This of course comes as no surprise for those of us who hold that evolution was front-loaded (anatomical complexity in later animals was present but not expressed in the ancestral animals) by an intelligent designer. Nothing in macro-evolution makes sense except in the light of front loading!
Excerpts with my emphasis:
Surprises in sea anemone genome
By Melissa Lee Phillips, The Scientist, 5/7/07
The study also found that these similarities were absent from fruit fly and nematode genomes, contradicting the widely held belief that organisms become more complex through evolution. The findings suggest that the ancestral animal genome was quite complex, and fly and worm genomes lost some of that intricacy as they evolved.
It’s surprising to find such a “high level of genomic complexity in a supposedly primitive animal such as the sea anemone,” Koonin told The Scientist. It implies that the ancestral animal “was already extremely highly complex, at least in terms of its genomic organization and regulatory and signal transduction circuits, if not necessarily morphologically.”