Many animal forms flash into life suddenly and then persist for hundreds of millions of years - a fact not emphasized in typical presentations of the history of life. Most recently, this problem resurfaced with the discovery of ancestral jellyfish in 2007.

A recent find of fossil jellyfish from Utah indicates that creatures similar to modern jellyfish existed by the Cambrian period (approximately 540-490 mya). Such finds push our knowledge of jellyfish with complex body plans back from 300 million years ago to about 505 million years ago.

Complex life in general is thought to be about 550 million years old or less. Bodies that consist of many specialized cells working within systems (multicellular/multisystem body plans) are a comparatively sudden development in the design of life, and thus probably not a gradual Darwinian process governed by natural selection acting on random mutation (survival of the fittest).

Here's the question: What happened so rapidly to jellyfish back then that has not happened in the half a billion years since?

British physicist David Tyler notes some of the key information about the find:

The most interesting aspect is the ability to identify modern orders and families. Here is another case of sudden appearance of complex life forms followed by stasis. This is evidence against the gradualist emphasis of Darwinism and it adds weight to the question asked by Steve Meyer ("The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories", Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 117(2004): 213-239.): "Can neo-Darwinism explain the discontinuous increase in CSI that appears in the Cambrian explosion-either in the form of new genetic information or in the form of hierarchically organized systems of parts?"

As a matter of fact, Meyer's paper was hugely controversial and led to intense persecution of his editor, Richard Sternberg, resulting in an investigation by US government authorities.

The zeal of Sternberg's opponents stems from the fact that the current model for evolution depends critically on neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism - a twentieth century version of 19th century Darwinism - is the standard theory of evolution that states that

1) small changes randomly appear in the genes of a given individual organism and 2) may confer a survival advantage, and - in that case - they 3) are then passed on to offspring because that organism is more likely to leave healthy offspring than a similar organism that did not experience those small changes.

That is how, we are told, an amoeba morphed into a man. The theory - usually described as "natural selection acting on random mutation" - quickly attained dominance because it rules out - in principle - the idea that there is any design of life.

It has had a massive effect on popular culture. It turns up in many places in an altered form as "survival of the fittest" (a term approved by Darwin), "eat or be eaten," or "the law of the jungle." It is sometimes represented as the "ascent of man". Often, it is simply called "evolution" and many sources assert that there is overwhelming evidence for it.

Actually, there is overwhelming evidence that life changes over time. So, if neo-Darwinism is a correct theory, we should see gradual change in life forms over a long period of time. However, the history of life apparently did not unfold in the way that neo-Darwinian theory requires.

Even in Darwin's day (1850s), the problem presented by the Cambrian period - during which the jellyfish (and almost all phyla of life forms) appeared - was recognized. Darwin blamed the fossil record. It wasn't good enough. But - as The Design of Life explains - we now have a fairly good fossil record:

For instance, among 43 known living orders of terrestrial vertebrates (the level of classification just below classes and phyla), 42 have been found as fossils. Thus 98 percent of extant terrestrial vertebrates at that level of classification were fossilized. (p. 70)

And the pattern persists to this day. Sudden appearance is followed by long periods of little change, then - in many cases - by extinction. (More on that later.)

It is actually not a problem with the fossil record, it is a problem for neo-Darwinism's account of the history of life.

From David Tyler's report:

New fossils from the Middle Cambrian of Utah "have very well preserved soft tissue, which the authors interpret as evidence that representatives of modern jellyfish existed by the middle Cambrian period."

How have they concluded they are "modern"? The fossils are entombed in fine-grained sediment so that fine details have been preserved. "Given the available character information, they also may comprise representatives of three separate classes of modern medusozoans: Cubozoa; Hydrozoa; and Scyphozoa. This suggests that an important aspect of modern marine pelagic ecosystems was in place shortly after the Cambrian radiation."

The authors themselves say,

the living cubozoan Tripedalia cystophora has sophisticated reproductive behavior that includes mate recognition and courtship, involving the indirect transfer of sperm through spermatophores. Cubozoans also have complex eyes and nervous systems. The existence of our newly described fossil material may suggest that these complex traits could have evolved within the Cnidaria by the Middle Cambrian.

