Joel Kontinen
Evolutionists have a number of enormous problems: the origin of life from non-life, snowball earth, the “boring billion” enigma, to mention just a few. According to a recent Nature news article:
“Swings in oxygen levels may be behind a mysterious billion-year hiatus in evolution. One of the biggest riddles in Earth's history is why animals did not evolve after a spike in oxygen levels approximately 2.3 billion years ago. Instead, despite what scientists had thought was a period of relatively high oxygen, the evolution of life on Earth stalled for what is dubbed the boring billion’.”
The article hopes to solve this riddle by assuming that varying the oxygen content of the atmosphere was the key to evolution:
"Earth’s early atmosphere has seen two major spikes in oxygen concentration — one roughly 2.3 billion years ago, dubbed the ‘great oxygenation event’, and a second 800 million years ago. The evolution of complex life only took off after this second peak. Now researchers say that fluctuations in oxygen levels probably kept evolution in check during the intervening period.
Rather than accumulating steadily, new findings suggest oxygen levels dropped precipitously soon after the first peak, which saw concentrations of the gas jump by at least 1,000-fold.”
But this can hardly explain why complex life arose. The Nature article quotes Malcolm Walter, a geobiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia: “Until the environment was right, and until genetics tools were there, [the evolution of complex life] couldn’t have happened.”
In other words, evolutionists don’t have a clue as to how life arose and how complex life arose. Life only comes from life and complexity requires input from an intelligent mind, so the issue will never be satisfactorily solved by merely naturalistic means.
What is needed is a return to Genesis.
Source:
Qiu, Jane. 2014. Oxygen fluctuations stalled life on Earth. Nature news (11 July).
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