Today there’s a Press Release provided by the University of Bristol about comb jellies from the Cambrian, found outcrops south of Kunming in the Yunnan Province, South China by Professor Hou Xianguang, co-author of the study.
Of interest, given the recent release of Michael Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves, is the following statement:
The study shows how comb jellies evolved from ancestors with an organic skeleton, which some still possessed and swam with during the Cambrian. Their combs evolved from tentacles in polyp-like ancestors that were attached to the seafloor. Their mouths then expanded into balloon-like spheres while their original body reduced in size so that the tentacles that used to surround the mouth now emerges from the back-end of the animal.
“With such body transformations, I think we have some of the answers to understand why comb jellies are so hard to figure out. It explains why they have lost so many genes and possess a morphology that we see in other animals,” added co-author Dr. Luke Parry.
So, to get a modern-day comb jelly, the organic skeleton has to be lost. Is this progress?
And what about the “[loss] of so many genes”? Is this evolution, or devolution?
The PR also says this:
Several amazingly preserved fossils have been unearthed from outcrops scattered among rice fields and farmlands in this part of tropical China in the last three decades.
It has been named Daihua after the Dai tribe in Yunnan and the Mandarin word for flower ‘Hua’, a cup-shaped organism with 18 tentacles surrounding its mouth. On the tentacles are fine feather-like branches with rows of large ciliary hairs preserved.
So, were the “fine feather-like branches” also ‘lost’?
So much evidence already points towards Behe’s “First Rule of Adaptation,” and this only adds further evidence substantiating Nature’s progression.