In a press release, the implications for rapid species diversification were described as follows:

Lieberman said the jellyfish the group describes, found in Utah, offer insights into the puzzle of rapid species diversification and development that occurred during the Cambrian radiation, a time when most animal groups appear in the fossil record, beginning roughly 540 million years ago. [. . .] With the discovery of the four different types of jellyfish in the Cambrian, however, the researchers said that there is enough detail to assert that the types can be related to the modern orders and families of jellyfish. The specimens show the same complexity. That means that either the complexity of modern jellyfish developed rapidly roughly 500 million years ago, or that the group is even older and existed long before then."

The really surprising thing is that this isn't by any means an unusual finding.

A couple of years ago (2004), I wrote an item for a science teachers' magazine, "Time Stands Still for Shell Guy?" detailing an equally remarkable discovery: An early crustacean that had fossilized so quickly in Herefordshire, United Kingdom, that its internal body plan was actually preserved.

The team led by David Siveter of the University of Leicester were able to completely reconstruct the fossil, a rare event: A recently found 425 million-year-old fossil crustacean apparently has the same internal organs as a modern one. Most news items on this find focused on the fact that Colymbosathos is the oldest “male” fossil (= the penis was visible). But the real story, for science, is the amazing stability of the key crustacean body organs over so vast an expanse of time. Researchers working with David Siveter, of the University of Leicester found the ostracode in Herefordshire, and discovered that it has quickly mineralized, so that most of its body tissues were preserved. They seized the opportunity to shave the rock very finely and photograph all the shavings, which enabled a complete reconstruction - and pushed back knowledge of the group by 200 million years.

And what did they discover?

Researchers are puzzled as to why the ancient creature appears so similar to its modern relatives.

In other words, this is another example of the tendency for life forms to appear suddenly and then not to evolve.

Both the jellyfish and the curstacean are classic examples of stasis, addressed in The Design of Life as follows:

Once a life form makes its first appearance in the fossil record, it tends to persist largely unchanged through many strata of rocks. It may exist to the present, exhibiting virtually no change over tens or even hundreds of millions of years. Or it may have a long and unchanging history but then go extinct. This characteristic of organisms to remain largely unchanged throughout their duration in the fossil record is called stasis. Thus, instead of showing one species gradually transforming into another, fossils overwhelmingly exhibit minor variation within a given species. (P. 64)

And here's another one, just in, showing the same tendency in beetles:

... a team of scientists has shown that large numbers of modern-day beetle lineages evolved very soon after the first beetles originated, and have persisted ever since. Many modern-day lineages first appeared during the Jurassic period, when the major groups of dinosaurs appeared too.

Yes, same story basically. The challenge that the design of life presents is either (1) how to defend the doctrine of neo-Darwinism against the evidence, in the centennial year of Darwin's birth or (2) how to understand the design of life?

We pick our challenges. If we stopped defending neo-Darwinism and looked at the evidence critically instead, might we make more progress in understanding the nature of life?

Here is the abstract of the jellyfish article:

Exceptionally Preserved Jellyfishes from the Middle Cambrian Cartwright P, Halgedahl SL, Hendricks JR, Jarrard RD, Marques AC, Collins, AG, Lieberman BS. PLoS ONE, 2007, 2(10): e1121. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001121 Abstract: Cnidarians represent an early diverging animal group and thus insight into their origin and diversification is key to understanding metazoan evolution. Further, cnidarian jellyfish comprise an important component of modern marine planktonic ecosystems. Here we report on exceptionally preserved cnidarian jellyfish fossils from the Middle Cambrian (~505 million years old) Marjum Formation of Utah. These are the first described Cambrian jellyfish fossils to display exquisite preservation of soft part anatomy including detailed features of structures interpreted as trailing tentacles and subumbrellar and exumbrellar surfaces. If the interpretation of these preserved characters is correct, their presence is diagnostic of modern jellyfish taxa. These new discoveries may provide insight into the scope of cnidarian diversity shortly after the Cambrian radiation, and would reinforce the notion that important taxonomic components of the modern planktonic realm were in place by the Cambrian period.