In his book The God Delusion, prominent atheist Richard Dawkins wrote, "As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.'" But how does Haldane's rather sarcastic and flippant remark translate into English? Well, consider that the Precambrian describes the geologic period of time between the origin of life and the Cambrian explosion. According to our experts in paleontology, this particular period of time during the Earth's development was dominated by single-celled organisms that descended via asexual reproduction from LUCA, an acronym referring to our Last Universal Common Ancestor, formed by a secular miracle of chemical reaction. So a fossil showing the presence of a more complex and modern product of sexual reproduction, such as a rabbit or a human, shouldn't be found in rocks formed long before that particular creature could have come into existence, according to these "rules" of evolution. When Darwin famously suggested that "monkeys make men", he could have claimed that protozoa make men, but his idea presented in The Origin of Species would have been harder to defend using comparative anatomy as the only weapon in Darwin's arsenal of evidence to argue in favor of common descent rather than common design. The idea that every living organism is related through common descent is the very heart and soul of Darwin's theory -- the belief that simple organisms can gradually evolve to become more complex, given the vagaries of time, through variety created by descent with modification via … [Read more...]