Darwin’s Dilemma features interviews with many leading scientists, including those who  accept an evolutionary explanation for the Cambrian Explosion, and those who question the adequacy of evolutionary explanations. Here you will find more information about the backgrounds the scientific experts featured in the film.

Simon Conway Morris is Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge and one of the world’s leading evolutionary paleontologists. He is noted in particular for his contributions to the understanding of the Cambrian Explosion and the fossils found in the Burgess Shale. Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (United Kingdom) in 1990, he also has been awarded the Walcott Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (United States). Dr. Conway Morris is author of the noted books The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals (1998) and Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (2003). His views about the extent as well as the limits of Neo-Darwinism can be found in his article “Darwin was right. Up to a point.”

James Valentine is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Museum of Paleontology and the Center for Integrative Genomics. He is one of the world’s leading experts on the Cambrian Explosion, and is the author of numerous technical articles on the subject, as well as author of the books On the Origin of Phyla and Evolutionary Paleoecology of the Marine Biosphere, co-author of Evolution and Evolving, and editor of Phanerozoic Diversity Patterns: Profiles in Macroevolution.

Paul Chien is a Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of San Francisco. A marine biologist, Dr. Chien received his Ph.D. in Biology from the University of California at Irvine, and he was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Dr. Chien’s work has been published in over fifty technical journals, and he has spoken internationally, and on numerous occasions, from Brazil to mainland China—where he has also been involved in cooperative research programs. Dr. Chien has done research in the renowned fossil beds of Chengjiang, China.

"The Cambrian explosion was the most remarkable and puzzling event in the history of life"--Stephen Jay Gould, (1994) "The Evolution of Life on Earth," Scientific American, 271:85-91, October.

The Cambrian explosion continues to be an enigma to evolutionists for good reasons. It does not square with their belief that life originated in a primordial sea as a single-celled organism that evolved into the myriad life forms seen in the fossil record and living organisms. There should have been innumerable intermediate links.

Darwin asked,
"Firstly, why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?"

He answered this problem by saying that the fossil record is imperfect, but even so, there should have been numerous transitional forms that were not well defined species. If evolution is true, they should have been the majority of all fossils as Darwin said. It is absurd to think that the only time organisms were fossilized was when they were fully differentiated. Yet this is what evolutionists seem to believe. They offer only a paltry few fossils they claim to be intermediates.

Most paleontologists believe complex life forms evolved on earth about 530 million years ago. They call this period the Cambrian. At 22, Charles Darwin studied Cambrian fossils with Adam Sedgwick long before he wrote The Origin of Species. He never reconciled his theory with the Cambrian fossils. Sedgwick never accepted Darwin's theory and spoke against it.

Evolutionists used to excuse the lack of ancestral forms prior to the Cambrian on the belief that previous life forms were all soft bodied and didn't leave fossils, but discoveries in the last 20 years show that many types of life forms existed before the Cambrian period, none of which are reasonable ancestral candidates for those in the Cambrian. In one amazing find the cellular details of tiny embryos can be clearly seen.

In Illustra's video, Darwin's Dilemma, Simon Conway Morris, an outstanding paleontologist, describes the Cambrian explosion as "an enormous diversification, a radiation, so that in the Cambrian what we have is an abrupt appearance of animals."

Charles Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1910, discovered the soft-bodied fossils of the Burgess shale. This effectively refutes Darwin's "extreme imperfection" contention that a fossiliferous geological record prior to the Cambrian didn't exist because the Precambrian fossils were soft-bodied. If Darwin knew what we know today about Precambrian, he wouldn't have been so bold to say the fossil record suffered from extreme imperfection.

Darwin's Dilemma says geologists believe an avalanche quickly buried the Burgess animals alive in an airtight tomb, which prevented the decay of soft body parts--eyes, legs, and internal organs. Simon Conway Morris says the alimentary canals and their contents can be seen in some of the worm fossils, indicating how well these soft, delicate parts were preserved. The sediments of the Burgess shale had to be deposited rapidly to preserve the fine structures seen by Morris and others. Morris explained how some organisms had darkly stained areas, which were the result of partial decomposition and body fluids leaking out into the sedimentary matrix. The burial of these organisms had to be extremely rapid and protected from oxygen, otherwise these delicate details would not have survived.

"Nothing distressed Darwin more than the Cambrian Explosion." Stephen Jay Gould The Panda's Thumb, p. 238
Modern biology rests on Darwin's twin pillars of common descent and natural selection. The branching tree of life was his greatest icon, which nearly every biology textbook depicts.
"There is another and allied difficulty, which is much graver. I allude to the manner in which numbers of species of the same group, suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks. Most of the arguments which have convinced me that all the existing species of the same group have descended from one progenitor, apply with nearly equal force to the earliest known species." Darwin

In chapter 9 of his book, Darwin remarked:
"I enumerated the chief objections which might be justly urged against the views maintained in this volume. Most of them have now been discussed. One, namely the distinctness of specific forms, and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty. I assigned reasons why such links do not commonly occur at the present day, under the circumstances apparently most favourable for their presence, namely on an extensive and continuous area with graduated physical conditions. I endeavoured to show, that the life of each species depends in a more important manner on the presence of other already defined organic forms, than on climate; and, therefore, that the really governing conditions of life do not graduate away quite insensibly like heat or moisture. I endeavoured, also, to show that intermediate varieties, from existing in lesser numbers than the forms which they connect, will generally be beaten out and exterminated during the course of further modification and improvement. The main cause, however, of innumerable intermediate links not now occurring everywhere throughout nature depends on the very process of natural selection, through which new varieties continually take the places of and exterminate their parent-forms. But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record."

