Jellyfish start out in a stationary polyp stage and later develop into mobile medusas.
We don’t make this stuff up. Researchers who wanted to know more about why jellyfish can move around but corals and sea anemones are anchored got some insights into that, via genome mapping—but also some other ones that they had not been expecting. From ScienceDaily:
“We expected that the genome organization in the two jellyfish would be more similar to each other than to the genomes of sea anemones or corals,” said Khalturin. Surprisingly, the gene order in the moon jelly genome resembled anthozoans [anemones] much more closely than fire jellyfish. In contrast, the genetic composition of the two jellyfish hardly overlapped; their genomes differ as drastically as humans do from sea urchins.
The results suggest that the giant box jellyfish genome must have been vigorously reshuffled at some point in its evolution. The dearth of similarities between moon and giant box jellies convinced the researchers that there is no universal region within jellyfish genomes responsible for orchestrating the medusa stage formation [when they can move around].
So there is no Darwin switch. Different jellyfish converge on moving around via different sets of genes.
Now, about why corals and anemones don’t move around?
Remarkably, they found that coral and anemones contain about two-thirds of the genes active in the moon jellyfish’s medusa stage. But moon jellyfish have a special genetic toolkit: an elite arsenal of genes that activate during their medusa stage but are absent in anthozoans. Devoid of a jellyfish stage, corals and anemones lack the genes to grow certain organs and tissues, such as eyes and specialized swimming muscles. The researchers found that water and fire jellyfish share about 100 of these species-specific genes that only switch on in their jellyfish stages. A large proportion of these genes code for transcription factors, proteins that fine tune which genes are expressed, when and in what quantities.Paper. (paywall) – Konstantin Khalturin, Chuya Shinzato, Maria Khalturina, Mayuko Hamada, Manabu Fujie, Ryo Koyanagi, Miyuki Kanda, Hiroki Goto, Friederike Anton-Erxleben, Masaya Toyokawa, Sho Toshino, Noriyuki Satoh. Medusozoan genomes inform the evolution of the jellyfish body plan. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41559-019-0853-y More.
Did the jellyfish evolve this elite toolkit or did the anemones and corals lose it?
See, this is what genome mapping does to Darwinian evolution.
See also: Evolution appears to converge on goals—but in Darwinian terms, is that possible?
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The headline rather relies on the reader being ignorant of the fact that humans are quite closely related to sea urchins. Box jellies and true jellies (the two “jellyfish” compared in this paper) are probably separated by ~500 million years of divergent evolution, not much less thatn humans (and other chordates) have been separate from urchins (and other echinoderms)
Mimus
On the contrary, your belief that ‘humans are quite closely related to sea urchins’ is based on your own ignorance. Only in the fetid imaginations of Darwinists, and their evidence free ‘just-so story telling’, is such over the top rationalization of such contradictory evidence to their theory, not only tolerated, but encouraged in the pseudoscience that is Darwinian evolution.
i.e. Darwinian evolution is not a true science by any reasonable measure but is, in reality, an unlimited exercise in imaginary excuse making by Darwinists for the failures inherent time and again in their theory.
Mimus,
“humans are quite closely related to sea urchins”
Through some marriages, ya think?
Andrew
We are jumped up sea urchins?
If humans are much more “closely related” to sea urchins than two jellyfish are to each other, genome mapping is hardly as good a source of information as we have hoped. Clearly, something is missing from this picture.
Poor Mimus is just plain ate up with The Narrative and it just spews out uncontrollably.
Andrew
So that’s why the old man on the corner used to call us ‘street urchins’ eh.
I have no idea why Mimas would go there because it’s only biologist speak for the two genomes of jellies are very different. No one is trying to pull a fast one. The statement is in the original research abstract. It says nothing about relationship nor is it intended to.
I don’t like trying to pull significant information from a science reporter (ScienceDaily). But I’m also too cheap to buy an article on an area I’m not really interested in…..still.
