I Don't Have the Stomach to Swallow This New Naturalistic Fairy Tale

 Stomachs they tell us, "evolved" 450 million years ago, unique to vertebrates. Having a sealed-off bag connected to an acid pump and other digestive enzymes is a huge advantage. It allows us to digest more proteins faster than other phyla. Functionality alone does not mean that a complex structure will be made though. It doesn't explain how it was made. Only that it would be useful if it would somehow come about. That the earliest vertebrates seem to have one is starkly at odds with what we would expect to see if nature is all that is at work here.

This is a specific instance of something I have noted before. Living phyla seem to show up complex and if anything some members lose stuff (de-evolution) over time if they don't need it for a particular niche. The evolution of the gaps religionists simply shrug and say that no matter what happened, "evolutiondidit". But you can't get from molecules to man by losing complexity. The pattern seems to be phyla show up with different complex structures, then some members lose some of them if not needed. None of that explains how they were complex right from the start. 

Stomachs are another example of what I mean. It turns out that a few vertebrate forms have lost their stomachs. The evolutionists count at least 18 times this happened. Including a couple of monotremes and a quarter of all fish. I guess that part can happen by nature alone. We don't need to appeal to a designer for something to lose a complex feature. Let's say they were in a niche where they did not need to digest a lot of complex proteins. Maybe they can do without it. 

The thing is, if it is so easy for a vertebrate to go without a stomach, even in a world where competing vertebrates have one, then what could have been the driving force for nature to start churning out vertebrates with this complex feature right from the start? Supposedly, a complex new feature would offer a powerful advantage, but 18 times at least it hasn't made the stomachless forms uncompetitive. Do complex new structures just immediately show up in phyla without even biological necessity? If so, when did this stop and why? It surely looks more like ID than the trial-and-error process of evolution as it has been described. 

EDIT- this article originally included two paragraphs talking about the the genes for stomachs in these agastric species appeared to be GONE, not just silenced and mutated. Some language in the report led me to believe that was the claim. Props to Sean Ovis for doing some good science and demonstrating beyond a reasonable doubt that Zebrafish have the remains of stomach genes, they are just so fragmented that one has to look close to find them. So I deleted the two paragraphs that it turns out were not accurate. 

Something is odd about all of it, whether the evolution-of-the-gaps folks want to admit it or not. 

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