This lengthy quote reveals much about Darwin's mentality and how willing he was to champion his theory even though the available evidence was against it. With a little flimflammery of scientism, Darwin and his modern students have slid past the chief objections to his theory. Information contrary to their belief will simply be ignored because they hope that eventually discoveries will be made that will justify their apparently blind faith. The objections that Darwin himself raised need to be raised again in light of continued fossil collecting around the world.
One chief objection Darwin missed and one which no one else has confirmed is the process Darwin suggests took place to generate a mammal from its supposed invertebrate ancestors. This is what he was asking his readers to trust him about, not just the minute variations within a species that can be achieved by husbandry. There are dubious mammal-like reptile fossils and creatures like Archeopteryx for the birds for transitional examples, but attempting to trace them from their invertebrate ancestry is highly speculative.

We can, however, challenge the supposed "extreme imperfection" of the fossil record. The fossil record is essentially complete and perfect. Paleontologists are still finding odds and ends, but what we see among the 250,000 fossil species and millions of fossils inhabiting museum storage bins around the world is what we would expect to find as the aftermath of the worldwide Genesis Flood, namely billions of "well-defined species" laid down in rock layers everywhere.

The Ediacaran Fossils
These are multicellular organisms named for a locality in Australia, but found throughout the world. From Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life, these organisms were:
1. Exclusively Precambrian--about 700 million years old or younger (Cambrian 530 million)
2. Soft-bodied
3. Not simpler ancestors for the Cambrian Explosion
4. Themselves without an ancestral line

Gould wrote:
"In one sense, the Ediacara fauna poses more problems than it solves for Darwin's resolution of the Cambrian explosion. The most promising version of the "imperfection theory" holds that the Cambrian explosion only may have undergone a long history of gradually ascending complexity leaving no record in the rocks because we have found no "Burgess Shale," or soft-bodied fauna, for the Precambrian....Thus, instead of Darwin's gradual rise to mounting complexity, the 100 million years from Ediacara to Burgess may have witnessed three radically different faunas--the large pancake-flat soft-bodied Ediacara creatures, the tiny cups and caps of the Tommotian, and finally the modern fauna, culminating in the maximal anatomical range of the Burgess. Nearly 2.5 billion years of prokaryotic cells and nothing else--two-thirds of life's history in stasis at the lowest level of recorded complexity. Another 700 million years of the larger and much more intricate eukaryotic cells, but no aggregation to multicellular animal life." (pp. 59-60)

Despite all this, evolutionists sincerely believe in the fictitious history of descent from a common ancestor by whatever mode. Denial is amazing in how it blinds the intellect. If evolution were true, there should be innumerable transitional fossils. Each favored micro-step mutant to the next species should have been superior to its ancestral stock and inferior to the next-step descendent, the ever-evolving line becoming increasingly more fit and well-defined. That's how variation and natural selection are supposed to work. (Text from: Darwin's Dilemma DVD)

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My name is Mark McMenamin. I have completed a PhD on the fossils of the Cambrian Explosion, have published several books on the subject. At the present time I am actively researching the latest fossil discoveries from Cambrian boundary strata.

This video is an outstanding, it presents the design argument better than anything I have seen before. From the perspective of a scientist informed about the raw data, the main thrust of the film is absolutely correct. Just as Darwin (to his credit) pointed out, a robust Cambrian Explosion destroys the concept of evolution by gradual natural selection. If anything, the Cambrian event seems even more abrupt than it did in Darwin's day.

I wrote to both James Valentine and Simon Conway Morris after, to my astonishment, seeing them appear in this video. Valentine, although no Intelligent Design proponent to be sure, admits that epigenetic transmission of information (i.e., heritable information not transmitted by nuclear DNA) really does happen. This has huge implications for how we understand evolutionary change.

Although Simon Conway Morris admits that we do not fully understand evolution, he claims that the Cambrian event is uncomplicated natural selection at play. How can this be, when the Early Cambrian Chinese fossil chordate Myllokunmingia appears comparable in complexity to a modern catfish? 

Darwin’s Dilemma in Darwin’s own words:

On the sudden Appearance of Groups of allied Species in the lowest known Fossiliferous Strata.

There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which many species in several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks. Most of the arguments which have convinced me that all the existing species of the same group are descended from a single progenitor, apply with nearly equal force to the earliest known species. For instance, it cannot be doubted that all the Silurian trilobites are descended from some one crustacean, which must have lived long before the Silurian age, and which probably differed greatly from any known animal. Some of the most ancient Silurian animals, as the Nautilus, Lingula, &c., do not differ much from living species; and it cannot on our theory be supposed, that these old species were the progenitors of all the species belonging to the same groups which have subsequently appeared, for they are not in any degree intermediate in character.

Consequently, if the theory be true, it is indisputable that, before the lowest Silurian or Cambrian stratum was deposited long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Cambrian age to the present day; and that during these vast periods the world swarmed with living creatures…

To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods, I can give no satisfactory answer… the difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence beneath the Upper Cambrian formations of vast piles of strata rich in fossils is very great. It does not seem probable that the most ancient beds have been quite worn away by denudation, or that their fossils have been wholly obliterated by metamorphic action, for if this had been the case we should have found only small remnants of the formations next succeeding them in age, and these would always have existed in a partially metamorphosed condition. But the descriptions which we possess of the Silurian deposits over immense territories in Russia and in North America, do not support the view, that the older a formation is, the more it has invariably suffered extreme denudation and metamorphism.

The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained. [emphasis added]

—Chapter IX, “On the Imperfection of the Geological Record,” On the Origin of Species, fifth edition (1869), pp. 378-381.

Thus, the Cambrian event is a scientific and intellectual challenge of the first order. We need all hands on deck to bring this ship to port.