Tuesday, January 24, 2017

The Sea Anemone: A Proverbial Precambrian Rabbit

A Contradiction of Another “Widely Held Belief”

When asked what evidence would disprove evolution, the famous 20th century evolutionist J.B.S. Haldane is famously said to have responded “a fossil rabbit in the preCambrian.” In other words, a fossil rabbit would have to be found in strata dating to long before rabbits, or mammals for that matter, are normally found. And by “long,” we’re talking about somewhere between roughly one-half a billion years to several billion years. It was an exercise in what philosophers refer to as theory protectionism—erecting insurmountable protective barriers around a theory. The fossil record was sufficiently understood in Haldane’s day to know that such as finding was highly unlikely. And it was also known that much less astounding, and more feasible, fossil findings would (or at least should) pose serious problems for evolutionary theory. In fact there are many such contradictions in the rocks, but if a rabbit in the preCambrian is the evidential standard, then evolution is comfortably safe. Haldane’s preCambrian rabbit response was also an exercise in naïve falsificationism—the thinking that a single finding is going to take down a theory so deeply imbedded in our thinking, and so confidently held to be true. In fact evolutionary theory has survived myriad contradictory evidences of at least as much severity as a preCambrian rabbit without so much as skipping a beat. Consider, for example, the genome of the starlet sea anemone, Nematostella vectensis. Here is how one report summarized it:

The genome of the sea anemone, one of the oldest living animal species on Earth, shares a surprising degree of similarity with the genome of vertebrates, researchers report in this week's Science. The study also found that these similarities were absent from fruit fly and nematode genomes, contradicting the widely held belief that organisms become more complex through evolution. The findings suggest that the ancestral animal genome was quite complex, and fly and worm genomes lost some of that intricacy as they evolved.

In other words, it was the genomic equivalent of Haldane’s preCambrian rabbit—a preCambrian genome had, err, all the complexity of species to come hundreds of millions of years later. In other cases it has more complexity than species such as worms and flies which, according to evolution, must have lost enormous amounts of genetic complexity.

The lead author of the sea anemone study explained that “We have this basic toolkit now for the whole animal kingdom.” Of course the idea of foresight is contradictory to evolutionary theory. As one evolutionist admitted, it is surprising to find such a “high level of genomic complexity in a supposedly primitive animal such as the sea anemone.” It implies that the ancestral animal “was already extremely highly complex, at least in terms of its genomic organization and regulatory and signal transduction circuits, if not necessarily morphologically.”

Or as another evolutionist put it:

It is commonly believed that complex organisms arose from simple ones. Yet analyses of genomes and of their transcribed genes in various organisms reveal that, as far as protein-coding genes are concerned, the repertoire of a sea anemone — a rather simple, evolutionarily basal animal — is almost as complex as that of a human.

None of this makes any sense on evolutionary theory. Of course it is “commonly believed” by evolutionists “that complex organisms arose from simple ones.” That would be rather fundamental to the theory. And yet we repeatedly find early complexity. This is another example of how resistant evolution is to testing and falsification.

The science contradicts the theory.

21 comments:

  1. The increase in complexity re anemones vis humans may be explained by this:
    http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2014.2/BIO-C.2014.2

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    1. A paper published in a failed journal, by an author who is also an editor of that same journal. Forgive me if I am sceptical.

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    2. Spearshake, the original article was published in "Science", analysis published in The-Scientist.com. Is this mainstream enough for you to respect?

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    3. BFast, I was responding to the link provided by mad doc. Biocomplexity not exactly a respected journal.

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    4. LoL! Only cowards attack the journal and not the science. Yet that is all wee willie ever does as it is ignorant of science.

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    5. Joke: "LoL! Only cowards attack the journal and not the science."

      Are we talking about the journal that is funded by the Biologic Inst.? The journal that published four articles in 2016? Three of which had authors who are employed by the Biologic Inst.? Three of which were authored by people who are on the editorial board of the journal?

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    6. Thank you for proving my point. Meanwhile there isn't anything in peer-review that supports evolutionism

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    7. Joke: "Meanwhile there isn't anything in peer-review that supports evolutionism."

      Citations please. Unless, of course, you are just blowing shit out of your pie hole.

