Hidden History or Imaginary History?
Evolutionists search through
blank spaces for imaginary creatures
to fill in their narrative
An old western movie ad said, “If this story ain’t true, it shoulda been.” That thar is the attitude of some evilootionists. They want so much for pappy Darwin’s tale to be right, they ain’t able to square thar story with the fax. So they just makum up. And thassa fack.
Animal life may be far older than its most ancient fossils – here’s how we uncovered its hidden history (The Conversation, 14 Oct 2026). Grad novitiate Orin Lole Durbin is learning her lessons well from Chief Wizard of Dogma, Professor Ross Anderson1 at Oxford School of Groupthink. The most difficult challenge is how to imagine facts when they are missing, and convince members of the media who are perplexed about their absence. With practice, Orin’s mentor is ready to help her to speak into The Indoctrination.
The question of when animals first evolved is one that has confounded scientists since the time of Charles Darwin. Studying rocks in north Wales in the mid-19th century, Darwin found the sudden first appearance of animal shells and skeletons in layers dating back over 500 million years perplexing. He had predicted a long history of evolution, with animals slowly gaining complexity through time, rather than this apparent instantaneous appearance of complex animals.
The sudden appearance of complex animals has led scientists to argue that animals must have a “hidden history”, a period in Earth’s past prior to their fossil record where they existed but have left no trace of their presence in the rocks. Our new study may help scientists understand how long this hidden history may have lasted.
The Cambrian Explosion is just one of many rapid radiations plaguing evolutionists. (Denver Museum diorama)
As admitted above, King Charles was perplexed by this observational fact of abrupt appearance in the fossil layers, remarking in The Origin that it might well be urged as the biggest difficulty for his theory.
Since his story shoulda been true, though, he filled in the missing history with his imagination, proposing that in Tomorrowland scientists would find the missing ancestors. Then, he hoped, it would bring the coveted understanding.
Sorry, Charley.2 The Cambrian Explosion remains one of the biggest problems for evolutionary paleontologists.
Abra-Ediacara
How do the Wizard and his pupil deal with a story that left no trace? First of all, they connect dots to fossil non-animals that preceded the Cambrian animals. Those are the so-called Ediacaran creatures.3 Most Cambrian paleontologists, including Simon Conway Morris,4 have not considered those to be ancestors to the Cambrian animals. They have no organs, no gut, no mouth, and no locomotion. Some of them look like leafy fronds attached to the seafloor; others like pillows or air mattresses. They may have been simple colonies of cells poised to passively capture nutrients in the water.
So that was their first imaginative step in revealing the hidden history: assume the Ediacaran creatures were ancestral to the Cambrian explosion.5
Gene Divination
Their next magic trick is to perform divination on molecules, transmogrifying them into storytelling clocks. The “molecular clock hypothesis” (a hypothesis, not a scientific fact) assumes that molecules evolve just like everything else. By evolve, don’t mean simple change over time. No; they mean that they progress from simple to complex, magically inventing innovative things like eyes, fins, guts, teeth, and brains.
Molecular clock studies aim to tackle this problem. A molecular clock works like the speed = distance/time equation. The genetic difference between two living species’ DNA provides the “distance”. If we can estimate the “speed” at which those differences accumulated, we can work backward to estimate the “time” at which their ancestors separated. Fossils provide important dated anchor points that help calibrate the “speed”.
Calibration sounds mathematically precise, but the circular reasoning in this method should be evident to critical thinkers. They assume genetic differences accumulated over deep time. They assume ancestors separated. What if living species were created different at the beginning? What if a bird was created with wings and didn’t get them from flying fish? What if trilobite eyes were created as parts of their body plans, and did not originate by accident from an Ediacaran frond-like organism? One has to assume the evolutionary story to use the molecular clock as evidence.
Whoops, The Incantation Didn’t Work
Durbin learned from her professor how to admit a difficulty without giving up on the plot. Part One is bluffing: making a statement devoid of fact that other evolutionists have made with circular reasoning (i.e., that humans “diverged” from chimpanzees). Part Two is appearing transparent and honest about the difficulty.
