Trilobites:
Marvelous Life Forms That Lived 530 Million Years Ago Refute Evolution

What Is A Complex System?

Many of the organs that appeared in Cambrian life forms, such as eyes, antennae, limbs, mouth and gut are all complex systems that exhibit a number of basic features.

A complex system can be summarized as follows:

A complex system arises from a large number of smaller components that are all interrelated to one another. At the same time, this system is in a constant exchange and interface with surrounding structures. It is not enough for a single component to be operating in order for the complex system to function. All of its components need to work together at the same time, in harmony, and in a flawless manner.

Research in various regions of the world has revealed the different characteristics of all life forms from the Cambrian Period. These life forms have heads, bodies and digestive systems consisting of various complex components. Some have dozens of feet. Some have shells, some have antennae and others have gills. In short, every feature possessed by living things today, and more, existed together with all their complex structures in the oceans of the Cambrian Period.

The eye is an example of one such complex structure, consisting of a large number of components, each of which is linked to other equally complex structures. Individually, the substructures of the eye cannot make vision possible. In order for the eye to see, all the components have to perform their own individual functions together, and flawlessly.

The complexity encapsulated within any single eye manifests itself similarly in a single cell of a living thing, or even at the fundamental level of a single protein within that cell. This interrelated sophistication is the greatest obstacle facing the Darwinist claim of “small, random changes” as an explanation for the development of species. As we know, random effects are almost always destructive. Any random mutation affecting a complex system will cause the collapse of that system, even if it affects only one of its components. Therefore, a mutation in the optic nerve will cause blindness in the eye.

Excessive current—as in a power surge—will cause damage to a radio. No one can imagine that a power surge could turn that radio into a television. Therefore, any random effect impacting on the eye, a structure far more complex than any radio, will inevitably damage it. With their complex structures, the Cambrian Period life forms we shall be looking at in this chapter expose the invalidity of the claims of evolution and show that these life forms were created.

Cambrian Life Forms, With Far More Complex Structures Than Those Of Many Life Forms Living Today, Cause Evolutionists To Despair

According to evolutionary claims, the Cambrian Period is very early for the high level of biological complexity it exhibits. Darwinists claim that the complex structures possessed by living things are acquired gradually, over long periods of time. Therefore, species must have possessed rudimentary, primitive characteristics at the start of their supposed evolutionary histories and acquired more complex features only at the end of a very lengthy evolutionary process.

In fact, however, the history of life presents the exact opposite picture. The first creatures shared the same basic body structures as those living today; and the same complex organs such as eyes, antennae, limbs, mouths and guts. Therefore, complexity is a characteristic that came “in the first moment” in the history of life, rather than late. It has been in existence since they first appeared. This, no doubt, is a great impasse for evolutionists. The evolutionist researchers Marshall Kay and Edwin H. Colbert state that this state of affairs is an insoluble dilemma for Darwinists: “The introduction of a variety of organisms in the early Cambrian, including such complex forms of the arthropods as the trilobites,is surprising..

"The introduction of abundant organisms in the record would not be so surprising if they were simple. Why should such complex organic forms be in rocks about 600 million years old and be absent or unrecognized in the records of the preceding two billion years? . . . If there has been evolution of life, the absence of the requisite fossils in the rocks older than the Cambrian is puzzling.”11

By hiding behind the concept of a “puzzle,” these evolutionist researchers are trying to gloss over the fact that all these complex systems emerged suddenly, hundreds of millions of years ago—a fact that by itself is enough to completely repudiate Darwinism. To show why this early complexity has such a devastating effect on Darwinism, it will be useful to examine the trilobite and the perfect and highly sophisticated structure of its eye.

This fossil trilobite, dating back to the Devonian Period, 417 to 354 million years ago, was found in Morocco. The amazing architecture of the eye has been preserved in all its detail.