Bold mine.
The ScienceDaily reporter slips in the word ‘composition’ in there among all the words that are referring to organization and order. The word ‘overlapped’ also is a word more often used when comparing genome organization. Farther down in the SD article we find that in fact both jellies have a lot of the same jelly specific genes not present in the anemones or urchins. Take home. The jellies have the same genes they’re just organized differently….a lot differently.
What they expected was that gene organization is somehow related to body plan and were surprised that it doesn’t seem to matter. This idea comes from the Neodarwinist concept that the gene is everything. Nothing else needed but the gene. All the information is in the gene….Ha! as if.
Thus the heritability of epigenetic information was resisted initially as too Lamarckian. (Poor Darwinists can’t catch a break.) Now there is resistance to the idea that perhaps much of the information for body plan may in fact reside in the cytoplasm and not in the nucleus. The original authors stumble over this interesting finding that may point to exactly that, pick themselves up, and trudge on to the unsurprising conclusion that the nematocyte gene cluster is highly conserved and phylum specific.
Why? The relatively close relationship between echinoderms and chordates, and the deep divergences between some “jellyfish” lineages was well known long before anyone sequenced a genome. Why should conservation of gene order over hundreds of millions of years (in one lineage but not another) be important for genome sequencing (not ‘mapping’ which is an entirety different technique) to be useful?
Mimus sees no problem with his evidence free just-so story telling. Minus simply assumes that Darwinian evolution is undeniably true without even one shred of empirical evidence that it is even remotely feasible.
Again Mimus has no empirical evidence!
As Jonathan Wells stated, “Studies using saturation mutagenesis in the embryos of fruit flies, roundworms, zebrafish and mice also provide evidence against the idea that DNA specifies the basic form of an organism. Biologists can mutate (and indeed have mutated) a fruit fly embryo in every possible way, and they have invariably observed only three possible outcomes: a normal fruit fly, a defective fruit fly, or a dead fruit fly.”
In the following video, at the 5:55 minute mark, Stephen Meyer states that ‘you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan.’
And here is a excellent powerpoint presentation by Dr. Jonathan Wells, starting around the 15:00 minute mark, showing that the central dogma of Darwinian evolution, which simply stated is “DNA makes RNA makes protein makes us”, is incorrect at every step.
Studies on microbes provide even more damning evidence against the claims of Darwinists than studies on multicellular creatures do:
In the following paper, Alan H. Linton – emeritus professor of bacteriology, states that ‘Bacteria are ideal for this kind of study, But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another,’
Ann Gauger and Doug Axe have found that Darwinian processes would need a trillion trillion years or more—to accomplish the seemingly subtle change in enzyme function that requires just a few mutations.
Michael Behe, in his book ‘The Edge of Evolution’, noted that the ability of the malaria parasite to develop resistance to chloroquine is a two mutation event with a probability of occurring of 1 in 10^20. He then notes that ‘for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would have to wait 100 million times 10 million years’ (or 1 quadrillion years)
Michael Behe then put what he has dubbed ‘the edge of evolution’ to be at 10^20 times 10^20, which is 10^40. ,,, Behe puts the edge of evolution at 10^40 since, as he states, ‘there have likely been fewer than 10^40 cells in the world in the last 4 billion years,’.
On page 135 of his book, Dr. Behe stated that “Generating a single new cellular protein-protein binding site is of the same order of difficulty or worse than the development of chloroquine resistance in the malarial parasite.”
,,,which is a very interesting finding since a single protein can have dozens, if not hundreds, of different interactions,,,
Moreover, as hard as it is for Darwinian processes to account for chloroquine resistance in the malaria parasite, the chloroquine adaptation came at a loss of fitness for the parasite, not a gain.