In some instances, such as the divergence of humans and chimpanzees, (when they split from a common ancestor and became different species) molecular clocks can be incredibly effective at estimating the timing of evolutionary origins. However, in the case of animal evolution, molecular clocks give wildly different answers. Depending on how the clocks are calibrated, estimates for the first animals can be hundreds of millions of years apart. Some suggest animals evolved 800–700 million years ago, but others indicate that they evolved only around 600 million years ago. In short, scientists don’t know when animals first evolved.
But “evolve” they did. If their story ain’t true, it shoulda been. The Prof and his novitiate will make sure fer dern tootin’ it is true!
Imagination to the Rescue!
Part Three of the skill of rescuing a story from the evidence is to employ the imagination and futureware. In this article, they calibrate one circular argument against another circular argument. They check genes that shoulda been there with fossils that shoulda been there.
We argue that palaeontologists need to use several deposits of roughly the same age from around the world, with each demonstrating the right conditions for animal fossilisation but producing no fossils. Only then might we have more confidence in the result.
We suggest that there might be enough deposits meeting these criteria around 900 to 720 million years ago to justify calibrating the animal molecular clock in this interval. Even then, we think that we could only do so with around 70% confidence (and a 30% chance that our evidence of absence is wrong with animals already having evolved).
Your doctor tells you he is 70% confident that you will get well with this pill, but there is a 30% chance you will die. Would you take the odds? The first question you might ask is how he came up with those probability numbers. Would you feel better if he said he imagined them?
Now, the Closing Benediction
If you are not sufficiently convinced of their story yet, the closing benediction will help you feel better.
The timing of animal origins remains uncertain. But by learning how to read not only the fossils preserved in rocks, but also the fossils that are missing, we are beginning to bring the hidden early history of animal life into view.
Translation: ‘Trust us. We are scientists, after all. We’re making good progress. Soon, we will all reach the nirvana of understanding.’
Footnotes
1. Definitely not the Professor Ross Anderson in California, a retired biochemistry professor from The Master’s University, a creationist and former leader of the Bible-Science Association of Southern California. He has written articles for Creation-Evolution Headlines.
2. Darwin biographer Janet Browne indicated in her book Charles Darwin, Vol 2: The Power of Place that Darwin was called by this nickname sometimes by his acquaintances. Incidentally, Browne has a condensed version of her two-volume biography out this year: Darwin: A Biography.
3. Named for the Ediacara Hills, a fossil deposit in Australia. Similar deposits have been found in various deposits around the world. The Illustra documentary Darwin’s Dilemma shows animations of the Ediacaran ecosystem and also of the Cambrian animals.
4. Simon Conway Morris was interviewed in the Illustra documentary, Darwin’s Dilemma.
5. The Cambrian Explosion would be hard enough for Darwinians to explain, but multiple explosions (abrupt appearances) are found in the fossil record (see the Discovery Institute film “Fossils: Mysterious Origins” for documentation). Evolutionists apply euphemisms to these sometimes, calling them “adaptive radiations” – a phrase that embeds the assumption of evolution.
Creationists believe that the major animal body plans, or created kinds, were complete from the beginning. They reproduce after their kind. They deny Darwin’s “tree of life” that portrays the entire living world developing from a primitive microbe. Darwin’s picture is more a Tree of Death, making death the agent of creation in a struggle for existence.
The creation picture is more like a lawn, where individual blades of grass may branch out but they are not ancestral to each other. Fossil beds represent ecosystems that lived together and were buried together, not creatures ancestral to one another. Common molecules and genes represent functions shared by similar organisms. This picture fits the world better than Darwin’s view of common ancestry.
Biblical creationists believe in a Tree of Life, too: a created health-giving tree in the original creation that will be present in the New Creation once again (Revelation 2:7, 22:2, 14). It will only be available, by God’s mercy and grace, to those who have been reconciled with their Creator.