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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