Okay, similar only in pieces:
The earliest multicellular organisms may have lacked heads, legs, or arms, but pieces of them remain inside of us today, new research shows. According to a new study, 555-million-year-old oceanic creatures from the Ediacaran period share genes with today’s animals, including humans.
According to a UC Riverside study, 555-million-year-old oceanic creatures from the Ediacaran period share genes with today’s animals, including humans.
“None of them had heads or skeletons. Many of them probably looked like three-dimensional bathmats on the sea floor, round discs that stuck up,” said Mary Droser, a geology professor at UCR. “These animals are so weird and so different, it’s difficult to assign them to modern categories of living organisms just by looking at them, and it’s not like we can extract their DNA — we can’t.”
University of California Riverside, “Research shows we’re surprisingly similar to Earth’s first animals” at ScienceDaily
So how are they similar to us? And how would we really know?
All four of the animals were multicellular, with cells of different types. Most had symmetry on their left and right sides, as well as noncentralized nervous systems and musculature.
Additionally, they seem to have been able to repair damaged body parts through a process known as apoptosis. The same genes involved are key elements of human immune systems, which helps to eliminate virus-infected and pre-cancerous cells.
These animals likely had the genetic parts responsible for heads and the sensory organs usually found there. However, the complexity of interaction between these genes that would give rise to such features hadn’t yet been achieved.
“The fact that we can say these genes were operating in something that’s been extinct for half a billion years is fascinating to me,” Evans said.
University of California Riverside, “Research shows we’re surprisingly similar to Earth’s first animals” at ScienceDaily
But wait. They don’t sound very similar to us at all. And the genetics is only conjectured.
The last line reads, “Our work is a way to put these animals on the tree of life, in some respects,” Droser said. “And show they’re genetically linked to modern animals, and to us.” So the point of all this is to somehow cram the Ediacarans into a Darwinian Tree of Life.
The similarity doesn’t sound convincing but then Darwinian narratives don’t need to sound convincing; they just need to sound comforting to Darwinians.
The paper is open access.