If Turning a Blind Eye Offend Thee

The Cambrian explosion lasted some 70,000,000 to 80,000,000 years.

The duration separating the appearance of the earliest lifeforms on earth from the appearance of the first, rudimentary eyes spanned at least 1,000,000,000 years, perhaps as many as 2,700,000,000 years.

The earliest true mammals first appeared in the early Jurassic, some 25,000,000 to 50,000,000 years before the Cretaceous.

Keeping those facts in mind, now read Christopher Booker's shale-brained slipslop:

One great stumbling block to [Darwin's] argument is that evolution has repeatedly taken place in leaps forward so sudden and so complex that they could not possibly have been accounted for by the gradual process he suggested - “the Cambrian explosion" of new life forms, the complexities of the eye, the post-Cretaceous explosion of mammals. [Emphasis added.]

One thing does seem clear: there is not enough selection pressure in the Telegraph's editorial department.

(Via Butterflies and Wheels.)

UPDATE: As Sister Y notes in the comments, there's nothing strictly incorrect about Booker's comment about the "post-Cretaceous explosion of mammals." The reason I flagged Mammalia's arrival before even the beginning of the Cretaceous (and the Cretaceous itself lasted 80 million years) is that you're likely to get the impression from Booker's paragraph that mammals just kind of "exploded" into existence at 60 million BCE, or that it was only in the Paleogene that distinctively mammalian traits began to develop. No: all of the main distinctively mammalian characters had probably evolved by the middle of the Jurassic.