Cause of Cambrian Explosion

Modern ideas of abiogenesis in hydrothermal vents or elsewhere on the primitive Earth have developed into sophisticated conjectures with little or no evidential support. - Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?

From the turn of the 20th century the resistance to panspermia had become ever more deeply entrenched in our scientific culture.
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A similar fate often befell attempts to re-instate certain crucial aspects of Lamarckism - the pre-Darwinian notion that the genes in our genome can be enriched in a 'directional' fashion through the inheritance of adaptive, environmentally-driven, acquired characteristics.

see also Bizarre New Study Suggests Octopuses Came From Outer Space

i think here's the key, most important paragraph of Cause of Cambrian Explosion article:

Before the extensive sequencing of DNA became available it would have been reasonable to speculate that random copying errors in a gene sequence could, over time, lead to the emergence of new traits, body plans and new physiologies that could explain the whole of evolution.

However the data we have reviewed here challenge this point of view. It suggests that the Cambrian Explosion of multicellular life that occurred 0.54 billion years ago led to a sudden emergence of essentially all the genes that subsequently came to be rearranged into an exceedingly wide range of multi-celled life forms - Tardigrades, the Squid, Octopus, fruit flies, humans – to name but a few.
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It was argued that copying errors of existing genes could not, on the average, produce new genes with functional utility. By analogy with computer programming, it was pointed out that errors generated in copying a computer code would not lead to enhanced or new capabilities but overwhelmingly to degradation of the original program.

от себя добавлю, что в статье ссылаются на Tegmark, который входит в мой ignore list

в google довольно много ссылок на octopus extraterrestrial