Apparently, it’s not just physics that starts things off with a bang. Life forms have done that too, and with equal drama.

In The Design of Life, Wells and Dembski say,

... in any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestor; it appears all at once and fully formed . (p. 68)

citing American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. But many others have noted the same pattern. Like an elephant in the rec room, sudden emergence is hard to avoid.

Here are just a few examples ... 

Mammals? We have mammals! Be the first on your block to show off an early complex mammal!

Conventional thinking about evolution, decades ago, was that the early mammals were small, simple creatures who lived in the shadow of the dominant dinosaurs and did not show much complex specialization. But, as British physicist David Tyler writes,

This picture has had to be totally revised in the light of evidence to the contrary. A great variety of specialised animals have been documented, some large and others small. The assumption that the Mesozoic mammal groups lacked ecological specializations "is now falsified by discoveries of several new Mesozoic mammals with convergences to highly specialised extant mammals."

Highly specialized mammals today include creatures like the beaver and the porcupine. If early mammals were adapted to specific environments in the way that beavers and porcupines are today, they must have adapted over a short period of time. But how?

A Big Bang of birds, or a big dinosaur becomes a bird?

There may have been a Big bang’ for birds according to biologist Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill).

He argues,

The classic view has been that modern bird orders, ducks and all these modern birds, evolved over 100 million years ago before the breakup of the continents. My view is that the event that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was also devastating for birds, but that they evolved explosively following the extinctions, just like the major groups of mammals.

This brings up one of the major questions in vertebrate history and evolution in general: Does the evolution of populations occur in very sudden spurts or as a result of the gradual accumulation of small changes over long, long periods of geologic time? ("Ornithologist and Evolutionary Biologist Alan Feduccia—Plucking Apart the Dino-Birds," Discover 02 01 2003)

Dino-bird doubters are booed offstage ...

Feduccia, a distinguished ornithologist (bird specialist), has drawn fire for doubting that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Discover magazine suggested he was "fringe." PBS put it like this,

The ancestors of all today's birds evolved later, he says, between 65 and 53 million years ago, independently of the dinosaurs. This is the "big bang theory" of birds. Feduccia and his fellow sceptics - it must be stressed they are in the minority - regard any similarity between birds and dinosaurs as an example of convergent evolution, by which two independent groups grow to look alike.

Why do pop science media put Feduccia down for providing evidence against the dino-to-bird theory? He suggests,

The idea of being able to watch living dinosaurs by looking out at the birds in your backyard bird feeder is very appealing. The popular press naturally jumped all over it. It's also a money game. Many museums have promoted the idea of birds being living dinosaurs, and they have spent huge amounts of money on exhibits about that link. Plus, some paleontologists have spent three decades saying that birds evolved from dinosaurs, so there are careers at stake. On the other hand, there is an army of people out there who do not buy into it. We are just not as vocal as the other side.

Feduccia's reflections show why we must be informed and critical consumers of popular science media. An emotionally appealing theory may be given coverage that is out of all proportion to the evidence. Worse, critics may be treated as hostile unbelievers, even though they are actually doing a job that is essential to progress in science - subjecting a popular theory to rigorous tests.

Of course people want to believe that the dinosaurs survived, and - better still - that they survived in the much more appealing form of birds! But wishing doesn't make it so. Here is a summary of arguments on both sides.

Suddenly, a huge bouquet of flowers!

Darwin's "abominable mystery"*, how flowering plants (angiosperms) originated, has been back in the news.

In recent decades, researchers thought they had found transitional flower fossils, but they turned out not to be transitional. Writing in Nature (450, 1184-1189 (20 December 2007) ), Michael W. Frohlich and Mark W Chase explain,

"There are no studied fossils clearly representing stem-group angiosperms, that is, of plants related to extant angiosperms but attached below the basal node of extant angiosperms in the tree. Such fossils might provide spectacular direct evidence of morphological change along this unknown stretch of evolutionary history."

Frohlich and Chase are not saying that flowering plants did not come from earlier plants, but that they evolved quite quickly. No long, slow transition of infinite gradations is so far found, so the "mystery, if not "abominable", is still a puzzle.

Well then, how DO new species arise?

The science literature, as well as the popular science press, assumes that an adequate fossil record must show a long, gradual series of transitions from simple to ever more complex life forms, powered by survival of the fittest. That is what the Darwin's theory of evolution predicts, and therefore it is what researchers are encouraged - and trained - to look for. When confronted by the sudden appearance of complexity, they assume that their evidence is exceptional, not normal.

In reality, the only reason we have for believing that these transitional life forms ever existed is Darwin's theory. And Darwin's theory depends on their discovery.

As we might expect, every so often, paleontologists do find an apparent transitional fossil. And there is much rejoicing in the popular science media that Darwin's theory is confirmed. However, the overall pattern of fossil finds does not confirm his theory. That was the state of the evidence in his own day, when he had to explain away the Cambrian explosion of life forms (see The Design of Life, pp. 69-71), which was hardly an easy task. Now that we have much more information, everything old is new again.

We do not currently know the mechanism for sudden, rapid changes. There may be more than one mechanism. But no mechanism can be found if it is not sought.

Centuries ago, scientists clashed over whether the father or the mother or both parents contributed to a child's genes. Gregor Mendel's genetic experiments provided evidence that both contributed, but that one was dominant but the other recessive (and thus liable to appear in a later generation). Providing that scientists accepted what Mendel's evidence actually showed, they could begin looking for a mechanism (which was found by Watson and Crick in the form of the double helix of our genome).

A mechanism will not be sought unless the evidence from the history of life is accepted at face value, not as an exception.

Note: See also the Avalon explosion, for example, as the earliest known "big bang" of complex life.