Nice to meet you too @sfmatheson. Looking forward to getting you know you better. Thanks for linking to your blog too.
I’ve already found the topic of my first post or two: a paper from last month that identifies a single mutation in the human genome that may explain (at least in part) the dramatic expansion of the cerebral cortex that occurred in our lineage
You might be curious to know that we already covered that article! Evolution by splicing . You should post a link to your article there when it is done.
Now returning to the discussion at hand about “body plans.” I noticed some strange irregularities here. Part of it is a misreading of Ross, and the other part what appears to be a mistake in his part. To recap…
Hugh Ross defines body plan as a phyla. First…
a phylum designates life-forms sharing the same basic body plan
Cambrian Explosion Brings Burst of Evidence for Creation - Reasons to Believe
And then he writes in another article…
The Cambrian explosion refers to the sudden, simultaneous appearance of most of the animal phyla (body plans) that occurred 542–543 million years ago.
…
http://www.reasons.org/blogs/todays-new-reason-to-believe/the-cambrian-explosion-and-evolutionists’-responses
But then goes on to make this statement…
Of the 182 animal skeletal designs theoretically permitted by the laws of physics, 146 appear in the Cambrian explosion fossils.
http://www.reasons.org/blogs/todays-new-reason-to-believe/the-cambrian-explosion-and-evolutionists’-responses
He does not reference this claim, but the only candidate article with those two numbers (128 and 146) is the Science article with the abstract…
The set of viable design elements available for animals to use in building
skeletons has been fully exploited. Analysis of animal skeletons in relation to
the multivariate, theoretical “Skeleton Space” has shown that a large proportion
of these options are used in each phylum. Here, we show that structural
elements deployed in the skeletons of Burgess Shale animals (Middle Cambrian)
incorporate 146 of 182 character pairs defined in this morphospace. Within 15
million years of the appearance of crown groups of phyla with substantial hard
parts, at least 80 percent of skeletal design elements recognized among living
and extinct marine metazoans were exploited.
http://faculty.jsd.claremont.edu/dmcfarlane/bio145mcfarlane/PDFs/cambrian%20designs.pdf
Now the first point I now recognize is that I misread Hugh the first time around. He is not saying that skeleton designs are body plans. That is not the case at all. That is something different entirely, in fact the point of the article is that within each phyla a large range of different skeletal designs can be found.
Second, it seems false to reference the “skeletal designs theoretically permitted by the laws of physics.” There is absolutely nothing in this article about the laws of physics limiting the number of designs to 182, and this appears to be Hugh’s invention.