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The compound eye structure that first appeared in trilobites, 530 million years ago, has remained unchanged and still exists in such arthropods as the dragonfly and the bee ever since.120This non-evolution displayed by arthropods throughout history constitutes a total repudiation of Darwinism.
The discovery of the trilobite and the subsequent emergence of its highly amazing structures led to considerable unease among evolutionists. As with the newly discovered Cambrian life forms, they first resorted to ignoring this important structure for a long time. They were reluctant to accept that eye’s complex structure, which they have great difficulty accounting for, came into being 530 million years ago. Ignoring that fact, however, did not do away with the fact of how trilobites saw millions of years ago and how similar structures are still exhibited today in various insects.
Luther Sunderland said this on the subject:
I find it odd that a leading evolutionist who is also a specialist in trilobites, Niles Eldredge of the American Museum in Natural History, never even mentions these problems of the eye. He has a recent book directed at the Creationists . . . He has several pages on the trilobite there, but he never mentions this eye which is really the hardest part of the problem. I think he does it because he simply can’t see the significance of all these things when he is utterly convinced that there must have been a slow build-up, but we just don’t have any fossils for it.121
Ignoring the subject altogether was evolutionists’ first choice. The astonishing thing was that Eldredge, who sought to ignore the trilobite eye that refuted evolution, had analyzed in the 1960s the Devonian fossils of Phacops rana, a species of trilobite which he had collected all over America. His analyses established that no slow and gradual development among trilobites had ever taken place, and that trilobites in the fossil record exhibited stasis.122
Another paleontologist who drew similar conclusions was R. A. Robison. In his study of fossil trilobites of the order Agnostida that had lived in Midwest America during the Cambrian, Robison found “a conspicuous lack of intergradation in species-specific characters.”.123In short, the fossil record exhibited stasis. The countless trilobite fossils revealed a fact too obvious to be ignored.
At this, evolutionists resorted to various suppositions. Different circles engaged in a number of initiatives to explain the cause of this complex arthropod that lived 530 million years ago and how it came to acquire these features. Each one came up with a different theory, details of which we shall review in due course. For some reason, no one explanation supported any of the others, and these evolutionists could arrive at no consensus.
The evolutionist Richard Fortey described the disagreement among evolutionists:
How then to account for their sudden appearance? Charles Darwin was unusually confident in the Origin of Species: “I cannot doubt that all the {Cambrian} trilobites have descended from some one crustacean which must have lived long before the {Cambrian},” he wrote, thirteen years before Thomas Hardy confronted his hero with another such “primitive crustacean.” The attribution of trilobites to the arthropods may be almost instinctive. The anthropologist Kenneth Oakley made known a perforated specimen, a pendant probably, recovered from the Grotte du Trilobite in Yonne (France). This is a late Paleolithic cave . . . In the same cave there was found a beautiful carving of a beetle. “It does seem reasonable,” says Oakley in 1965, “to infer that the trilobite would have appeared to the untutored yet observant and thoughtful Magdalenian as a kind of insect in stone. Quite so. The Magdalenian saw an insect, Darwin a crustacean, Walcott (eventually) an arachnid, that is, a relative of the spiders and scorpions—they cannot all be right.124
One evolutionist source described the question of the origin of trilobites in these terms:
The big problem with the earliest known trilobites, is that they are trilobites. That is to say, their earliest representatives are distinctly and emphatically trilobites, and they do not look like anything else.125
Of course trilobites were trilobites ever since the day they first came into existence, just as fish are fish, birds are birds, and reptiles are reptiles. All these groups came into being with their characteristics fully developed and maintained these properties throughout their existence on Earth, without evolving into other life form.
For that reason, there is no scientific problem here. Scientific findings prove, very clearly and definitely, that living things came into being through a superior creation. The only reason why evolutionists regard trilobites as a “problem” is the total lack of similar life forms preceding them—the lack of any animals they can propose as the trilobites’ evolutionary ancestors. Fossil record has provided tens of thousands of specimens of trilobites’ existence on Earth over hundreds of millions of years. So the problem is not that insufficient specimens have been fossilized. Tens of thousands of fossil trilobites date back to between 530 and 200 millions years ago, but scientists have failed to find one single fossil trilobite from any rocks immediately pre-dating the period.
The reason for this is clear; Almighty Allah flawlessly brought trilobites into existence 530 million years ago. Their supposed ancestral forms exist not in the pre-Cambrian, but only in evolutionists’ imaginations.
Evolutionists will likely face still more difficulty on this subject. In seeking for evidence in favor of evolution, they constantly encounter facts that totally repudiate it. Indeed, the evolutionist Norman Macbeth openly stated so in an address he gave at Harvard University:
One example of this is the little animal called the trilobite. There are a great many fossils of the trilobite right there at the beginning, with no build-up to it. And, if you examine them closely, you will find that they are not simple animals. They are small, but they have an eye that has been discussed a great deal in recent years—an eye that is simply incredible.
It is made up of dozens of little tubes which are all at slightly different angles so that it covers the entire field of vision, with a different tube pointing at each spot on the horizon. But these tubes are all more complicated than that, by far. They have a lens on them that is optically arranged in a very complicated way, and it is bound into another layer that has to be just exactly right for them to see anything. . . . But the more complicated it is, the less likely it is simply to have grown up out of nothing.
And this situation has troubled everybody from the beginning—to have everything at the very opening of the drama. The curtain goes up, and you have the players on the stage already, entirely in modern costumes.126
Of course, the way that evolutionists ignore this situation does not alter the fact that there clearly was an exceedingly complex life form on Earth during the Cambrian. It was able to view the underwater world of that time through perfect eyes, and with its perfect structure, became widespread across the entire world. Its eye, one of living things’ most complex organs, appeared suddenly, having undergone no intermediate stages and with no imaginary primitive forms. There is no evolutionary origin of the perfect eyes possessed by this or any other creature, because they, and their eyes, never underwent evolution. This creature was created 530 million years ago, with all its perfect features, all its complex structures, its amazing eyes and the colors which we are unable to perceive today.
It was created from nothing by Allah, Who knows the exact properties it possessed, how it lived, how it saw and what it looked like. Allah reveals this fact in a verse:
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. (Surah Hud, 6)
Whether or not evolutionists admit it, this evident fact applies all over the world, right before their very eyes:
Is it other than the religion of Allah that you desire, when everything in the heavens and Earth, willingly or unwillingly, submits to Him and to Him you will be returned? (Surah Al ‘Imran, 83)