Product Details

• Actors: Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, Jonathan Wells, Douglas Axe
• Directors: Lad Allen
• Writers: Lad Allen
• Producers: Lad Allen
• Format: NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: All Regions
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Illustra Media
• DVD Release Date: October 29, 2010
• Run Time: 72 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (110 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B002MZTSRM
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #14,320 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Darwin's Dilemma examines what many consider to be the most powerful refutation of Darwinian evolution - the Cambrian fossil record.

Charles Darwin realized that the fossil evidence did not support his theory of gradual, step-by-step evolutionary development. He hoped that future generations of scientists would make the discoveries necessary to validate his ideas.

Today, after more than 150 years of exploration fossil evidence of slow, incremental biological change has yet to be excavated. Instead, we find a picture of the rapid appearance of fully developed, complex organisms during the outset of the Cambrian geological era. Organisms that embody the major animal body plans that exist today. This remarkable explosion of life is truly Darwin's Dilemma and is best explained by the existence of a transcendent intelligence.

This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

292 of 338 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Trilobites Meet Theology April 16, 2010

By Mark McMenamin

Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase

My name is Mark McMenamin. I have completed a PhD on the fossils of the Cambrian Explosion, have published several books on the subject, and am a devout Christian. At the present time I am actively researching the latest fossil discoveries from Cambrian boundary strata.

This video is an outstanding success. It presents the design argument better than anything I have seen before. From the perspective of a scientist informed about the raw data, the main thrust of the film is absolutely correct. Just as Darwin (to his credit) pointed out, a robust Cambrian Explosion destroys the concept of evolution by gradual natural selection. If anything, the Cambrian event seems even more abrupt than it did in Darwin's day.

I wrote to both James Valentine and Simon Conway Morris after, to my astonishment, seeing them appear in this video. Valentine, although no Intelligent Design proponent to be sure, admits that epigenetic transmission of information (i.e., heritable information not transmitted by nuclear DNA) really does happen. This has huge implications for how we understand evolutionary change.

Although Simon Conway Morris admits that we do not fully understand evolution, he claims that the Cambrian event is uncomplicated natural selection at play. How can this be, when the Early Cambrian Chinese fossil chordate Myllokunmingia appears comparable in complexity to a modern catfish? This is sudden appearance of complexity, not ordinary microevolution. Andy Knoll at Harvard has been quoted recently as saying that it is natural selection all the way. Please, gentlemen, it is time to think more broadly, and it is past time to provide a persuasive scientific basis for these opinions about the efficacy of natural selection....

This is not to say that there are no ancestor-descendant connections across the Cambrian boundary. Dolf Seilacher has argued quite a bit with me about the Ediacaran fossil organism called Spriggina. Seilacher sees this fossil as a weird vendobiont creature, whereas I have evidence that it is the trilobite ancestor:

[...].

This said, I agree with Seilacher that most Ediacarans are bizarre and not closely related to Cambrian animals.

To conclude, biotic change through time has certainly taken place but this change is not random mutation mediated by gradual natural selection. The scientific community needs to distance itself from the taint of Darwin's defunct, socially corrosive theory. On the other hand, the Intelligent Design community needs to be careful, lest it seem to be dictating to God how He can or cannot create. It would be theologically problematic and silly to presume to allow God to create in one way (instantaneous fiat), but not in another (change through time).

Finally, with the Cambrian event we have a scientific and intellectual challenge of the first order. We need all hands on deck to bring this ship to port. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes in "Silver Blaze," we need to see the value of imagination, imagine what might have happened, act upon the supposition, and perhaps in the end, find ourselves justified. Let us proceed. I wish to congratulate creationists for (finally) making a substantive contribution to scientific discussion. Read more ›

205 of 255 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Science Documentary September 18, 2009

By L. Galbraith

Format:DVD

Judging from all the name-calling and lack of substantive response by the detractors of Darwin's Dilemma you know this film has hit a home run. The documentary reveals the huge scientific problems with Darwin's theory as it relates to the Cambrian Explosion.

