The Humble Comb Jelly Has a Through-Gut

The Theory is Superfluous

My friend Steve used to have an old Pontiac that was in shambles. Somewhere along the line the front bumper had fallen off, and somebody welded on an I-beam as a replacement. It was a rust bucket that was literally falling apart, but the funny things was, that old car just kept on running, seemingly on inertia. A hose might spring a leak or a belt might snap, but it kept on running. Steve’s Pontiac had become a fixture—for better or worse, it had been running for decades and it was unbelievable that it would ever stop. Why breakdown now, it could always run one more day.

Steve’s Pontiac was like the theory of evolution. It fails over and over, but just keeps on going. Our faith in it is unshakeable even though it is full of holes. I have long since given up on trying to document all of the scientific failures of our modern day Epicureanism.

But somebody at least must try. So here we go again.

Today’s falsification deals with the gut. We humans ingest our food into one hole and excrete it out another hole. The food makes its way through our body via the gut—it is a “through-gut.” But lesser organisms, such as sea anemones and jellyfish, send their waste back up and out, through the same hole that ingested the food.

According to evolution—you know the drill—the single-hole model was in the beginning, and later natural selection crafted the two-hole, through-gut, design, increasing efficiency and fortuitously making way for longer body plans and all sorts of other good things.

But now William Browne of the University of Miami in Florida has found that one of those lesser forms, the comb jelly (which is supposed to long predate not only the through-gut design but even many of the other single-hole creatures because, after all, that is what the DNA evidence says), in fact has been operating a through-gut all along. It just wasn’t obvious.

These findings have stunned evolutionists, for the humble comb jelly is not cooperating with the evolutionary pattern. As Kevin Kocot, evolutionary biologist at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, put it, “We have all these traditional notions of a ladderlike view of evolution, and it keeps getting shaken.”

Yes indeed, it “keeps getting shaken.” The hierarchical pattern evolutionists have predicted and celebrated does not exist—not in any meaningful way. The scientific evidence contradicts the theory of evolution.

And so—the second half of the drill—we have the patches and epicycles. Perhaps the comb jelly evolved through-guts on their own, independent of the other animals. Or perhaps the through-gut evolved once in an ancient animal ancestor, and subsequently became lost in anemones, jellyfish, and sponges.

Perhaps if you’re an anemone or a sponge stuck to a rock, suggests evolutionist George Matsumoto, a marine biologist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California, it’s better to push waste back into the current rather than below.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

The evolutionary pattern is, once again, contradicted and, once again, the theory is contorted to the point that it is meaningless.

I once debated an evolutionist who insisted that evolution has explanatory value. No, it does not have explanatory value. The comb jelly was thought to be part of the evolutionary pattern. Now it violates that pattern, and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because the theory doesn’t rule out any pattern. The comb jelly doesn’t fit—OK, then it is an exception. An anomaly. It went off by itself and evolved its own structures, independently.

Or, on the other hand, perhaps it is the rule, and not the exception, and the through gut was later lost in those other creatures which, in that case, would be the exceptions.

Whatever.

Any explanation will do, so long as we call it evolution.

The theory does not have explanatory value. It is meaningless. It is superfluous.

Like Steve’s Pontiac, it just keeps on running no matter how many failures.