"’Günter Bechly: Rich Fossil Record Says No to Insect Evolution’
Posted on March 11, , 2019
On this episode of ID the Future, Dr. Günter Bechly, paleoentomologist and former curator for amber and fossil insects for the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, talks with host Andrew McDiarmid about evidence for macroevolution among insects. The fossil record is “saturated,” Bechly says. By that he doesn’t mean there aren’t new fossil forms to discover. Bechly himself has discovered several. He means we have an extensive enough sampling to confidently discern the major patterns of change and stasis in the history of life. And it shows no sign of insect evolution. It shows no transition from marine arthropods to terrestrial insects, none from wingless insects to winged insects, and no gradual evolution to insects (such as beetles and butterflies) that go through a metamorphosis that includes a pupal stage. And evidence for common ancestry is either contradictory or missing. In short, Bechly argues, the insect fossil record is much better explained by intelligent design than blind evolution."
Who is Gunter Bechly?
"Günter Bechly is a distinguished scientist focusing on the fossil history of insects. He has authored or co-authored about 150 scientific publications, including a co-edited book published by Cambridge University Press and a popular science book on evolution. He has discovered and named more than 160 new species, and has 10 biological groups named in his honor. He has served on the editorial boards of two scientific journals, and has organized five large public exhibitions on Earth history and evolution. He has been interviewed widely in German media and served as a science advisor for two natural history documentaries on the BBC."
Günter Bechly
Günter Bechly: Rich Fossil Record Says No to Insect Evolution
Probably because there are few paleontologists who don't know that there were many complex animals living before the Cambrian.
Ediacara fauna | Definition, Biota, and Facts
“A few of the gaps (which are systematic in the fossil record) they claim to fill, but there’s another deposit in the region that throws the whole evolutionary story into disrepute: the Chengyiang bed in southern China. Here, the Cambrian Explosion has been documented in fine detail; all the major animal phyla appear in the early Cambrian without precursors. Even though conditions for the preservation of ancestral forms, whether soft-bodied or microscopic, are ideal (even sponge embryos are found in similar strata), the precursors are nowhere to be found. Paleontologist J. Y. Chen said in the film Icons of Evolution, “Darwinism is maybe only telling part of the story for evolution. Darwin’s tree is a reverse cone shape. Very unexpectedly, our research is convincing us that major phyla is starting down below at the beginning of the Cambrian. The base is wide and gradually narrows. This is almost turned a different way.” His colleague Zhou Qui Gin, a senior research fellow at the site, says (translated), “I do not believe that animals developed gradually from the bottom up. I think the animals suddenly appeared. Among the Chengyiang animals we have found 136 different kinds of animals. And they represent diversity in the level of phyla and classes. So they sudden appearance makes them very special …
If all the animal and plant types appeared abruptly at the Cambrian, then evolution is debunked right there. Zhou, Barrett and Hilton cannot therefore make a case for Darwinism in the Cretaceous. Perhaps with different glasses on, paleontologists will find the same ‘reverse cone’ in the Jehol strata. Earlier epochs were much richer in species diversity. By comparison, our world is impoverished. This is devolution, not evolution.
Chinese Fossil Bed Astounds Paleontologists, freerepublic.com 2003
www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/854288/posts?page=2
In February 1999, I had arranged for a talk at the University of Washington for Jun-Yuan Chen, a Chinese paleontologist who was an acknowledged expert on the Cambrian explosion — in which the major animal phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record … The 1909 discovery of the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies provided the best fossil record of the Cambrian explosion until the 1984 discovery of the slightly older Maotianshan Shales in Chengjiang, China. Because of their excellent preservation, the Chengjiang fauna (many of which were soft-bodied) document the Cambrian explosion in exquisite detail, and J.-Y. Chen was the world expert. In his February lecture at the Burke Museum of the University of Washington, Chen described many of the Chengjiang fossils and argued that their abrupt appearance in the early Cambrian was a problem for Darwinian evolution. Darwin’s theory predicts that minor taxonomic differences (such as species and genera) gradually evolve into larger differences (such as classes and phyla), whereas the fossils show that the phyla and many classes appeared first and then diversified into a variety of genera and species. Chen called this “top-down” evolution, to contrast it with the “bottom-up” evolution required by Darwin’s theory. Afterwards, scientists in the audience asked him a lot of questions about specific fossils, but they completely avoided the topic of Darwinian evolution. When Chen later asked me why, I told him that perhaps they were just being polite, because most American scientists disapprove of criticizing Darwinism. At that he laughed, and said: “In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.”
""In China We Can Criticize Darwin": Prelude"
"In China We Can Criticize Darwin": Prelude | Evolution News
Darwinian theory explains why we see a radiation of taxa evolving when something critical changes in the population or the environment that opens up new niches for life. In this case, it seems to have been the evolution of full body armor in the form of sclerites. That was followed by a radiation of all sorts of body forms and taxa.
“It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test.”
Dr. Colin Patterson, from a letter to Sunderland.