This is not a religious film but atheists hate it because the scientific evidence is deeply disturbing to their belief system. The absence of transitional forms between the animal body plans implies design rather than a gradual, unguided cobbling together of adaptations.

The movie shows how the Precambrian layer contains single-celled creatures but no obvious ancestors of the Cambrian Phyla. By looking at the Burgess Shale of BC and the Chengjiang fossils of China the film shows how soft-bodied and microscopic creatures are exquisitely well preserved in the rocks but no transitional forms connect the animal phyla. Thus, the old Darwinist excuse that the transitionals really did exist but were too small and soft-bodied to be preserved is untenable.

The interviews with Cambrian fossil experts James Valentine and Simon Conway Morris are very informative. It's difficult for Darwinists to brush off the opinions of these evolutionary biologists because they aren't affiliated with the Intelligent Design movement. They're simply giving a candid assessment of the fossil evidence and the subsequent challenge it poses for Darwin's theory.

The computer graphics are well done and very helpful. Overall, it's an excellent documentary that's well worth seeing if you want to be a scientifically literate person.

175 of 218 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Gleanings from Darwin's Dilemma October 23, 2009

By Jon Covey

Format:DVD

"The Cambrian explosion was the most remarkable and puzzling event in the history of life"--Stephen Jay Gould, (1994) "The Evolution of Life on Earth," Scientific American, 271:85-91, October.

The Cambrian explosion continues to be an enigma to evolutionists for good reasons. It does not square with their belief that life originated in a primordial sea as a single-celled organism that evolved into the myriad life forms seen in the fossil record and living organisms. There should have been innumerable intermediate links.

Darwin asked,
"Firstly, why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?"

He answered this problem by saying that the fossil record is imperfect, but even so, there should have been numerous transitional forms that were not well defined species. If evolution is true, they should have been the majority of all fossils as Darwin said. It is absurd to think that the only time organisms were fossilized was when they were fully differentiated. Yet this is what evolutionists seem to believe. They offer only a paltry few fossils they claim to be intermediates.

Most paleontologists believe complex life forms evolved on earth about 530 million years ago. They call this period the Cambrian. At 22, Charles Darwin studied Cambrian fossils with Adam Sedgwick long before he wrote The Origin of Species. He never reconciled his theory with the Cambrian fossils. Sedgwick never accepted Darwin's theory and spoke against it....

Evolutionists used to excuse the lack of ancestral forms prior to the Cambrian on the belief that previous life forms were all soft bodied and didn't leave fossils, but discoveries in the last 20 years show that many types of life forms existed before the Cambrian period, none of which are reasonable ancestral candidates for those in the Cambrian. In one amazing find the cellular details of tiny embryos can be clearly seen.

In Illustra's video, Darwin's Dilemma, Simon Conway Morris, an outstanding paleontologist, describes the Cambrian explosion as "an enormous diversification, a radiation, so that in the Cambrian what we have is an abrupt appearance of animals."

Charles Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1910, discovered the soft-bodied fossils of the Burgess shale. This effectively refutes Darwin's "extreme imperfection" contention that a fossiliferous geological record prior to the Cambrian didn't exist because the Precambrian fossils were soft-bodied. If Darwin knew what we know today about Precambrian, he wouldn't have been so bold to say the fossil record suffered from extreme imperfection.

Darwin's Dilemma says geologists believe an avalanche quickly buried the Burgess animals alive in an airtight tomb, which prevented the decay of soft body parts--eyes, legs, and internal organs. Simon Conway Morris says the alimentary canals and their contents can be seen in some of the worm fossils, indicating how well these soft, delicate parts were preserved. The sediments of the Burgess shale had to be deposited rapidly to preserve the fine structures seen by Morris and others. Morris explained how some organisms had darkly stained areas, which were the result of partial decomposition and body fluids leaking out into the sedimentary matrix. The burial of these organisms had to be extremely rapid and protected from oxygen, otherwise these delicate details would not have survived.

