From ScienceDaily:
You’d think that losing 25 percent of your genes would be a big problem for survival. But not for red algae, including the seaweed used to wrap sushi.
An ancestor of red algae lost about a quarter of its genes roughly one billion years ago, but the algae still became dominant in near-shore coastal areas around the world, according to Rutgers University-New Brunswick Professor Debashish Bhattacharya, who co-authored a study in the journal Nature Communications.
The research may assist in the creation of genetically altered seaweeds that could be used as crops, help to predict the spread of seaweed pests and — as the climate warms and pollution possibly increases — control invasive seaweeds that blanket shorelines.
Scientists believe the 25 percent loss in genetic material resulted from adaptation by the red algal ancestor to an extreme environment, such as hot springs or a low-nutrient habitat. That’s when the genome of these algae became smaller and more specialized. So, how did they manage to escape these challenging conditions to occupy so many different habitats?
“It is a story akin to Phoenix rising from the ashes, and the study answers an important question in evolution,” said Bhattacharya, a distinguished professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. “This lineage has an amazing evolutionary history and the algae now thrive in a much more diverse environment than hot springs.” Paper. (open access) – JunMo Lee, Dongseok Kim, Debashish Bhattacharya, Hwan Su Yoon. Expansion of phycobilisome linker gene families in mesophilic red algae. Nature Communications, 2019; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-12779-1 More.
This is a classic story of devolution, where an organism thrives by losing information, as Michael Behe explains in Darwin Devolves. Devolution is a form of evolution; it just isn’t glitzy.
See also: Devolution: Getting back to the simple life
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How do they know that it lost 25% of its genes a billion years ago?
Of related note:
Ancient bacteria spores recovered from amber crystals and salt crystals, which are tens to hundreds of millions of years old, have been ‘revived’,,,
,,, and have now been compared to their living descendants of today. ,,,
To the disbelieving shock of Darwinists, “Almost without exception, bacteria isolated from ancient material have proven to closely resemble modern bacteria at both morphological and molecular levels.”
Evolutionists were so disbelieving at this stunning lack of change, (far less change than was expected from the neo-Darwinian view), that they insisted the stunning similarity was due to modern contamination in Vreeland’s experiment. Yet the following study laid that objection to rest by finding some ancient DNA sequences that were completely unique:
I wrote an e-mail to Dr. Cano and asked him if he had performed a ‘fitness test’ on the ancient bacteria he had revived to see if they were more fit than their modern day descendants. He wrote back and said that he had done such a test and that ‘we surmised that the putative “ancient”,,, isolate was capable of utilizing a broader scope of substrates” than the modern strain
Moreover, the ancient yeast that Dr. Cano had also isolated was also found to be more resilient than modern day yeast in terms of making beer:
Thus, these ancient bacteria are actually more resilient than their modern day descendants. Exactly the opposite finding one would have expected from a Darwinian perspective.
Moreover, in terms of morphology, billion year old bacteria “surprisingly looked exactly like modern species,” and the similarity in morphology is widespread among fossils of [varying] times,”
Here are a few more references to drive this point home:
Thus, where you would expect the most change, i.e. in single celled organisms with high replication and mutation rates, we instead find a extreme conservation of morphology, much more extreme than in multicellular organisms. Again the exact opposite finding as we would expect under Darwinian presuppositions.
Darwinists are rather flexible with their belief in evolution. Species take millions of years to evolve, unless something is found that shows a species must have evolved much sooner than possible. Others, like crocodiles, don’t seem to evolve much over the course of millions of years. In the case of single celled organisms, they just need more time to mutate. For the first scientific theory to go right past the law status to fact, there’s a lot of things missing, including the logical thought process of supporters. For those not well versed in English, Darwinists are not rational in their thoughts.