Richard Fortey, an evolutionist paleontologist from London’s Natural History Museum, comments on the great number of lenses in some trilobite eyes:

“One of the most difficult jobs I ever attempted was to count the number of lenses in a large trilobite eye. I took several photographs of the eye from the different angles and then made enormous prints magnified large enough to see individual lenses. I started counting as one might, “One, two, three, four. . . ” and so on, to a hundred or two. The trouble was that you had only to look away for an instant, or sneeze, to forget exactly where you were, so it was back again to “One, two, three...” ... I got to a total of more than three thousand before I vowed that, in future, I would simply estimate the number of lenses in a bit of an eye, and use my best arithmetic to estimate the whole number.”12

More than 3,000 lenses means that the animal in question received more than 3,000 images. This clearly shows the degree of the complexity in the eye and brain structure of a creature that lived 530 million years ago. This flawless structure cannot have come into existence through evolution, as is set out by David Raup, a professor of geology from Harvard, Rochester and Chicago universities:

“Thus the trilobites 450 million years ago used an optimal design which would require a well trained and imaginative optical engineer to develop today—or one who was familiar with the seventeenth-century optical literature.”13

Fossil Trilobite

One characteristic of Cambrian fossils is that they’ve been so very well preserved. During fossilization under normal conditions, the hard part of the outer shells, consisting of chitin and calcium, should be decayed or dispersed. Yet in the great majority of specimens collected from Cambrian rocks, the exoskeletons maintain nearly all their original forms, and their owners’ main internal systems can also be seen.

Each wide, hemispherical eye may had hundreds or even thousands of lenses, each of which perceived an image from a different direction. Some faced straight forwards, others to the side, and some even faced backward. Each lens focused on an area determined for it. The trilobite was thus able to perceive danger approaching from any direction, and also possessed a great advantage when hunting.

Period: Devonian

Age: 417 - 354 million years

Region:Morocco

The body of a trilobite consisted of various segmented sections, all joined together. Each was connected to the adjoining ones with a hinge, forming a linked system much like modern railway carriages. By means of this segmented body, these creatures could easily move over obstacles, flex and turn.14 14

The trilobite had the same compound eye structure as that of the present-day housefly, shown above. Some species of trilobite had thousands of lenses in their eyes. Every lens perceived a separate image of the region it focused on. The greater the number of lenses, the greater the resolution of the image. Perfect trilobite eyes, dating back half a billion years, are truly a marvel of creation

One of the most important characteristics of the trilobite eye is its "calcite crystals." Calcite crystal, or calcium carbonate, is the building block of pyramids, amphitheaters and historic columns that have survived the centuries down to the present day. And this gave rise to the compound eyes in these life forms. 15

Fossil Trilobite

This fossil trilobiteis 480 million years old and dates back to the Ordovician Period. It was unearthed in Russia. The antennae on the upper part of the trilobite’s head are thought to both serve as a nose or olfactory organ and also enabled the animal to perceive what was going on around it.

Period: Ordovician

Age: 480 million years

Region: Russia

The way that all a living thing’s characteristics remain preserved in stone is a great miracle worked by Allah. A living thing that should decay and become part of the surrounding soil after it dies can sometimes leave behind all its details, from the suckers it possesses to its digestive system, and sometimes even its nerve endings. In this way, the evidence of its existence is exhibited in rock dating back millions of years. Allah's glorious creation and amazing artistry are there for all to see, in the manner that Allah chooses, despite the passage of millions of years. One of the greatest proofs of this immaculate artistry is that of the Precambrian life forms.

Another reason for concentrating on these life forms is to enable evolutionists, who are astonished by the way Precambrian life forms appeared approximately 500 million years ago, to see the true facts and to enlighten people who blindly believe in evolution. The scientific evidence clearly shows that no process of evolution ever took place in the course of natural history. All life forms appeared in one moment, with no evolutionary forebearers, and came into being possessing all of their complex characteristics; in other words, they were created.

Our Lord, the Creator of all, reveals the creation of living things in the following verse:

Allah created every animal from water. Some of them go on their bellies, some of them on two legs, and some on four. Allah creates whatever He wills. Allah has power over all things. (Qur’an, 24:45)

Fossil Trilobite

Period:Devonian

Age:350 million years

Region: Atlas Mountains, Morocco

The trilobite was a flawless life form with exceedingly complex characteristics that lived in the Cambrian Period. It was able to see the world of that time through perfect eyes, and it spread across the world with its perfect architecture. The eyes, one of any living things’ most complex organs, appeared at once with no supposed “primitive form” behind it. The perfect eyes possessed by this life form had no evolutionary origins, because its perfect eyes never evolved.

