Complexity Appears “Earlier than Thought”

Widely-separate branches of science seem to converge on a common puzzle: complexity goes farther back than scientists expected – evolutionary scientists, that is.

1. Cosmology:  More evidence has come that galaxies formed very early.  A mature galaxy detected through gravitational lensing was announced by the Hubble Telescope team, with an estimated redshift of 6.027.  In the conventional big bang chronology, that dates it at 950 million years after the big bang.
       Other galaxies have been detected at redshift 10 or more, but this appears to have mature stars, “pushing back the epoch of its formation to about 200 million years after the Big Bang, much further than we had expected,” a NASA spokesperson said in the Hubble press release.  That is about 1.5% of the assumed age of the universe.  “This suggests,” he continued, “that the first galaxies have been around for a lot longer than previously thought.”
2. Biology:  “Complex Life Emerged from Sea Earlier Than Thought,” reported Jennifer Walsh at Live Science.  Although her article assumes evolutionary time, the announcement from Boston College and University of Sheffield, who studied sediments in Scotland lakes, poses a challenge for evolutionists who had assumed the climb onto dry land was much later.
       “Life on Earth began in the oceans, but new fossils are showing that complex algae-like organisms left these salty seas earlier than thought, about 1 billion years ago, and spent more time evolving on land.”  Science Daily titled their report, “Loch Fossils Show Life Harnessed Sun and Sex Early on.”  “This suggests that life on land at this time was more abundant and complex than anticipated,” a co-author of the study said.  “It also opens the intriguing possibility that some of the major events in the early history of life may have taken place on land and not entirely within the marine realm.”
3. Geology:  Belemnites are a type of cephalopod known only from fossils.  They were thought to have gone globally extinct at an alleged “Cretaceous-Paleogene event,” after which time modern cephalopods evolved.  According to an abstract in Geology,¹ “In the North Pacific, however, a turnover from belemnites to the modern types of cephalopods about 35 m.y. before the Cretaceous-Paleogene event documents a more complex evolutionary history of cephalopods than previously thought.
4. Botany:  Recall also, as reported here 04/12/2011 (bullet 5), scientists at Penn State found evidence in their evolutionary scheme that genetic “upheavals” leading to the emergence of flowering plants occurred “nearly 200 million years earlier than the events that other research groups had described” (see PhysOrg).

1.  Iba et al, “Belemnite extinction and the origin of modern cephalopods 35 m.y. prior to the Cretaceous-Paleogene event,” Geology, v. 39 no. 5 (April 2011), pp. 483-486, doi: 10.1130/G31724.1.

What this means is not that the evolutionary dating schemes are now more accurate than before, but that empirical evidence is falsifying earlier beliefs about slow, gradual increases in complexity appearing over time.  The data won’t give evolutionists what they want even within their own assumptions; why should the rest of us pay any attention?  What’s a word that means the early appearance of complexity?  Starts with a C, but we can’t utter it, because in academic circles it is offensive and makes scientists feel uncomfortable.