fact that puts evolutionists into a deep quandary about the
Cambrian Explosion is comparisons between different living
taxa. The results of these comparisons reveal that animal
taxa considered to be "close relatives" by evolutionists until
quite recently, are in fact genetically very different, which
makes the "intermediate form" hypothesis-which only exists
theoretically-even more dubious. An article published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
USA, in 2000 reports that recent DNA analyses have rearranged
taxa that used to be considered "intermediate forms" in the
DNA sequence analysis
dictates new interpretation of phylogenic trees. Taxa that
were once thought to represent successive grades of complexity
at the base of the metazoan tree are being displaced to
much higher positions inside the tree. This leaves no evolutionary
''intermediates'' and forces us to rethink the genesis of
In the same article, evolutionist writers note
that some taxa which were considered "intermediate" between
groups such as sponges, cnidarians and ctenophores, can no
longer be considered as such because of these new genetic
findings. These writers say that they have "lost hope" of
constructing such evolutionary family trees:
The new molecular based
phylogeny has several important implications. Foremost among
them is the disappearance of "intermediate" taxa between
sponges, cnidarians, ctenophores, and the last common ancestor
of bilaterians or "Urbilateria."...A corollary is that we
have a major gap in the stem leading to the Urbilataria.
We have lost the hope, so common in older evolutionary reasoning,
of reconstructing the morphology of the "coelomate ancestor"
through a scenario involving successive grades of increasing
complexity based on the anatomy of extant "primitive" lineages.68
New Animal Phylogeny: Reliability And Implications", Proc.
of Nat. Aca. of Sci., 25 April 2000, vol. 97, no. 9,
68 "The New Animal
Phylogeny: Reliability And Implications, Proc. of Nat.
Aca. of Sci., 25 April 2000, vol. 97, no. 9, pp. 4453-4456.