First Animals Formed Complex Communities

One of my passions for Ages of Joy is to be able to share a Biblical perspective on exciting new scientific discoveries and significant research results. This new (September 17, 2018) article Earth's oldest animals formed complex ecological communities on Science Daily is one such opportunity.

An Aside for Young Earth Readers

Some of you may be following this blog from a young earth perspective.  The Ages of Joy - Young Biosphere (AOJ-YB) model is for you.  AOJ-YB posits that each Day of the Creation week is 1000 or more years in length, but not millions or billions of years.  This is based in part on the following verses with the understanding that the story is told from God's perspective, not man's and that the events of each day would take time to unfold.

For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night. (Psalm 90:4)

But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. (2 Peter 3:8)

"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding." (Job 38:4)

The AOJ-YB perspective is important because it allows us to place the events of this scientific article into the Creation Week context in the same manner as the standard AOJ old earth model.  To clarify, the article refers to the Ediacaran Biota which existed 570 million years ago.  AOJ identifies that time with the Morning (final event) of the Second Day.  Under the standard AOJ model, we simply accept the 570 million year estimate and move on.  Under the AOJ-YB model, this event would have occurred at least 4000 years before Adam (before Day 6, Day 5, Day 4, and all or most of Day 3).  The fossil record was largely formed during the Creation Week.  The absolute dating is not as critical as the Sequence of Events.  The reason AOJ maintains two models, standard and young biosphere, is because many Christians come from the Young Earth perspective and I want to give them a bridge into the wonders of God's creative miracles that can only be seen by appreciating the time and steps He took in preparing a habit for humanity.

Pitching the Tent

The work God performed on the Second Day of Creation involved creating the Firmament which is the protective shield of the atmosphere which makes life on Earth possible.  During the Second Day, tiny photosynthetic cyanobacteria living in the Deep churned away under the good Light that shone forth on the First Day, liberating oxygen from water.   During the so-called Boring Billion,  (boring thousand for AOJ-YB readers), Earth enjoyed a great deal of stability.  This period of Earth's history is known as the Proterozoic.  Only single-celled lifeforms and aggregates of single-celled organisms existed on Earth during this time.  The atmosphere was being transformed, enriched with oxygen, and an ozone layer was forming to protect life from damaging UV radiation.  While some creationists equate billions of years with evolution, this era shows that unless the conditions are just right AND unless God chooses to act, life just chugs away with only minor, incremental micro-evolutionary changes.  It would have been just as easy, and far more likely, for life to have gone extinct than to evolve under only natural forces into anything significantly more complex.

Isaiah 40:21-22 English Standard Version (ESV)

Do you not know? Do you not hear?
     Has it not been told you from the beginning?
     Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
     and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
     who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
     and spreads them like a tent to dwell in

During the Second Day, God was transforming Earth's atmosphere into a life-sheltering tent.

The work of the Second Day, the accumulation of oxygen and transformation of the atmosphere, lead to a dramatic decrease in greenhouse gases, namely carbon monoxide and also carbon dioxide.  This plunged the Earth into a Deep Freeze - literally the Deep froze over.  This period of time is known as the Cryogenian.  In the AOJ model, a Day corresponds to a Work-Night-Morning cycle.  The Cyrogenian is the Night of Distress which is followed by a Morning of Bright Joy.  It was a frosty morning at that, because the first part of the Ediacaran era, which follows the Cryogenian, included the Gaskiers Glaciation at about 579 million years ago.

What was happening that was so important on the Morning of the Second Day (yes, each Day ends with a Morning)?  According to this article:

About 650 million years ago a dramatic event happened called Snowball Earth. The Earth was frozen over for million of years. Huge glaciers ground entire mountain ranges to powder that released nutrients, and when the snow melted during an extreme global heating event rivers washed torrents of nutrients into the ocean. Extremely high levels of nutrients in the ocean, and cooling of global temperatures to more hospitable levels, created the perfect conditions for the rapid spread of algae. This rise of algae triggered one of the most profound ecological revolutions in Earth's history. A transition occurred from oceans being dominated by bacteria to a world inhabited by more complex life. These large and nutritious organisms at the base of the food web provided the burst of energy required for complex ecosystems, where increasingly large and complex life forms could thrive on Earth.