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    8. William Spearshake, "I was responding to the link provided by mad doc."
      That's nice, but the main topic of this thread is a report of findings which are devastating to the dominant theory. They are published in a well respected journal. These findings should land as a shock, a crisis, to anybody who holds to a non-foresighted model.

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    9. LoL! wee willie wants a citation for something that doesn't exist!

      Tell you what wee willie- find one peer-reviewed paper that supports the evolution of vertebrate vision systems by means of blind and mindless processes. Find one that demonstrates any bacterial flagellum can evolve via those same processes.

      You have been told what is being debated, although you seem to be too dense to understand it. So go ahead find the peer-review that supports blind watchmaker evolution.

      Heck you already proven that you cannot find the alleged scientific theory of evolutuon

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    10. I'd be more curious about exactly what Spearshake is skeptical. Is there a particular problem he has in how Wells argues that there are some important sources of information encoded outside the genome? Or rather is he skeptical of whether he should bother to look at Wells' article since he bases his skepticism on the venue rather than the argument? Personally, I'm not sure what why Mad Doc thought Wells' article was relevant to this topic, unless he is suggesting that there might extra information complexity in human development that isn't in the genome (implying that the relative complexity of the sea anemone is somewhat illusory).

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  2. Nice article. Evolution is like globalism. It's hanging by a thread. But the exit is unavoidable.

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  3. We believe in Darwin, the father almighty and in his only son, Evolution,
    Who was conceived by his rejection of God.
    Born of the enlightenment, he was promulgated throughout the world.
    He descended into the universities.
    He ascended into the courts and governments,
    And his kingdom shall have no end.
    We believe in the Scientists, the Lords and givers of light, who with Darwin and Evolution are worshipped and glorified. They have spoken through the Journals.
    We believe in one grand unified theory of everything. We acknowledge one university degree for the pathway to knowledge.
    We are not sure what happens after this but we are very sure that those whose say they do know are wrong.

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    1. Thanks. I blurted that out. But I think what I have written is true, having been an evolutionist once myself. It took 12 months to un-brainwash myself. It's like taking the "red pill"

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    2. Certainly seems to capture the feeling behind all the talk of "tentative" science.

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  4. Dr. Hunter, I do agree with you that, unless contrary evidence arises, this is the genetic equivalent to a rabbit in the cambrian. This finding makes ABSOLUTELY NO neo-Darwinian sense!

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  5. Part of the slippery nature of evolutionary explanation is that a lot of the complexity is incidental (e.g. "zero force evolutionary law" [ZFEL] or "irremedial complexity"). In this view, the sea anemone is more informationally complex than it needs to be (i.e. its informational complexity is out of proportion with its functional/ organizational complexity) because evolution tends to favor the baroque. Now, this still has the fundamental problem of not being predictive. If there is more informational complexity than we would otherwise expect, we can attribute it to ZFEL; otherwise we can call it proof of the awesome powers of natural selection. This is the explanatory power of every evolutionary "Synthesis": It will seem to explain anything we find, whether it matches expectations or not.

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  6. hi. dr hunter. here is 2 more examples of a precambrian rabbit:

    http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/01/24/rsbl.2011.1216.full

    its amazing what the paper says:

    ""Any acrodontan—let alone an advanced agamid—in the Triassic is thus highly unexpected in the light of recent studies."

    "Tikiguania estesi is widely accepted to be the earliest member of Squamata, the reptile group that includes lizards and snakes. It is based on a lower jaw from the Late Triassic of India"

    "It is extremely unlikely that Tikiguania is an advanced agamid from the Triassic, and that the draconine jaw ‘morphotype’ has persisted largely unchanged for 216 Myr."
    "

    "Tikiguania would have been evidence for an anomalously early (i.e. Triassic) age for what molecular studies suggest is a highly derived squamate clade (Acrodonta), implying that all major clades of squamates such as iguanians, anguimorphs, snakes, scincomorphs and gekkotans had diverged in the Triassic. However, none of these groups appear unequivocally in the fossil record until substantially later [5]. Indeed, some recent palaeontological and molecular studies of squamate divergence dates have not mentioned Tikiguania, presumably because of its problematic nature"

    and here is another one:


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoavis


    " Though it existed far earlier than Archaeopteryx, its skeletal structure is allegedly more bird-like."

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