"Nothing distressed Darwin more than the Cambrian Explosion." Stephen Jay Gould The Panda's Thumb, p. 238
Modern biology rests on Darwin's twin pillars of common descent and natural selection. The branching tree of life was his greatest icon, which nearly every biology textbook depicts.
"There is another and allied difficulty, which is much graver. I allude to the manner in which numbers of species of the same group, suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks. Most of the arguments which have convinced me that all the existing species of the same group have descended from one progenitor, apply with nearly equal force to the earliest known species." Darwin

In chapter 9 of his book, Darwin remarked:
"I enumerated the chief objections which might be justly urged against the views maintained in this volume. Most of them have now been discussed. One, namely the distinctness of specific forms, and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty. I assigned reasons why such links do not commonly occur at the present day, under the circumstances apparently most favourable for their presence, namely on an extensive and continuous area with graduated physical conditions. I endeavoured to show, that the life of each species depends in a more important manner on the presence of other already defined organic forms, than on climate; and, therefore, that the really governing conditions of life do not graduate away quite insensibly like heat or moisture. I endeavoured, also, to show that intermediate varieties, from existing in lesser numbers than the forms which they connect, will generally be beaten out and exterminated during the course of further modification and improvement. The main cause, however, of innumerable intermediate links not now occurring everywhere throughout nature depends on the very process of natural selection, through which new varieties continually take the places of and exterminate their parent-forms. But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record."

This lengthy quote reveals much about Darwin's mentality and how willing he was to champion his theory even though the available evidence was against it. With a little flimflammery of scientism, Darwin and his modern students have slid past the chief objections to his theory. Information contrary to their belief will simply be ignored because they hope that eventually discoveries will be made that will justify their apparently blind faith. The objections that Darwin himself raised need to be raised again in light of continued fossil collecting around the world.
One chief objection Darwin missed and one which no one else has confirmed is the process Darwin suggests took place to generate a mammal from its supposed invertebrate ancestors. This is what he was asking his readers to trust him about, not just the minute variations within a species that can be achieved by husbandry. There are dubious mammal-like reptile fossils and creatures like Archeopteryx for the birds for transitional examples, but attempting to trace them from their invertebrate ancestry is highly speculative.

We can, however, challenge the supposed "extreme imperfection" of the fossil record. The fossil record is essentially complete and perfect. Paleontologists are still finding odds and ends, but what we see among the 250,000 fossil species and millions of fossils inhabiting museum storage bins around the world is what we would expect to find as the aftermath of the worldwide Genesis Flood, namely billions of "well-defined species" laid down in rock layers everywhere.

The Ediacaran Fossils
These are multicellular organisms named for a locality in Australia, but found throughout the world. From Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life, these organisms were:
1. Exclusively Precambrian--about 700 million years old or younger (Cambrian 530 million)
2. Soft-bodied
3. Not simpler ancestors for the Cambrian Explosion
4. Themselves without an ancestral line

Gould wrote:
"In one sense, the Ediacara fauna poses more problems than it solves for Darwin's resolution of the Cambrian explosion. The most promising version of the "imperfection theory" holds that the Cambrian explosion only may have undergone a long history of gradually ascending complexity leaving no record in the rocks because we have found no "Burgess Shale," or soft-bodied fauna, for the Precambrian....Thus, instead of Darwin's gradual rise to mounting complexity, the 100 million years from Ediacara to Burgess may have witnessed three radically different faunas--the large pancake-flat soft-bodied Ediacara creatures, the tiny cups and caps of the Tommotian, and finally the modern fauna, culminating in the maximal anatomical range of the Burgess. Nearly 2.5 billion years of prokaryotic cells and nothing else--two-thirds of life's history in stasis at the lowest level of recorded complexity. Another 700 million years of the larger and much more intricate eukaryotic cells, but no aggregation to multicellular animal life." (pp. 59-60)

Despite all this, evolutionists sincerely believe in the fictitious history of descent from a common ancestor by whatever mode. Denial is amazing in how it blinds the intellect. If evolution were true, there should be innumerable transitional fossils. Each favored micro-step mutant to the next species should have been superior to its ancestral stock and inferior to the next-step descendent, the ever-evolving line becoming increasingly more fit and well-defined. That's how variation and natural selection are supposed to work. Read more ›