Once Again the Proposed "Ancestor" Becomes Just Another Cousin - Hagfish Fossil

The hagfish is one of the most gruesome and alien-looking creatures on earth. Along with lampreys, they make up a group of "jawless vertebrates". Above is a picture of the head of a hagfish. The mouth closes vertically, unlike basically every other non-insect animal. Muscles just sort of mush the cartilage together, there is no jaw. They use their comb-like teeth to strip flesh off of the bodies of animal carcasses which sink to the ocean floor.

This creature has also been proposed as a "living fossil" which represents what the ancestor of all vertebrates looked like. In other words, many scientists proposed that something which looked much like a hagfish gave rise to all other vertebrates. Other scientists saw them as a derived form of whatever gave rise to vertebrates- another branch in the vertebrate tree and not a remnant of the trunk.

When I saw this article on Science Daily yesterday "Fossilized Slime of 100-million Year Old Hagfish Shakes up Vertebrate Family Tree" I was interested in it, but I knew what it was going to say before I ever clicked on it. It was going to say that yet-another group that was believed to represent a basal type instead turned out to be just another "sister group". I knew that because I had seen it so many times before. Scientists think they find the "trunk" of some evolutionary tree, but when they look at the evidence more closely they don't see a "Y" with one original type splitting into two or more branches. They see a series of parallel lines, at least when looking above the "Family" level of classification. It's not the "common ancestor" that they had hoped it would be.

Sure enough, it happened again. I'll just lay out the key quote:

Features of the new fossil help place hagfish and their relatives on the vertebrate family tree. In the past, scientists have disagreed about where they belonged, depending on how they tackled the question. Those who rely on fossil evidence alone tend to conclude that hagfish are so primitive that they are not even vertebrates. This implies that all fishes and their vertebrate descendants had a common ancestor that -- more or less -- looked like a hagfish.
But those who work with genetic data argue that hagfish and lampreys are more closely related to each other. This suggests that modern hagfish and lampreys are the odd ones out in the family tree of vertebrates. In that case, the primitive appearance of hagfish and lampreys is deceptive, and the common ancestor of all vertebrates was probably something more conventionally fish-like.
Miyashita's work reconciles these two approaches, using physical evidence of the animal's anatomy from the fossil to come to the same conclusion as the geneticists: that the hagfish and lampreys should be grouped separately from the rest of fishes.

So there you have it. The hagfish and lamprey's don't represent a basal ancestor which gave rise to vertebrates. They are their own thing. Even more amazingly, it's not even like one of those two represent a form which gave rise to the other.  Contrary to what scientists previously believed even hagfish and lampreys appear to be sister groups with neither one derived from the other.

I should have been keeping a list of every time I came on an article where scientists announce results which "explain how evolution occurred" when in fact the results show that what they once thought was a basal group was actually just a sister group. The original ancestor would then be a hypothetical form which existed sometime in the distant past. I'm not saying it never goes the other way. On occasion they predict a creature with certain features will be found and sometimes a fossil like that will be found. But even in some of those cases, the story does not really add up and what they are really looking at is a 'composite' creature, not a true intermediate.

The other issue from the article is that the 100-million year old fossil had chemical traces in it which indicated that the creature had a "slime defense" system similar to living hagfish today. Hagfish have special glands along their body which secrete an amazing amount of slime when they are threatened. A tub of them can turn the water into the consistency of jelly! The slime gets in gills and can interfere with breathing. Apparently even this amazing and chemically and anatomically complex defense system was already present in hagfish 100-million years ago! Where is the evolution?

Now I am not saying that evolution didn't happen at all. I am sure a lot of it did. It's just not the total explanation. I am more inclined to the explanation given in early Genesis. The earth and the waters brought forth living things at God's command, but they also had God's help. It wasn't just evolution, it was creation too. And of course, for man himself, the earth was not involved, except as a source of raw material. Man was God's doing.

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Why Ussher's Method for Calculating Dates Won't Work

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Noah's Ark Did Not Really Look Like That!

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A Southern Location for Eden? Only if we have Noah's Landing Spot Wrong

I am convinced that the Garden of Eden was a real place, but I don't know where it was. In Early Genesis the Revealed Cosmology I gave the four best possibilities for a northern location of the garden, along with some reasons why I supported a northern location somewhere in this region. Others have made a respectable case for a southern location for Eden. Reasons to Believe for example, has laid out evidence supporting a location for Eden which was covered in water about 8,000 years ago and is now under the Persian Gulf.

The text of Genesis says that when they were expelled from Eden a guardian was placed "at the east" which indicates that they were driven eastward. When Cain was driven from the presence of the LORD and his family he went further east to the "land of Nod".

So all of the directional motion given in the text is east-west motion. The one possible exception: The text also says that the waters returned to where they came from. In the case of a Mesopotamian flood the waters would drain south. An ark landing at the mountains of Ararat, but on the Mesopotamian side, on the extreme north end of that region doesn't make sense. You can't get there using east-west, and possible south motion from a starting point of an Eden in the Persian Gulf.

However there is one thing that might save the hypothesis of a southern location for Eden: A mistaken location for "the mountains of Ararat". The word used for Ararat is not Hebrew. It is a loan word from another language, likely Assyrian and used by them to identify the land of Uratu. It is difficult to know what it means but I've heard one linguist suggest that it means "the highest lands" or country. The region around our present day Mount Ararat is the highest land relative to the people of Assyria, but what if Noah was in another region, with another "highest land" when the account was compiled?

There was another ancient kingdom with a similar-sounding name, Aratta, probably located somewhere on the other side of Elam. What if the original account said that the ark landed on "the highest lands" which happened to be near a land later named "Aratta" and the name Uratu just happened to mean "highest land" in a local language? Over time it would be easy to see how Noah's "highest lands" got confused for the highest lands of the surrounding area.

Since I have a two-population model for early Genesis the descendants of Adam don't have to be the whole human race. The Reasons to Believe position is that the whole human population lived in the region of Mesopotamia at the time of the flood. I don't think the evidence supports that this was ever true, nor does it need to in my view since the target of the flood was the descendants of Adam, not the rest of the race Adam (humanity). The clan of Adam could have just lived in the large basin in the Kerman and Baluchestan provinces of what is now Iran. Under this scenario that basin was flooded, wiping them out, and the ark of Noah would have landed in the high ground on its western edge. From there, they journeyed east and attained a plain in the land of Shinar. That part would be a good fit with the text of Genesis chapter ten where it describes cities that were in southern and central Mesopotamia as being the start of the kingdom of Nimrod, with the clan of Asshur striking out from there under Nimrod's flag to build more northerly cities.

Again, I still support a northerly Eden based on all the evidence available at this time, but I can see that there are circumstances where a southern location makes sense.

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