Comb Jelly De-Evolution

Nature keeps messing up. That is, naturalists come up with all of these wonderfully consistent (with their premises) hypotheses, but then when they actually conduct the research it turns out that nature has done the opposite. 

Take their recent research into comb jellies. Naturalists have assumed that living forms started out simple, and over time grew more complex. To be sure there have been cases where an organism lost complexity and returned to a simpler form, but this has to be the exception under naturalism, not the rule. After all, you can't go from amoebas to man by losing complexity. The early organisms have to start with less complexity and then develop more and more complexity over time. Yet ancient comb jellies had complex nervous systems. Modern ones have lost complexity, even though their lifestyles haven't changed much since the beginning. 

How did they get complex nervous systems, more complex than they needed- only to lose various degrees of it over time? Here is another quote from the article.... 

To better understand the evolution of this group, the team performed phylogenetic analysis which suggests the condensed nervous system is actually the ancestral condition and that only modern ctenophores have lost this complex nervous system and instead favored a more diffuse nerve net.......

The researchers conclude that Cambrian ctenophores had more complex nervous systems compared to those observed today. Living species of comb jellies have a diffuse nervous system similar to the structure of chicken wire, but very thin and transparent. Cambrian ctenophores' nervous systems were condensed with specific nerve tracks that basically ran along the length of the body and then as a ring around the mouth. This complex system is only seen in one living species, the Euplokamis, which is regarded as potentially being an early branching ctenophore living today. However, while Euplokamis has this elongated nerve structure that runs the length of the body, it does not have the ring around the mouth, so it too is simpler compared to Cambrian ctenophores.

So they can survive with a simple nervous system, or a complicated one, or something in between. How did nature produce the early models with the full suite of nervous system features when much simpler arrangements have actually proved to be perfectly satisfactory for what they do? The simple systems may even be a little better, based on the fact that most groups of comb jellies have that set up. 

Evolution isn't supposed to work like that. Animals are not supposed to start out with a bunch of complex systems that they don't need. Loss of complexity may come later, in certain exceptional cases when environment or lifestyle changes...for example if some group of them adopts a new life-style or environment where the original system is no longer used. Think blind cave fish who lost their sight. But this isn't that. Their life-style hasn't changed much. 

They are not supposed to start complex (where did that come from if simple was good enough?) and devolve to simple when the lifestyle is basically the same. It makes no sense- under naturalist premises anyway. It does make sense in the Christ-centered model for early Genesis. Nature does bring forth living creatures, but not without God putting her in position to do so. 

(Additional relevant note: This study says that ctenophores have such a different nervous system, including using different genes to form it, that it appears that nervous systems had more than one origin. 

Recent data show that neural systems of ctenophores are vastly different from those of other animals and use different sets of cellular and genetic mechanisms. Thus, neural systems appear to have at least two independent origins regardless of whether ctenophores or sponges are the earliest branching extant animal lineage.

So don't look for a common ancestor of regular jellyfish and comb jellies to solve this mystery. It wasn't the case that something with a regular nervous branched off and became comb jellies that didn't need one anymore. This group had its own independently derived nervous system, that most of the group got rid of after going to all the trouble to "develop". )

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My book about early Genesis is far more about Theology than science, and that's good. I've come to see we won't really get the science right, big picture anyway, without getting the theology right. 

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