This isn't just Theistic Evolution at work, this is Theistic Engineering!  God pulled off an amazing miracle with a carefully controlled and profoundly effective series of events.  The Boring Billion shows us that evolution can't drive change, it can only try to respond to it.  It takes a purposeful Creator, enacting coordinated feats of Genetic and Geologic Engineering to advance life to the next level.  Just look at Mars to see what happens when no One intervenes.

So, after God's Work of creating the Firmament, the Night of the Cryogenian and Frosty Morning of the Gaskers Glaciation, we get the Bright Joy of Complex Life.

To life, to life, l'chaim

Now, back to the original article that inspired this post.  Simon A. F. Darroch, assistant professor in Vanderbilt's Earth and Environmental Sciences Department, and his team of researchers investigated all available data on Ediacaran fossils, even going so far as to conduct field work in Namibia to characterize additional Ediacaran fossils.  Fossil beds containing Ediacaran fossils host a unique, and some say bizarre, set of creatures that existed for a time and then seemed to suddenly disappear, with no currently known relationship to other creatures.  Ediacaran fossil sites exist in Newfoundland, Namibia, Australia, and England, showing this to be a world-wide phenomena.

Existing in lower strata than the Cambria fossils of "Cambrian Explosion" fame, these fossils represent the first appearance of macroscopic life on Earth.  The question explored by the researchers is whether or not the Ediacaran biota existed in a "simple" ecosystem or a "complex" ecosystem.  A default assumption of naturalistic evolution would posit that life moves from simple to complex over time.  Since this was the first ecosystem with macroscopic organisms, it might be assumed that these "organisms were universally primitive, sharing the same basic ecology and all competing for the same resources."  A complex model, Darroch describes, "would instead suggest that they likely competed for a variety of different resources, just like modern animals."

The results of their research is summarized as follows:

The team found that the signature of complex communities extends all the way back to the oldest Ediacaran fossils. In other words, as soon as macroscopic life evolved, it began forming diverse ecological communities not unlike those in the present day.

How did this amazing biota come to exist, seemingly in the blink of an eye, in geological terms?  The Bible gives the clearest answer.

When you send forth your Spirit, they are created (Psalm 104:30a)

God rapidly engineered a thriving community of interacting organisms.  The published article, High complexity in benthic Ediacaran communities, calls some of these creatures "ecosystem engineers" because they create niches for other creatures to exist in.  Of course, these animals are not the real engineers of this system.  They are the product of engineering and exist in "engineered ecosystems".  God is the True Engineer of this ecosystem.  Ironically, by dismissing the work of a Creator, the author must attribute to these creatures powers beyond their ability, as if cars were ecosystem engineers of their own roads and gas stations.

None-the-less, we can be very grateful to the researchers who are detailing God's Handiwork.  We owe them a debt of gratitude for uncovering the mysteries of creation and for not just assuming a simple ecosystem existed at that time.  We also recognize that some of these researchers may be Christian believers and are compelled to use the prevailing vernacular of academia in discussing their results.  These researches challenged the assumption of simplicity and demonstrated that Earth's oldest animals formed complex ecological communities.

The Third Day

The Bible does not explicitly mention the creation of the first macroscopic organisms that pre-dated the seed plants and fruiting trees created on the Third Day.  AOJ attributes the Early Ediacaran and the rise of the Ozone shield at 600 million years ago to the Second Day.  The ability of Earth to host the Ediacaran biota is the fruit of the Work of the Second Day, because even with the cover of water, an ozone shield is necessary to protect life because UV penetrates water to quite some depth.

As the article mentioned, the Ediacaran biota began to fade prior to the Cambrian Explosion.  While some Progressive Creationist and Old Earth authors attribute the subsequent Cambrian Explosion to the Fifth Day, AOJ does not.  We see the Cambrian as part of the Third Day.  In the AOJ model the Fifth Day begins with the renewal following the extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs and a majority of other non-plant life forms.

So what happened to the Ediacaran biota, and why was it replaced with the Cambrian biota?  Again, the Bible gives the most straight forward answer:

Psalm 104 (ESV)

    27 These all look to you, to give them their food in due season.
    28 When you give it to them, they gather it up;
         when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
    29 When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
         when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
    30 When you send forth your Spirit, they are created,
         and you renew the face of the ground.

There was a turnover between the Ediacaran and the Cambrian, and there would be many subsequent turnovers as God engineered each successive ecosystem on His steady cadence to a world habitable by mankind.