Bigelowiella natans: Evolution Damage Control is Frantic

This One Looks Really Bad

You’ve heard of novel genes—genes that are found in only one species, and you’ve heard of alternative splicing—complex genes that are edited in different ways. Now put them together and on steroids, and to top it off, all in a mere unicellar algae. It’s another damage control nightmare as evolutionists again can’t figure out what went wrong.

The explosion in molecular biology in the past fifty years brought a plethora of new DNA sequence data and with it many new contradictions for evolutionists. One interesting finding was that in the higher species, genes are often interrupted multiple times. Instead of one DNA segment, those complex genes consisted of several smaller segments separated by intervening sequences.

As usual evolutionists figured it was all a mistake, the result of random mutations wreaking more havoc, this time in the higher species. As we have discussed many times, the evolutionist’s first move is always to assume that biology is a kludge, just barely functioning. It is amazing anything works at all.

Fortunately those random mutations also created exquisite molecular machines to splice the gene at just the right places and just the right times, and glue back together the right segments, omitting those useless intervening sequences. Another disaster somehow averted.

In fact, no thanks to evolutionary theory scientists discovered that those intervening sequences aren’t so useless, and that the gene segments are not only glued back together, but they can be rearranged as well. The process is referred to as alternative splicing and it rewrites the definition of a gene. It also allows for a far greater diversity of genes.

All of this was observed in the higher species, so evolutionists assumed those random mutations caused all this trouble at some point in the evolutionary history leading to those higher species.

That is, until the recent discovery that the unicellular algae, Bigelowiella natans, is an alternative splicing wizard, up there with the best of the higher organisms. It was “an unexpected finding”:

Unlike all characterized unicellular species—indeed, unlike all characterized non-metazoans—B. natans shows complex and ubiquitous alternative splicing.

Or as one evolution admitted, these levels of alternative splicing in B. natans:

greatly exceed that seen in the model plant Arabidopsis and on par with the human cerebral cortex, unprecedented and truly remarkable for a unicellular organism. This challenges the paradigm that complex alternative splicing is a phenomenon limited to sophisticated multicellular organisms.

It also challenges the paradigm called evolution. But as usual evolutionists easily resolve the dilemma. For once again, it is all just a mistake. The observed alternative splicing is really just “noise” in the molecular machinery—splicing errors. Like a broken calculator, evolutionary theory continues to give the same answer: it’s all just “noise.” It is amazing that evolution produced anything at all.

Alternative splicing is not the only contradiction offered up by this humble organism. B. natans also surprised evolutionists with unique, novel genes. In fact it has, err, about ten thousand unique genes.

When unique genes first starting appearing in the genomic data, evolutionists figured their evolutionary cousins would be discovered in the genomes of other species. The problem was that we did not yet have sufficient genome data in hand. Surely once the genome data from more species were obtained, the cousins of those pesky unique genes would be found. Unique genes would become a thing of the past.

But once again evolutionary theory pointed in the wrong direction. In fact, as the genomic data have increased, so have the unique genes. Now we can throw another 10,000 onto the heap.

Evolution is not motivated by the science. It never was. Darwin became convinced of transmutation for religious reasons. Since then nothing has changed. Religion drives science, and it matters.