Genome Complexity No Measure of Evolution

Do genes show an increasing pattern of complexity from lower to higher organisms?  Not necessarily, reported Elizabeth Pennisi in Science Now.  Cnidarians, including sea anemones and corals, for example, show almost as much complexity in their genomes as humans, whereas fruit flies and worms, seemingly more complex than cnidarians (06/25/2005, 2nd par.) appear to have lost some of the complex gene families found in corals.  A molecular biology team in Norway found that cnidarians have a more complex genome than previously thought.

…cnidarians such as coral and sea anemones have similar genetic underpinnings to vertebrates, be they fish or people.  Cnidarians share extended gene families with vertebrates that fruit flies and nematodes lack, suggesting that insects and worms lost many members of those families.  Indeed, the data hint that cnidarians have more genes than either fruit flies or nematodes.

Pennisi ends with a quote by John Finnerty, an evolutionary biologist at Boston University.  “There is no simple relationship between the numbers of genes an animal possess and its complexity at the morphological level,” he said.

OK, then, Darwinism has been falsified.  Again.  (See 11/25/2004, 12/30/2004).  The complexity was there near the beginning and has not increased over hundreds of millions of years.  There is no linear progression from simple to complex.  This is not what evolutionary theory predicted.  It chops down the evolutionary “tree of life.”  Good; now we can build an intelligently-designed log cabin with it and come in out of the cold.