I was doing some research and quickly found the following statements. As I read the article I became even more aware of the efforts to explain what happened that proves what or who we are – while not really explaining much of anything. The efforts to cloud an issue while working hard to clarify and substantiate current theories is somewhat mind-boggling. If you read what is written closely you will see that the efforts put forth in the end completely support the requirement, the staging and the changes that had to take place that allowed man of old to live such a long life (up to and over 900 years). These changes in sea level and how the atmosphere changed hold such a key to who we are. Changes like these disrupt the current scientific dating methods more specifically carbon dating. As you read the report keep in mind that if the Cambrian explosion happened and it was responsible for starting life forms to evolve, and that it took place 530 million years ago, then we should not find things of human origin or things of later era’s located in this formation of the earth. However, we do find these things. Is it even possible that life of anything could have existed and then survived this explosion. Is it possible for this type explosion to happen and still keep our earth in its place in the atmosphere allowing life that existed to continue and expand into what we see today? If it took an explosion to really kick-start life as we know it, then how could it possibly take 20 million years. It would not be an explosion! It would have been a process and this is what science wants us to believe happened. So was it a process or an explosion?

LiveScience
By By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer
September 19, 2013 2:47 PM

Evolutionary ‘Big Bang’ Was Triggered by Multiple Events

The Cambrian explosion, the evolutionary “big bang” that led to the emergence of a trove of complex life forms, was caused by multiple events, researchers argue.

Genetic changes allowing for complex body plans combined with rising sea levels and an influx of chemicals into the ocean probably created the unique conditions needed to set off the Cambrian explosion, researchers argue in a perspectives paper published today (Sept. 19) in the journal Science.

“There was this cascade of events,” said study co-author Paul Smith, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History. “You can see how one process might feed into one another and possibly amplify it as it feeds back.”

Evolutionary big bang

About 530 million years ago during the Cambrian Period, the diversity of life on Earth exploded. The first sea-faring predators and prey emerged, animals developed strange and diverse body plans and evolved hard exoskeletons. A recent study revealed that life evolved during the Cambrian Period at a rate about five times faster than today. [Cambrian Creatures: Images of Primitive Sea Life]

Scientists have proposed everything from genetic changes to a starburst in the Milky Way to explain the explosion in diversity.

“There are well over 30 hypotheses out there for the Cambrian explosion,” Smith told LiveScience.

Smith and his colleagues looked through all the existing research to see what could explain the evolution of complexity from relatively simple life forms that existed prior to the Cambrian explosion.

“Prior to this, a typical ecosystem would have been a microbial mat with a few things sitting on top,” Smith said. (Microbial are single cell living organisms. Where did they come from?)

At that time, animals couldn’t eat large particles of food, and there were no food webs with predators chasing prey. (if life forms started based on the theory that the big bang mixed just the right amount of chemicals and etc. together to start life, then life didn’t exist prior to the big bang. If it did exist then the big bang did not start life. At the time of the big bang no animals existed big or small. So how did it start?)

Multiple factors

The researchers found genetic changes were needed to get the ball rolling toward an explosion of life. By estimating mutation rates, biologists have concluded the genes that code for complex, easily adaptable, bilateral body plans — a necessary precursor for diverse life forms — likely evolved 150 million years prior to the Cambrian Period. (Some evidence suggests this evolution may have occurred closer in time to the Cambrian explosion.)

But genetic changes alone couldn’t explain the explosion in diversity.

The rise of sea levels and the flooding of flat, shallow areas of the continents may have served as triggering events. The flooded areas would have provided vastly more habitat for organisms, and the contact between the eroded rock surface and the seawater would have infused minerals, such as calcium and strontium, into the oceans.

Those minerals are toxic to cells, so animals would’ve needed a way to excrete them.

The animals then would have evolved the ability to incorporate those minerals into their exoskeletons, enabling much more complicated body plans, predation and more modern food webs.

The idea that many factors led to the Cambrian explosion is pretty widespread, said Robert Gaines, a geologist at Pomona College in California, who was not involved in the study.

“I think there are very few people who wouldn’t wholeheartedly agree with that,” Gaines told LiveScience.

Though the Cambrian explosion is described as a big bang, it was a rather drawn-out affair occurring over 20 million years, Michael Lee, a researcher at the South Australian Museum at the University of Adelaide, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email.

“One would expect that a range of complex ecological and abiotic drivers might have acted at different times throughout the period,” Lee said.

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