“Shock: First Animal on Earth Was Surprisingly Complex”

This is from LiveScience.com:

Earth’s first animal was the ocean-drifting comb jelly, not the simple sponge, according to a new find that has shocked scientists who didn’t imagine the earliest critter could be so complex….

“This was a complete shocker,” said study team member Casey Dunn of Brown University in Rhode Island. “So shocking that we initially thought something had gone very wrong.”…

Unlike sponges, comb jellies have connective tissues and a nervous system, and so are more complex…. The finding was unexpected because evolutionary biologists had thought that less complex animals split off and evolved separately first….

Though scientists can say which animal branched off first, they can’t date precisely when this early comb jelly diverged away. “Unfortunately, we don’t have fossils of the oldest comb jelly,” Dunn said. “Therefore, there is no way to date the earliest jelly and determine when it diverged.”…

Though comb jellies are a common creature in the seas today, these modern specimens likely look very different from their early ancestors.

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Gintas writes:

“Earth’s first animal was the ocean-drifting comb jelly, not the simple sponge, according to a new find that has shocked scientists who didn’t imagine the earliest critter could be so complex.”

I’m shocked—shocked!—that they’re shocked.

“The finding was unexpected because evolutionary biologists had thought that less complex animals split off and evolved separately first. Dunn says that two evolutionary scenarios can explain why the comb jellies would actually have been first among animals. The first is that the comb jelly evolved its complexity independent of other animals after branching off to forge its own path.”

In the absence of really knowing something is true, evolutionary biologists generate pseudo-knowledge to fill in gaps. I think this is called using the theory to make predictions. And then are shocked! when the theory predicted wrongly. Once the shock wears off, new evolutionary scenarios must be created. In other words, the theory must grow until it explains everything that we know ever happened. Since new things are always happening, or are being discovered to have happened, this theory will not stop growing until the end of time.

James S. writes:

Something to keep in mind is that the method used here to determine the “first animal” (by which I think they mean the earliest appearing branch of the living phylums) assumes random mutation. What they do is they count up the changes found in DNA sequence and then calculate from that, based on mutation rate and generation time, how many years ago the two groups must have diverged. But the mutation rate can only be assumed to be constant if it also assumed to be random.

LA replies:

Yes, I wondered about that, since the story said there is no estimate of when this species lived.

However, as Carol Iannone asked the other day, why should we assume that these mutations are random? After all, when people look at a tree, a flower, they see obvious design, yet the scientists tell us that this is an illusion, that there is no design, there is just the results of random mutations naturally selected. But here the shoe is on the other foot. The Darwinian scientists see mutations that seem to occur at regular intervals, and this looks random to them, and so they declare that the mutations are random. But since the Darwinian scientists don’t accept what appears to us as the obvious indications of design, why should we accept what appears to them as obvious indications of randomness?

James S. replies:

Well I guess they would say randomness is the default. You only reject randomness when you have evidence for something more; or in other words when randomness fails to explain the observations.

MJF writes from Portugal:

Well, I hate to say I told you so, but I did tell you so!

Evolution does go from more to less complex, with less to more complex movements in between!

Pretty soon we’ll all evolve into one (gigantic?) unicellular being!

LA replies:

MJF is referring to an exchange we had in a discussion about E.O. Wilson. MJF had written:

One thing I don’t understand about “evolution” is, why does it always take the same direction: from less to more complex. Is there anything that makes more complex organisms intrinsically more adaptable than less complex organisms?

I realize that, at the meta-level, that’s the reason why this purposeless process is called, well, evolution—otherwise, the designation would be senseless.

But I mean, at the reality level. Why is it not (or is it?) a question of more complex evolving to less complex? Why don’t men evolve into flies, which I bet have less problematic lives than we do—and so better chances of survival, I suppose.

I’m pretty sure it’s a dumb question with a very simple answer, but I’ve only recently started to read about evolution.

And I had replied:

It’s not a dumb question at all but goes to the heart of the Big Darwinian Lie. Darwin’s supporters think he pulled off the greatest intellectual feat in the history of science by showing how the apparently purposive processes of life, including the progressive appearance of new life forms of ever greater complexity and mental powers (all of which suggest an ordering and directing intelligence), happened as a result of mindless material processes. But in reality this brilliant “solution” is an absurd contradiction that cannot stand. Given mindless purposeless mutations plus natural selection, there is no reason why life should exhibit its evident drive toward greater complexity. Gould himself said that from the point of view of Darwinism, bacteria are superior to man, since they survive better. Why then the evolution, out of one-celled organisms that had existed on earth for two billion years, of marine invertebrates, marine vertebrates, deciduous trees, and eagles? Gould says that all this is nothing other than a random oscillation of degrees of complexity, a “bush” rather than “tree.” Which is just begging the question and repeating the Big Darwinian Lie.

So the short answer is: there is no reason in Darwinism for the evolution of more complex species. The most that Darwinian random mutation and natural selection can plausibly explain is slight improvements within an existing species.

Now, we don’t know that this latest discovery, of the greater age of the more complex comb jelly than the less complex sponge is correct. It is only a projection, based on questionable assumptions about the frequency of mutations. But let’s say for the sake of argument that the discovery is true and that the comb jelly is older than the sponge. What would it mean? It would suggest different and contradictory meanings.

On one hand, it would support MJF’s idea that, if the Darwinian process of random mutations and natural selection were true, more complex creatures would in general “evolve” into less complex creatures; and since that is what has happened here, Darwinian “evolution in reverse” would be supported. But then of course it would be also be shattering the Darwinian theory of evolution since the main tendency of evolution has been toward the more complex.

On the other hand, it could suggest that the comb jelly came into existence by an act of special creation, not requiring a long build-up, much as the Cambrian explosion suggests a massive act of special creation, which would disprove Darwinian evolution altogether.

But then there is the Darwinian scientists’ own explanation, as reported in the article:

Dunn says that two evolutionary scenarios can explain why the comb jellies would actually have been first among animals. The first is that the comb jelly evolved its complexity independent of other animals after branching off to forge its own path.

The second is that the sponge evolved its simpler form from the more complex form. This second possibility underscores the fact that “evolution is not necessarily just a march towards increased complexity,” Dunn said.

Dunn’s second scenario sounds like Gould’s “bush,” in which evolution, or rather “evolution,” instead of leading in a definite sustained direction, oscillates back and forth. Sometimes it results in more complex forms, sometimes in less. But Gould’s idea would be very difficult to sustain, since it says (as I remember from reading one of his essays years ago) that bacteria are the default life form, and that fish, song birds, elm trees, and elephants are mere oscillations from that default state.

MJF writes:

You write:

On one hand, it would support MJF’s idea that, if the Darwinian process of random mutations and natural selection were true, more complex creatures would in general “evolve” into less complex creatures; and since that is what has happened here, Darwinian “evolution in reverse” would be supported. But then of course it would be also be shattering the Darwinian theory of evolution since the main tendency of evolution has been toward the more complex.

Yes, but wouldn’t it be really, really amazing if a single unicellular being had “evolved” into all the complexity that surrounds us, then “un-evolved” back into its own simplicity again—all of that by chance?

In fact, if this comb jelly thing is true, then it appears that it’s either what I just said or the other possibility you mention: direct creation of complex beings, which are now evolving into simpler ones.

If this isn’t a fairy tale, I don’t know what is…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 11, 2008 02:04 PM | Send