Günter Bechly on Life’s Sudden Information Explosions

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

We are mourning the recent loss of our friend and colleague Günter Bechly. Gunter was a world-class paleontologist and an inspiration to many for his learned insight into the fossil record and his brave rejection of Darwinian dogma. Today we’re sharing the second half of a two-part interview with Dr. Bechly originally recorded in 2018 with host Sarah Chaffee. You’ve likely heard of the Cambrian Explosion of animal life. But what about all the other geologically sudden explosions of biodiversity in the history of life on Earth? Dr. Bechly is co-author (with Stephen C. Meyer) of the chapter titled “The Fossil Record and Universal Common Ancestry” in the book Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. In this part of Read More › Source

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
0:13.7	Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Sarah Chaffee, and I'm pleased to have back on the show today
0:19.3	German paleontologist Gunter Beckley for an encore interview.
0:23.3	We've been talking about the new anthology from Crossway, Theistic Evolution, a scientific, philosophical, and theological critique.
0:31.5	In a previous conversation, we were discussing the chapter Beckley co-authored on the fossil record and the theory of common descent.
0:39.3	But the topic is a rich field, with a lot more to explore.
0:44.3	When we left off, Dr. Beckley had noted that there were many instances in the fossil record of a dramatic and abrupt appearance of new animal forms,
0:53.3	not at all what one would expect from a
0:55.7	gradual evolutionary process of small mutations and slow diversification of life.
1:02.3	What I want to ask you next, Dr. Beckley, is this.
1:06.0	You mentioned that there are close to 20 big radiations in the fossil record, moments where in a geologically
1:12.5	brief window, many new animal forms seem to appear out of nowhere. Is there one particular
1:19.4	radiation that stands out to you that you would like to share with our listeners?
1:25.1	There are several ones. So I would drop the Cambrian explosion because that is
1:31.1	the most well known and I think more interesting is to hear about some of the other events.
1:41.3	So one event that I briefly mentioned is this great Ordovician biodiversity
1:45.9	event, which happened in the geological era of the Ordovician about 470 million years ago.
1:55.3	And there you had an explosive radiation origin of all those different families of marine invertebrate organisms,
2:05.4	more than 300 families appear suddenly without precursors in the older layers.
2:14.6	So that would be similar to the Cambrian explosion, but a totally different event, but it has
2:21.3	been called in the popular press live second Big Bang, even though it is much less well known
2:28.9	by the general public. There is a preceding event to the Cambrian explosion, the so-called Avalon explosion,
	...

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