Evolution. You learned about it in high school? It goes like this. Life started out with

very simple forms, and then gradually over hundreds of millions of years morphed into

all the forms we see today. Bacteria to Beethoven. Not a straight line, of course, but that's

roughly how it went. This was the theory proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, and with

some modification it's been embraced as unassailable by the scientific community over the last

century. As evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says, if you meet somebody who claims not

to believe in evolution, that person is either ignorant, stupid, or insane. But is that right?

Are there no scientific reasons to doubt the evolutionary count of life's origins? In

November 2016, I attended a conference in London convened by some of the world's leading

evolutionary biologists. The purpose? To address growing doubts about the modern version

of Darwin's theory. Let's look at just two scientific reasons to doubt this theory.

First, the Cambrian explosion. A weird and wonderful thing happened 530 million years ago. A

whole bunch of major groups of animals, what scientists called the phyla, appeared abruptly

within a geologically short window of time. About 10 million years. These novel animal

forms exhibiting prototypes of most animal body designs we see today, emerged in the fossil

record without evidence of earlier ancestors. Did you catch that? A huge number of diverse animals

appeared with no discernible antecedents. So where did they come from? This question really

bothered Darwin. And he acknowledged that he could give it no satisfactory answer. Nor

conscientist today, the renowned biologist Eugene Koonan of the National Center for Biotechnology

Information, describes the abrupt appearance of the Cambrian animals and other organisms,

such as dinosaurs, birds, flowering plants, and mammals, as a pattern of biological big bangs.

So what caused all these new forms of life to arise? That question leads to a second big doubt.

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