Hi Interbane,Interbane wrote: Regarding Meyer, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Here is Donald Prothero setting him straight:
I'm a layman here myself but I can see if something is logically consistent or not. Prothero a paleontologist takes Meyer to task largely on the question of the duration of the cambrian era. Prothero says 80 million years.Yet I note that at the end of the review a reader responds to the review questioning this timeframe ,and Prothero seems to backtrack to 20 to 25million years.
In the wikipedia article the author mentions that researchers radiometric dating fossils from the Cambrian, differ by 20 million years in their results.
Meyer's arguments largely relate to the production of new genetic information and whether this could be generated in the time available and focuses on a particular part of the Cambrian explosion where a lot of complex creatures appear suddenly in evolutionary terms.
Donald Prothero and Michael Shermer debated Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg where Sternberg and Meyer argue for the same informational deficit and inadequacy of the mutation/natural selection mechanisms for whale evolution in the available time.
Reviews are one thing, but I think the debate provides a way to evaluate what both sides are actually saying.
Here's the Prothero/Shermer vs Meyer/Sternberg debate from a few years ago on the question; Can Darwinian evolution adequately explain the origin of life? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yqqlZ29gcU