Traits are Linked. "Re-Thinking the Fundamentals of Evolution"

 Their headline, not mine. A study of a wide-spread African fish group has turned a quarter-century of evolutionary assumption upside down. Cichlids have a very complex set of double-jaws. Well, I will let the article tell it...

Researchers have long thought that the two sets of jaws are evolutionarily decoupled and can evolve independently of one another, pushing the boundaries of morphological evolution. However, Conith and Albertson demonstrated that such decoupling does not appear to be the case for cichlids, challenging a quarter-century-old assumption. "What we've found is not just that the evolution of the two sets of jaws is linked, but that they're linked across multiple levels, from genetic to evolutionary," says Albertson.

Traditional thinking is that genetically linked traits led to features that were constrained in terms of evolution. You could not tinker with the one without messing up the other, making accumulated changes much harder. You had to have a hail-mary that changed everything at once in a way that somehow still worked. 

any models of evolution theorize both that organisms are constructed from repeated units—digits on your hand or teeth in your mouth—and that these individual units evolve independently from one another. "It is this 'modularity' of organisms that is thought to facilitate the evolutionary process," Albertson notes.

Linked systems are usually thought to lack evolutionary potential. "They just cannot evolve in as many dimensions," Conith says. This is referred to as an evolutionary constraint, and it plays an important role in shaping biodiversity. Constraints determine what body structures are possible.

The article then does what such pieces typically do- take a discovery which ought to challenge naturalist premises and instead use it to claim support for them. All discoveries that naturalists were wrong about evolution automatically get re-interpreted to "this is how evolution works". When a quarter-century fundamental assumption is overturned, they don't even blink. Linked or unlinked, nature saw to all the changes unaided. It's a naturalism-of-the-gaps at work. 

"The constraint is actually facilitating cichlid evolution, rather than impeding it," says Conith.

Of course it is, because whatever happened, evolution did it.

"This tells us that we need to rethink the fundamentals of evolutionary mechanisms," says Albertson. "Perhaps constraints play a wider role in the evolutionary success of species around the world."

That sounds like however the constraints got imposed, it helped promote adaptation. Sort of like how God's commandments are not cages, but guard-rails. The so-called "constraints" imposed by the creator give us freedom, they don't remove it. 

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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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Why Didn't the Ediacaran Biota Fill More Niches?

 The Ediacaran Biota seems to have been the first multi-cellular organisms on earth, living during the Vendian Period. No one is sure what they were. They died out once the Cambrian Explosion resulted in a large number of new forms of animal life appearing in the ancient seas. 

Most scientists acknowledge that the Ediacaran biota were not related to the later Cambrian forms. One role they play in the debate on creation is to show that hard shells are not required for fossilization- undermining the excuse that a lack of hard shells prior to the Cambrian explains the absence of reasonable evolutionary precursors to the explosion of forms in the Cambrian. Even without shells, if conditions are right, fossilization occurs. This makes it more likely that the reason that fossils of evolutionary precursors to the Cambrian forms are missing is that they did not exist. 

Of the many things that I find amazing about the Ediacaran forms is their lack of evolution. They expanded into a world where every macro niche was unfilled, yet over the course of 80-100 million years they apparently filled very few of them. This paper analyzed Vendian life-forms for where they lived in the ocean, their level of motility, and feeding strategy. This resulted in a matrix of 216 potential niches. As the paper notes:

The Ediacaran fauna utilized at most 12 modes of life, with just two practised by skeletal organisms.

They didn't evolve much. The Goldblum character from Jurassic Park's classic statement "life finds a way" wasn't true of Vendian Period forms. They didn't find a way. They left most niches wide-open for 80 to 100 million years. In contrast, the explosion of forms in the Cambrian quickly diversified as shown by their statement:

A total of 30 modes of life are recorded in the Early and Middle Cambrian, 19 of which were utilized by skeletal organisms. The other 11 are documented from soft-bodied animals preserved in the Chengjiang and Burgess Shale Konservat-Lagerstätten. The number of modes of life utilized by skeletal organisms increased by more than 50 per cent during the Ordovician radiation to a Late Ordovician total of 30....

The Ordovician radiation is another problem for naturalists. Life did not unfold they way their theories would have it. It isn't that species diversified into closely related ones, which over time became a new genus, then some from that became a new family, and then eventually some of that became a new order and so forth. Instead, the new phyla came first, then the new classes, and then the new orders. Only after an extended period of time did the process they call evolution begin to happen- with new species splitting and eventually forming a new genus and so forth. 

The early and middle Cambrian together lasted only 20 million years. Forty million years or so later the Ordovician came along. All of that together is less time than the Ediacaran forms had in the Vendian. Those forms basically didn't evolve. There was one burst in the Avalon where new forms show up. But they don't do a lot of subsequent changing. If evolution is fundamental to life, why didn't these things do it?

I don't have any hard answers here, only speculations. In the Christ-centered model Creation participates in its being filled to varying degrees by the "day" and type of living thing. With plants, it looks most like theistic evolution, with God simply commanding the land to bring forth "vegetation" and the land doing so without further direct intervention from God. God is giving the commands as if creation itself has some creative power. Later, God commands the seas to bring forth living creatures, but subsequent to that He intervenes on the job. One of the biggest theology points of the model is that the universe was made to be fit for beings like us- it can't do God's will without God's help either. 