Study after study on microbes (as well as on multicellular creatures), reveal the same insurmountable problems for Darwinists in that their Random Mutation and Natural Selection mechanism is shown to be, as Pauli might put it, ‘not even wrong’. And yet, despite the fact that Darwinists are completely bankrupt of any substantiating empirical evidence for their claims, Mimus feels free to infer that “humans are quite closely related to sea urchins”. That claim is a complete joke! A joke that apparently everyone on this thread gets save for Minus himself. It is hard for me to believe that some people can be that clueless.
Moreover, even if we were to grant, without empirical warrant, that the Darwinian mechanism of Random Mutation and Natural Selection might be feasible, and were to try to derive a evolutionary tree from the molecular and morphological data we find that the molecular data wrecks Darwin’s imaginary tree of life:
Of supplemental note, Darwinists, with their theory being based on reductive materialism as it is, are, with advances in Quantum Biology, found to not even be on the correct theoretical foundation in the first place in order to properly understand molecular biology
And yet, despite all this empirical evidence that completely undermines his theory, Minus, since he is religiously devoted to believing Darwinism to be true, will ignore all of the evidence that falsifies his theory and continue religiously believing, even evangelizing, that Darwinian evolution is true.
Sometimes I wish the church had as many Christians on the internet that are as fanatically devoted to Christianity as there are Darwinists on the internet that are apparently fanatically devoted to Darwinism. And given that Christianity has, by far, more evidence going for it than Darwinism has evidence going for it, it really is a shame that we don’t see as many Christians boldly proclaiming the truth of the gospel as there are Darwinists on the internet shilling for their imaginary religion..
You seem to be stuck in some kind of loop, BA. None of the spam you posted explain what gene-order shold be maintained in one pair of lineages that have are ~500 million years divergent (the two jellies) in anotther that is nearly is as divergent (humans and echinoderms). Let alone why this fact should render genome sequencing less useful than thought.
I suspect “News” just jumped on this phrase because she doesn’t know much about the history of animals, but please correct if I’m wrong and there is really something to this headline.
Mimus at 11 states that
So Mimus does not understand the fact that since Darwinian evolution is empirically shown to be false, then that renders his entire just-so story for common descent, via Darwinian evolution, defunct? And he also does not understand that since “phylogenetic conflict is common, and [is] frequently the norm rather than the exception”, then that renders any further speculation for common descent, via Darwinian evolution, defunct as well???
Okie Dokie… So there we have the problem right there, Mimus has no inkling whatsoever how empirical science actually works.
Mimus is a true believer. Even childlike in his faith in Darwinian evolution! 🙂
Mimi’s
You actually read through all of that? You are a better man than I. 🙂
@Mimus says: “Box jellies and true jellies (the two “jellyfish” compared in this paper) are probably separated by ~500 million years of divergent evolution, not much less thatn humans (and other chordates) have been separate from urchins (and other echinoderms)”
Hmmm. So, during the 500 million years while true jellies evolved into box jellies, sea urchins turned into humans? Anyone see anything fishy in that assumption/belief?
Sea urchins turned into humans in just 500 million years? WOW! Gotta hand it to him for his amazing faith in the power of evolution.
No. Saying sea urchins evolved into humans is like saying “Spanish turned into French” because they both descend from Latin.
Mimus , please show us some empirical evidence that sea urchins and humans came from a common ancestor 500 million years ago, and please do so with using the words , believe, probably, most likely.
Mimus humorously tries to use human language as an analogy for what he imagines happened in Darwinian evolution,,,
Human language is perhaps the worst analogy to Darwinian evolution that Mimus could have possibly chosen to use since human language, and the immaterial information inherent in it, is forever beyond the reductive materialistic explanations, (i.e. the just-so story telling), of Darwinian evolution:
Nor do Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, have any clue how the material brain may process immaterial information and/or human language in the first place,
In fact, unlike Darwinian evolution which has no falsification criteria that Darwinists will ever accept, (and is therefore not even a testable science since Darwinists forever refuse to accept any rigid falsification criteria for their theory), the falsification criteria of Intelligent Design, on the other hand, is simply the creation of language and/or encoded information by purely material processes. i.e. If Darwinists could ever demonstrate the origin of such “language” and/or encoded information by purely material processes then they would immediately falsify Intelligent Design as a scientific theory.