All these perfections possessed by the trilobite, all its complex structures, its amazing eyes and the colors we cannot currently see, were all created 530 million years ago.

It is Allah Who created trilobites from nothing, Who fully knows the features they possessed, how they lived and how they saw.

Allah reveals in the following verse that:

There is no creature on the earth which is not dependent upon Allah for its provision. He knows where it lives and where it dies. They are all in a Clear Book. (Qur’an, 11:6)

Complex, Cambrian Period Life Forms That Have Left Remains Behind And The Evolutionist Panic

The organisms that appear in Cambrian strata, and the research into them, clearly and definitely reveal that no process of evolution ever took place. This fact has led to terrible panic among all evolutionists, Darwin included, and obliged them to review all the claims they had made so far. Some Darwinists who hadn’t expected this sudden appearance in the Cambrian Period began to doubt the very theory they had advocated. However, others stepped up their endeavors to keep alive the theory, which had been definitively repudiated by the evidence. As the result of this, they produced highly exaggerated and nonsensical theories, totally inconsistent and all very different from one another, based on no scientific evidence, and wholly incompatible with logic and reason. Their objective was to try to introduce some factor of evolution into the Cambrian explosion, which they had ignored for many years but which the overwhelming weight of the evidence had finally forced them to accept.

Dr. Raymond G. Bohlin, a scientist and an expert in the fields of zoology, population genetics, and molecular and cellular biology—and who espouses creation—describes these astonishing and fruitless efforts:

“So, where is the documentation for the long history of the [so-called] evolution of these creatures? The usual answer is that the necessary fossil layers prior to the Cambrian period have not been discovered yet. The fossils are just missing! How convenient! This, after all, was Darwin’s excuse and many evolutionists after him followed suit. Well, recent discoveries from Canada, Greenland, China, Siberia, and Namibia document quite clearly that this period of biological creativity occurred in a geological instant virtually all around the globe. So, the usual excuse no longer holds water. . . . [According to evolutionists] Darwinism has always been characterized by slow gradual change that is imperceptible in our time frame. Major evolutionary change was only visible as we looked to the fossils to reveal the number and type of intermediates between species and major groups. But the Cambrian explosion is anything but gradual, and identifiable intermediates are totally absent.”16

All the scientific evidence shows that the first living things to appear on Earth did not develop through evolution, and that new species did not develop by their turning into another species. Cambrian life forms appeared on the stage of history with no supposed primitive forebear behind them. Evolutionists have been unable to produce “one single piece of evidence” from the fossil record, which should represent the most important source of evidence and greatest witness for the supposed “process of evolution” they have been talking about for the last 150 years. Not one of the mechanisms proposed by the theory of evolution has been seen to bring about evolution. No branch of science supports the theory of evolution in any way. On the contrary, they constantly produce new evidence to refute it.

Cambrian life forms from 530 million years ago, in which some 50 phyla containing all the basic structures of the animal world were alive, have radically undermined the theory of evolution. Evolutionists are still trying to recover from this surprise and to gloss over this extraordinary phenomenon. Yet the Cambrian explosion remains a fact, in the face of which evolution has melted away.

Darwinism will appear as whimsical to future generations as the stories about the Earth resting on the back of a giant turtle that people in past centuries believed in so passionately. People will fail to understand how Nobel Prize-winning professors, members of academic staffs and societies came to believe in such a farce and lined up wholeheartedly behind such nonsense. The 20th century will go down as a century of shame for all Darwinist scientific circles.

He is Allah – the Creator, the Maker, the Giver of Form. To Him belong the Most Beautiful Names. Everything in the heavens and earth glorifies Him. He is the Almighty, the All-Wise. (Qur’an, 59:24)

Fossil Trilobite

Fossil Trilobite Period: Ordovician Age: 480 million years Region: Russia