ID Proponets attacking Evolution again

Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute has attacked Evolution once more in his article "Deepening Darwin's Dilemma." This pile of nonsense brings up the ID believers same old arguments against Evolution and once more, get it all wrong.

To start off with is the mistake that finding more transition fossils instead of adding to our picture of the 'tree of life' actually make the problem worse. Seriously Wells? How many fossils do we need to add to convince you that new ones don't raise more questions? Examples like the transition from Dinosaur to bird question, despite Archeopteryx, is a fallacious argument. The evidence is there and ID proponents can't just claim that the transition fossils don't fill in the gaps especially when you have prime examples like Archeopteryx. Moving on Wells continues the ID argument about the Precambrian fossils and how the fossils are soft bodied. Well, many fossils were soft bodied before and after the Cambrian Explosion and beyond that many of the Cambrian fossils had hard parts. I think this is a good time to point out that the "explosion" in the Cambrian period happened over five to ten (ish) million years. That my friends is far from an explosion on anything but, well, an evolutionary time scale.

Last but not least is my personal favorite nonsense of the whole article. Wells claims that the lack of Precambrian fossils makes the "Darwin's dilemma" more confusing. While yes there are few Precambrian fossils the extreme age coupled with a lack of hard bodies (as Wells had mentioned himself earlier in the article) leads naturally to few fossils. Hard bits fossilize easier than soft parts. Evidence thus far shows that there was not a predilection for hard parts prior to the Cambrian period.

All in all Well's closing statement regarding lack of evidence that the Cambrian phyla are from a common ancestor is simply refuted. There are many more branching points before the Cambrian period to consider before you can dismiss the range of life found in the Cambrian period of having not evolved to get there. This time period was not the origin of complex life which Scientists have evidence for 5 million years before the Cambrian period. Also there are trace-like fossils from more than 1200 million years ago (as opposed to the Cambrian period's 540 million years) and evidence of microbial life over 3000 million years ago. Obviously from that there was a lot of evolution going on prior to the Cambrian period and any attempt to directly link the Cambrian phyla to a common ancestor is ludicrous.

This article is just another example of the ridiculous claims that the Discovery Institute is spewing out and it is a horrible effort to get Intelligent Design (eg creationism) inserted into peoples minds.

**Most of the information on the fossil record was found here**