Not Even Wrong: Darwins Tree Suffers Base Blow
Darwin’s “tree of life” icon is suffering another blow. The root of multicellular life was supposed to be the simplest, most primitive animal. Now, scientists are seriously considering that the mother of all animals was a complex animal with a gut, tissues, a nervous system and amazing light displays: a comb jelly.
PhysOrg set up the announcement as if to maximize the surprise: “And the first animal on Earth was a … ” If the suspense is killing you, consider the impact on the scientists who, under a grant from the National Science Foundation, concluded it was a comb jelly. Casey Dunn exclaimed, “This was a complete shocker. So shocking that we initially thought something had gone very wrong.”
Comb jellies are more complex than sponges, long considered the most primitive animal because it lacks tissues and organs. Placing a comb jelly (ctenophore) at the base of Darwin’s tree puts the mystery of the evolution of complex tissues into an unobservable past.
Dunn said the early comb jellies probably looked different than the ones alive today, but last year (04/03/2007) a comb jelly found in China’s Cambrian fossil beds looked essentially modern. It was dated to early Cambrian – supposedly 540 million years old.
Science Daily began its report with a summary of the impact: “A new study mapping the evolutionary history of animals indicates that Earth’s first animal — a mysterious creature whose characteristics can only be inferred from fossils and studies of living animals–was probably significantly more complex than previously believed.” A subsection was titled, “Shaking up the tree of life.”
Ironically, this made the cover story of Nature April 10, with the caption, “Improved Relations.”
If the first animal was a predator, what did it eat? If Darwin’s tree fell in the falsification forest, and nobody cared, would it even make a sound?
Darwinists act so shocked. This is old news. Why they continue to be tree-huggers when Darwin’s tree icon has been shown to be a myth? (02/01/2007). Creationists already knew it was a tree of lie, composed of the building blocks of lie (03/19/2008). Old myths die hard.