In fact there is currently up to a 5 million dollar prize being offered for the first person that can “Show an example of Information that doesn’t come from a mind. All you need is one.”
The primary reason why Darwinists will never be able to meet that falsification threshold for Intelligent Design is because immaterial information is now shown to be its own distinct physical entity that, although it can interact with matter and energy, will never be reducible to, or emergent from, a material basis as is presupposed within the reductive materialistic framework of Darwinian thought.
In the following 2010 experimental realization of Maxwell’s demon thought experiment, it was demonstrated that knowledge of a particle’s location and/or position turns information into energy.
And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”
And the following 2018 article states that, “Physicists have experimentally demonstrated an information engine—a device that converts information into work—with an efficiency that exceeds the conventional second law of thermodynamics.”
Thus immaterial information is now empirically shown, directly contrary to Darwinian thought, to be its own distinct physical entity that, although it can interact with matter and energy, will never be reducible to, or emergent from, a material basis as is presupposed within the reductive materialistic framework of Darwinian thought.
Again, if Darwinian evolution were a normal science, instead of basically being a pseuodo-scientific religion for atheists, this should count as a fatal falsification of their reductive materialistic theory.
As to the fact that humans only, out of all the creatures on earth, have a unique capacity for language, the late best selling author Tom Wolfe was so taken aback by the honest confession by leading Darwinists in 2014 that they have no clue how human language could have possibly evolved, that he wrote a book on the subject., “The Kingdom of Speech”,,
In other words, humans have, completely contrary to Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking, managed to become masters of the planet, not by brute force, but simply by our unique ability to communicate information and also to, specifically, infuse information into material substrates in order to create, i.e. intelligently design, objects that are extremely useful for our defense, basic survival in procuring food, furtherance of our knowledge, and also for our pleasure.
And although the ‘top-down’ infusion of immaterial information into material substrates, that allowed humans to become ‘masters of the planet’, was rather crude to begin with, (i.e. spears, arrows, and plows etc..), this top down infusion of immaterial information into material substrates has become much more impressive over the last half century or so.
Specifically, the ‘top-down’ infusion of mathematical and/or logical information into material substrates lies at the very basis of many, if not all, of man’s most stunning, almost miraculous, technological advances in recent decades.
What is more interesting still about the fact that humans have a unique ability to understand and create information, and have come to dominate the world through the ‘top-down’ infusion of information into material substrates, is the fact that, due to advances in science, both the universe and life itself, are now found to be ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis.
As Vlatko Vedral, who is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and who is also a recognized leader in the field of quantum mechanics, states
Moreover, “the ‘grammar’ of the human genetic code is more complex than that of even the most intricately constructed spoken languages in the world.”
It is hard to imagine a more convincing proof that we are made ‘in the image of God’, than finding that both the universe and life itself are ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and have come to ‘master the planet’ precisely because of our ability infuse information into material substrates.
Perhaps a more convincing proof that we are made in the image of God could be if God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was God.
And that just so happens to be precisely the proof claimed within Christianity.
Verses:
Mimus, are you saying sea urchins Evolved from something and then stopped Evolving?
Andrew
Margin
The article itself provides some empiricle evidence. The fossil record provides more. Observervations of natural selection provide more. There are thousands of pieces of empirical evidence supporting common anscestry, from disparate fields of study. That is what makes evolution as an explanation so compelling.
“The article itself provides some empirical evidence.”
No it assumes Darwinian evolution as true.
“The fossil record provides more.”
The fossil record certainly does not provide ’empirical’, i.e. experimental, evidence. Moreover, the inferences one may draw from just looking at the fossil evidence, from the Cambrian explosion onward, certainly does not support a Darwinian view of life on earth.
“Observervations of natural selection provide more.”
