Gogo Darwin: Latest Evo-Hype from Heart Fossil

A soft-tissue fossil should shame Darwinians into
embarrassed silence, but they’re using it to promote evolution.

Fact: A fossil of a modern-looking heart in a fish, showing exquisite preservation, upsets prior thinking about ancestral relationships between jawless fish and sharks.

Question: This fact is evidence for (multiple choice): A. Evolution. B. Evolution. C. Evolution. D. All the above.

Only one answer is permissible with any fossil evidence. Big Science has ruled that Darwinian evolution is the scientific consensus. It has labeled skepticism of Darwinism as pseudoscience. Pseudoscience must be censored. Why? Because as Harvard evolutionist Richard Lewontin famously said, “It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.”

Since secular science cannot allow a “Divine foot in the door,” all evidence must be cast as support for material explanations, i.e., Darwinian evolution, preferably for human evolution. Let’s watch how this plays out in the media story of an exceptionally-preserved fossil fish from the Gogo formation in Australia they claim is 380 million Darwin Years old.

New Curtin-led research discovers the heart of our evolution (Curtin University press release, 16 Sept 2022).

Researchers have discovered a 380-million-year-old heart – the oldest ever found – alongside a separate fossilised stomach, intestine and liver in an ancient jawed fish, shedding new light on the evolution of our own bodies.

The article begins with a photo of Professor Kate Trinajstic of Curtin University inspecting the fossil. She is taken in by the soft tissue preservation, which is rare in fossils. This one has soft tissue preservation in 3D, which is even more rare.

“As a palaeontologist who has studied fossils for more than 20 years, I was truly amazed to find a 3D and beautifully preserved heart in a 380-million-year-old ancestor,” Professor Trinajstic said.

All evidence must be presented to the honor of King Charley, even when it contradicts what his theory expected to find in fossils.

Evolution is often thought of as a series of small steps, but these ancient fossils suggest there was a larger leap between jawless and jawed vertebrates. These fish literally have their hearts in their mouths and under their gills – just like sharks today.”

Gogo Darwin: the Gogo formation, thought to be an ancient reef, is contradicting Darwin’s statement that

natural selection can act only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a leap, but must advance by short and slow steps.

But Darwinism does not require confirming evidence, because the consensus has already ruled that science must use the apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive and mystifying to the uninitiated. If you don’t agree, you clearly haven’t passed the initiation rite yet and have not obtained the requisite D-Merit Badge to engage in Big Science circles. Only then will you understand that all evidence sheds light on “the big steps in our distant evolution.”

This new discovery of mineralised organs, in addition to previous finds of muscles and embryos, makes the Gogo arthrodires the most fully understood of all jawed stem vertebrates and clarifies an evolutionary transition on the line to living jawed vertebrates, which includes the mammals and humans.

Let the Media Party Begin

Researchers Visualize Heart From 380-Million-Year-Old Fish (The Scientist, 15 Sept 2022). Natalia Mesa sings,

A team of researchers in Australia have imaged fossilized soft organs of early jawed vertebrates for the first time, finding that our ancient fish ancestors’ hearts, livers, and stomachs are strikingly similar to ours.

Rethinking the mode of evolution is OK, as long as there are no questions about the fact of evolution.

The heart of modern-day jawless fish like lampreys is thought to be very much like that of the jawless fishes that were around in the Devonian period and earlier. Jawless fishes have a heart with chambers that sit side by side, a relatively small liver, and a long, unsegmented digestive tract. The study found that jawed fish, which evolved from jawless ancestors, seem to have simultaneously developed several modern traits early on in their history. In addition to jaws, they also developed a unique, S-shaped heart where one chamber sits on top of the other, which was repositioned to the back of the throat just beneath the gills. In lampreys, hearts are positioned further back in the body, behind the gills. These ancient jawed fish also had a large, buoyant liver, a layered stomach, and a digestive tract with multiple chambers, all of which resemble those of modern fish.

Lack of gradual evolution is not a problem. Never underestimate the power of evolution to create complex organs simultaneously!

“I think the expectation is that evolution is slow and stepwise,” says Trinajstic, but these findings show that some features that we see in modern vertebrates all came about at roughly the same time. “What we’re seeing is that . . . when there’s an innovation, it tends to be not one thing, it tends to be a whole cascade of things bursting together.”

Does Trinajstic’s team paper in Science Magazine 15 Sept 2022, “Exceptional preservation of organs in Devonian placoderms from the Gogo lagerstätte,” offer any skepticism about what the fossil means for Darwinism?

Together with the previously described musculature, the three-dimensionally preserved organs make the Gogo arthrodires the most fully understood of all jawed stem gnathostomes, help to resolve conflicting phylogenies for early fish, and can validate evolutionary transition hypotheses generated by extant developmental models. They provide a unique window on jawed vertebrate evolution just before the origin of the crown group and the assembly of the gnathostome body plan.

What were you thinking? Of course not. All evidence is pre-qualified for Darwin celebrations, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Soft Tissue Details

Those outside the Darwin castle might be curious about the soft tissues that were so well preserved in 3-D. The paper and articles do not mention any parts that were unpermineralized. It is curious, however, how anyone could expect such detail in something 380 million years old, given plate tectonics, earthquakes, natural disasters, impacts and other geological events that could reasonably be expected in all that time, and bioturbation by subterranean organisms (worms, etc.) that usually scramble fossil parts quickly. Modern scanning techniques allowed the Curtin University team to recreate the 3-D position of all parts without damaging the fossil. Here is what the paper states about the condition of the organs and tissues:

The Gogo lagerstätte shows exceptional three-dimensional bone and muscle preservation within placoderms, a paraphyletic taxon of stem gnathostomes. Preservation occurred through bacterially mediated authigenic mineralization under conditions of photic zone euxinia [(6) and supplementary text]. The discovery that this process also preserved internal organs in arthrodires reveals a virtually unknown aspect of vertebrate evolution. Early gnathostome internal organs are unknown outside of digestive tract infills and blood vessel impressions in the antiarch placoderm Bothriolepis. Using propagation phase contrast synchrotron x-ray microtomography (PPC-SRμCT) and neutron tomography, arthrodire organs can be visualized in three dimensions and distinguished from bones and mineral matrix (Fig. 1, A to E, and fig. S1). Internal viscera are preserved in approximate life position, although they have undergone postmortem shrinkage (figs. S2 and S3 and supplementary text). All organs have been recovered from multiple specimens (supplementary materials), but no single specimen shows a full complement, which is consistent with decay experiments.

In other words, they suspect that the fish dropped into an area of low-oxygen, where bacteria replaced original tissues with minerals. The organs showed a little bit of shrinkage but were otherwise in life position. The diagrams of complete fish in the paper were composites of multiple specimens. Supplementary Material states that the stomach is one of the first organs to degrade. The fact that it was preserved so well “indicates the replacement by calcium phosphate must have occurred rapidly.”

Reconstruction of “early jawed fish” from the Curtin U. paper, reproduced at The Scientist.

No consideration of intelligent design is found in any of these articles for all the functional, organized organs, including eyes and digestive systems, circulatory systems, reproductive systems, nervous systems, brains and muscles. It all just happened. “Arthrodires thus provide the earliest and phylogenetically deepest evidence for the stomach, considered an evolutionary innovation of gnathostomes.” Stomachs made themselves.

This is the kind of logic that comes out of one-party rule in science.