument is that: is God exists, God is human-like, and God loves us.

Why would a cosmic being care more about humans than bacteria? Why would he value things like freedom over slavery? Why would he care if we believed in him or not?

Those are entirely human qualities and concepts.

> Those are entirely human qualities and concepts.

These are entirely human concepts only if you've already accepted some different axioms of your own. The Christian argument is that valuing freedom over slavery, and wanting worship, are divine qualities and concepts. And humans share those things because they were made after God's likeness for the sake of being loved (and more importantly, loving God in return).

You care about the things you love. The single "human-like" trait of my reasoning is to be able to love. I do not like the "human-like" term because it involves so many negative connotations. If God is perfect, I can not imagine him as "human-like" ;-).

Human-likeness is not a very popular trait to attribute to a higher power because it shows the underlying anthropomorphism at work.

There is no reason to think that if there is some sort of higher power, it has an any bigger interest in humans than it has with atoms or planets. To assume that is an assumption, which shouldn't be hidden.

So if I exist and I love my cat, there is no way my cat can prove I exist?

If this is false, then I think some further axioms may be needed to differentiate the two scenarios.

The difference between scenarios is that God is God, the one that may have created everything including your cat or at least (the other extreme of God definition for believers) the "thing" that differentiates love from a chemical reaction.

To be honest, we don't know either, so the agnostic viewpoint (compared to atheistic) would be that it is equally valid. Either you believe in random chance or you believe in God.

I'm always perfectly happy when someone calls the big bang the moment of creation. It could have been.

>Either you believe in random chance or you believe in God

Not really true.

"We don't know exactly how the Cambrian explosion came about, but have a lot of good evidence on how evolution works, which allows us to probe deeper into theories about what happened" is not equivalent to "it's all random chance!"

Isn't evolution random chance + selection? That's how I've always seen it.

Most religious people (or at least most widespread religions) essentially accept evolution, you know. Hard evolution denialism (especially young earth creationism) is largely peculiar to certain forms of evangelical Protestantism and some factions of Islam, these days.

A belief in evolution have nothing to do with atheism. Many religious people believe in evolution.

Not sure the point you're making.

I do not differentiate between agnostic and atheistic thought. They are both the same thinking/belief systems in my view. An agnostic believes there could be a "god/creator" (but does not pursue this thought any further than "maybe"). An agnostic also believes there may not be a God/Creator given the absence of evidence to justify such a belief. An atheist believes that there is NO god/creator given the absence of evidence to prove the existence of such a being. If evidence had to exist then the atheist will believe the existence of such a being based on such evidence. That sounds exactly the same.

As to your point about "we don't know" - well, not knowing is perfectly fine in science. We cannot ascribe to or embellish and fabricate imagined facts and agents to any unknown phenomenon without evidence.

> I do not differentiate between agnostic and atheistic thought.

I find it very interesting that in de US there seem to be a lot of gnostic atheists (they know for certain there is no god, and are very vocal about this), while in Europe most people would be agnostic atheists, and they don't care as much.

In order to decide whether you believe in something, you have to know what "something" the question is about. The concept of "God" in western society is often so vague it is impossible to have an opinion either way - for some it means "the absolute", for some it means "the force of creation in the universe". I don't think you can meaningfully say you don't believe in such unspecific concepts. But if you go into more concrete religious beliefs, like "God created the world in seven days" or "God punished the wife of Lot by turning her into a pillar of salt" or "Jesus is the only path to God", then it is easier to decide whether or not you actually believe it or not.

My impression is Biblical literalism is more widespread in the US compared to Europe, which in turn is easier to decide for or against. Especially the discussion about evolution vs religion is almost entirely absent in Europe. Framing evolution as opposed to a belief in God means it is pretty easy to become an atheist, since we have overwhelming evidence for evolution.

I always liked the "Radiological explanation" regarding the Cambrian explosion.

Higher-than-normal levels of radiation would provide the mutagenic effects on all life. Many things would die because of dead-end deviations.

I look at the area around Chernobyl at what radiation can do for evolution. Of course, it's pretty terrible for suffering on a whole, but we're talking about evolution. Life gets messy.

Would that not just be a tipping point in genetic diversity?

Once you reach a certain level of complexity in one lineage you get exponentially more variation possible.

Likewise, compound that from earlier lineage break aways that are now also reaching a tipping point in their own complexity.

In other words, it's just an exponential situation under prime conditions for new species to emerge.

Maybe in my analogy evolution was able to run through the different mutations of "2" and then had tried them all hence it finishing?

Brother in-law?

Yip. He insists on hammering the vast wonders and myriad colours of life through the same blunt instrumentation of non-sequiturs and other horrendous logical fallacies. He simply cannot accept the removal of a "God's hand" in any conversation of scientific import. Conversations with him can get comical only if you insist on ignoring that he is a medical doctor to boot.

"He insists on hammering the vast wonders and myriad colours of life through the same blunt instrumentation"

That's how human brains generally work. He's been conditioned to particular pattern matching and filtering. It's not a rational choice.

How does he cope with the obvious evolution of antibiotic resistance through natural selection of bacteria?

Or is he one of those 'micro-evolution' exists, but not 'macro-evolution'.?

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