Really??? Perhaps you should inform James Shapiro of this imaginary observational evidence that you have?
Neo-Darwinists have elevated Natural Selection into a unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems without a real empirical basis.
https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/
“There are thousands of pieces of empirical evidence supporting common anscestry, from disparate fields of study. That is what makes evolution as an explanation so compelling.”
And there again is the primary problem, Darwinists have no clue what empirical science actually is.
Empirical evidence is the information received by means of the senses, particularly by observation and documentation of patterns and behavior through experimentation.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence
Again, you have ZERO empirical, i.e. experimental, evidence supporting your imaginary belief in common ancestry.
Scant search for the Maker – 2001
Excerpt: But where is the experimental evidence? None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of 20 to 30 minutes, and populations achieved after 18 hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another, in spite of the fact that populations have been exposed to potent chemical and physical mutagens and that, uniquely, bacteria possess extrachromosomal, transmissible plasmids. Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms.
– Alan H. Linton – emeritus professor of bacteriology, University of Bristol.
http://www.timeshighereducatio.....ode=159282
LoL! @ Brother Brian- Your position doesn’t have a mechanism capable of producing the organisms that were fossilized. You lose.
Natural selection is impotent for anything other than shifting allele frequencies over time within a population. You lose.
You don’t have a mechanism capable of producing universal common descent. You lose.
And ID is still not anti-evolution. Your ignorance, while amusing, is still not an argument.
LoL! @ mimus @ 1:
The headline was taken from the Science Daily article. It’s even quoted in the OP. Did you bother to read beyond the title?
What an odd crowd,
No. Perhaps the analogy would be helpful to you too. French and Spanish continue to evolve (and in the case of Spanish, for new lineages), the fact they both descent from a common ancestory (Latin) has no bearing on this fact.
ET,
Yes, I read the piece. Again, my point is that there is not great suprise that two pairs of lineage,s each about 500 million years divergent have approximately the same level of gene-reordering. If News was genreally surprised by this fact she was probably ignorant about the relationships between animal lineages.
Marfin,
The evidence is easy enought to find. The major split between Deuterostomes (including echinoderms and us) and Protostomes (most other familiar animals) was originally based on shared developmental and morphological traits, and later confrimed by DNA evidence. Fossils and DNA evidence place a date on the divergence.
BA,
Maybe just step back from the keyboard or a bit?
Mimus,
“Maybe just step back from the keyboard or a bit?”
Since we are now into giving advice to each other, perhaps you should step away from the fantasy world of Darwinian LSD trips and visit the real world of empirical science? 🙂
BA, I’m not trying to be unkind play rhetorical games. I really think there has to be a better way for you to spend your time then this kind of scattershot copy-paste assault. You can, of course, continue to post them, but I don’t I’ll respond anymore.
Mimus, you disparage my comments since you cannot refute them. The comments are unambiguous. Darwinism, since it based on no known laws of the universe, does not even qualify a ‘normal’ science like chemistry and physics do.
You claim that the referenced comments by none other than Ernst Mayr, Roger Highfield, and Murray Eden of MIT, are a “scattershot copy-paste assault”.
The only “assault” those comments have committed are against your belief that you are even doing science in the first place.
I don’t blame you for being upset and basically responding with ad hominem against me instead of responding with actual empirical evidence (much less pointing to an actual ‘law of evolution’ that would qualify Darwinism as a science). Number one, you have no actual empirical evidence to support your grandiose claims for Darwinian evolution. Number 2, people living in denial of reality, such as say alcoholics, drug addicts and Darwinists all live in denial of reality, often get very upset with people who point out that they are living in a imaginary fantasy land.
Aha, here’s the paper I was looking for the other day,,,,
LoL! @ mimus- News wasn’t surprised. The authors of the article were. As I said it appears you didn’t read the article at all.
The fact that there isn’t a known mechanism capable of producing your alleged relationships between animal lineages says your claims are not scientific.