Today at Design of Life: The Avalon explosion: Another intricate, Darwin-busting puzzle

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the history of life shows no steady Darwinian march of progress, and the recent discovery about the Avalon explosion is yet another blow to an idea that is kept alive only by ideology, not evidence (and perhaps because the Darwin bicentennial budgets have already been spent?): Excerpts:

Because the Ediacaran creatures are so little known, the significance of their sudden appearance and disappearance is often overlooked: Many scientists have been hoping to find a smooth, orderly transition from the earliest cyanobacteria to the Cambrian creatures, precisely the sort of transition that Darwin's theory of evolution predicts. But the Ediacarans are not only no help to their theory, they are actually quite a setback. An entire complex fauna came into existence quite suddenly (in terms of geological time), and just as suddenly disappeared. Worse, the Ediacarans are NOT ancestors of the Cambrians.

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There was no road between Avalon and Cambria at all. The most remarkable thing about Avalon life is that it strutted its strange stuff a while and then, as far as we know, just disappeared, as did the trilobite and the dinosaur.

For more go here.

(The gen is that the 600 million year old (and incredible) Avalon life forms did not increase in complexity, as expected. They were complex from the beginning, and then they just disappeared ... Whatever theory explains that will not be Darwin's.)