So if I am speculating, and that is all this is at this point, perhaps the Ediacaran forms were an attempt of the earth to fill the waters with living creatures on its own. The result was inadequate and unsuitable. This deficit was cured by God's participation. This mirrors how our attempts to do good on our own fall flat, and are made fruitful only by operating in what He has done - the Atonement being the central example. 

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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. If you have found anything I say about the evidence from science in the least remarkable, know that it is nothing at all compared to the profound truths shown about the work of Christ in early Genesis as described in this book.

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Chordates Also Show Complexity From the Start

I recently wrote a post about comb jellies and how, contrary to evolutionary expectations, the initial members of the group had more advanced neurology than later members of the group. It was like they started with even more complexity than they needed for their niche (without apparent precursors) and then various members of the group lost differing amounts of complexity over time. It's obvious to anyone who thinks about it objectively (which unfortunately is not very many I've found) that this is completely contrary to macro-evolutionary expectations but perfectly compatible with a creationist view.

What I most often get out of naturalists on this one is that the evidence must be misleading and incomplete. OK, but then what you are doing there is taking macro-evolution on faith. That is, even if the evidence says otherwise, you assume that the evidence is incomplete and misleading and that your beliefs contrary to the evidence are correct. That's fine, but don't claim the mantle of "science" for your beliefs then. 

Note that I am not saying "there is no evolution". I think scripture teaches that the earth and the seas have the power to bring forth various living things- but not without God's help in both sea and land. In such a scenario, one cannot appeal to the considerable evidence that nature has taken a single species and over vast amounts of time diversified it into a family of closely-related genera to explain the extra-ordinary times in earth's history when new phyla and classes appear seemingly out of nowhere with tremendous amounts of initial complexity. The former does not explain the latter, it doesn't look like the latter, and the most reasonable conclusion is that some other mechanism of formation was involved.

The best point my naturalist associates made in my prior attempt to show this was that I had only the example of comb jellies, a relatively obscure phylum. Why would a creator God start them off with maximum complexity but go from simplest to complex with other denizens of the deep? Thus, this data point could be considered a fluke, and not an example by which we could judge the origin of life in the seas. It was a fair point. 

Too bad for them, the point is invalid. It wasn't just comb jellies that started off with more complexity than needed for the niche occupied by the phylum. The same thing happens with chordates, a group which includes us vertebrates. It turns out that the simpler one (Pikaia), long presumed to be the ancestor of an array of more complicated chordates, does not appear earlier than those more complicated types. Dr. Fuzale Rana of Reasons to Believe explains the evidence here, but he links to the original research so there is no good reason to doubt his facts.

The short version of his article is that they assumed the simpler chordate came first (520 million years ago) then later more complex ones arose. Then they found the more complex ones in an earlier formation. So something similar happened with chordates and comb jellies- they start with more complexity than they need and some groups then mostly lose it! Bear in mind that, as Rana explains here, just twenty years ago evolutionary scientists thought that chordates evolved from invertebrate phyla that also appeared in the Cambrian. Now they not only have to explain away why the chordates show up too early and too distinct for that to be the case, but that it isn't even the case that the simplest versions of the type are first!

Dr. Hugh Ross, an associate of Rana at Reasons to Believe, points out that the genetic tree evidence is conflicting- if you insist on imposing naturalistic evolution. It isn't conflicting at all if you take the evidence at face value- phyla show up independently and rapidly and all in the same era without reasonable evolutionary precursors. 

I found one paragraph in the Ross link, from June of this year, particularly enlightening and satisfying. We are coming to basically the same conclusions based on the same evidence. This is mostly Ross citing two papers from secular researchers, which I provide the cite for below the paragraph..... 

"5 Furthermore, the fossil record shows that “there are no indications that the evolutionary activity at the family level was driving the origination of higher-level taxa.”6 In fact, “the diversification of phyla occurs before that of classes, classes before that of orders, and orders before that of families”7 

6. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1558-5646.1987.tb02459.x

7.Erwin, Valentine, and Sepkoski, Jr., “A Comparative Study.”

That sure sounds like these papers are saying that what I noticed about comb jellies isn't a fluke at all- it is typical of the origin of all living phyla. Life started in distinct forms and the phyla became classes and super-orders and so forth. Only when you get far down the taxonomic classification ladder do things start to go the other way and species began diversifying into genera. What is lacking is any evidence that new phyla, or even classes, can arise via that same process.

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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. If you have found anything I say about the evidence from science in the least remarkable, know that it is nothing at all compared to the profound truths shown about the work of Christ in early Genesis as described in this book.

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Genes Can Respond to Coded Information in Signals

 https://phys.org/news/2021-08-genes-coded-signalsor-filter.html

I assumed that when God shaped new living creatures He operated on the quantum level, sending information from the eternal realm into the temporal realm. Things would look like "a series of extremely unlikely natural events". And I still think that. But wow, messages can be sent directing the genome via EM radiation, and how different genomes interpret the signal varies. So the same EM signal could tell some organisms to do one thing and another something else. Lots of ways the Creator could have done His handiwork. 

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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