We are told that “A single set of genes drives the development of pufferfish spines, zebrafish scales, mouse hair,and chicken feathers. The pufferfish studied in the open-access paper is the odd one out, described in the article as an “obscure species”:
The new study, conducted in the Japanese grass pufferfish (Takifugu niphobles), confirms recent findings that the same signaling pathways shape all vertebrate skin appendages but represents the first attempt to demonstrate this in such an obscure species.
“The building blocks of these structures are pretty much conserved across vertebrates,” says coauthor Gareth Fraser, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “Even these spines from this really odd, derived group of fishes, the pufferfish, still use the same set of genes that makes hair, feathers, fish scales, and shark dermal denticles.” … The pufferfish study confirms, “in a way, unsurprisingly,” that skin appendages are governed by the same molecules in all animals, he says. The next step will be to learn how the conserved network has been tweaked to produce pufferfish spines of varying size and skin coverage. Having now successfully bred pufferfish at the University of Florida, Fraser plans to pursue the research in the coming year. Nicoletta Lanese, “Pufferfish Spines Shaped by Same Genes as Feathers and Fish Scales” at The Scientist
If so, this set of genes got started a very long time ago and shows an admirable ability to switch from producing, say, lawnmowers to cars to cell phones. Yet it got started back when life was supposed to be simple and primitive, remember? It would seem that something back then was not simple and primitive. Watch the file.
See also: Direct Experimental Falsification Of Darwinism?
and
Researchers: Body Plan Evolution Not So Simple As Once Thought The Hox genes are not the big answer many thought
How is this a problem?
R7
I agree. We have long known that scales, hair and feathers all have the same evolutionary origin.
Brother Brian:
Except for the fact no one has any such knowledge. No one knows how blind and mindless processes could have produced scales, hair and feathers.
rhampton7:
It isn’t a problem for Intelligent Design as a Common Design explains it quite well. However evolution by means of blind and mindless processes could never produce such genes.
as to “How is this a problem?”
Well besides the fact that the evolutionary origin of a single gene and/or protein is shown to be astronomically unlikely, much less have Darwinists ever empirically demonstrated the origin of a single gene and/or protein,,,
Besides that little inconvenient fact, the alternative splicing patterns are found to be very different between different kinds of species. As the following article states, “A major question in vertebrate evolutionary biology is “how do physical and behavioral differences arise if we have a very similar set of genes to that of the mouse, chicken, or frog?”,,, ” “the papers show that most alternative splicing events differ widely between even closely related species. The alternative splicing patterns are very different even between closely related species, i.e. humans and chimpanzees,”
And yet, alternative splicing patterns are part of the Gene Regulatory Network:
But early acting mutations to Gene Regulatory Networks, (early acting mutations which are necessary to explain the supposed Darwinian origin of new body plans), are now shown to always be ”catastrophically bad”
Thus, where Darwinists most need plasticity in the genome to be viable as a theory, (i.e. developmental Gene Regulatory Networks), is the place where mutations are found to be almost ‘always catastrophically bad’. Yet, it is exactly in this area of the genome (i.e. regulatory networks) where substantial, ‘orders of magnitude’, differences are found between even the supposedly closely related species of chimps and humans.
Needless to say, since Darwinian evolution presupposes the unlimited plasticity of organisms, then the finding of inflexible, yet radically different, alternative splicing patterns, (developmental gene regulatory networks), between even supposedly closely related species is exactly the opposite finding for what would have been predicted to be found by Darwinists. If Darwinian evolution were a normal science that was subject to rigorous testing, instead of the pseudo-science that relies on an almost endless litany of ‘just so stories’ to cover up embarrassing empirical shortcomings, this finding, by itself, besides all the other falsifications of Darwin’s theory, should have been more than enough to falsify neo-Darwinian claims.
Of related note, the overlapping coding of the genome, including the overlapping coding of Alternative splicing, is far more problematic to Darwinian presuppositions than they will ever openly admit in public:
I think what is being overlooked here is that there is no transitional form between scales and feathers. This is one of the “missing link” problems.
In other words, we do NOT know that scales and feathers have the same evolutionary origin.
Evolution and Developmental Diversity of Skin Spines in Pufferfishes
Takanori Shono, Alexandre P. Thiery, Rory L. Cooper, Daisuke Kurokawa, Ralf Britz, Masataka Okabe, Gareth J. Fraser
DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2019.06.003
Article
talking about puffer fish,
this short video alone destroys evolutionary theory,
unless you evolutionists believe, that this small fish took math lessons.
make sure you watch the whole video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B91tozyQs9M
OLV, thanks for linking to the whole article and not just a summary. Interesting use of genetic research to propose an evolutionary tree.
Brother Brian @2
>I agree. We have long known that scales, hair and feathers all have the same evolutionary origin.
We don’t know that; it is an evolutionary assumption with little evidence. Scales are a type of skin fold while hair and feathers are separate things that grow in the skin. They’re quite different.