Trending: Things Evolved “Earlier Than Thought”

CEH has often reported organisms supposedly evolving “earlier than thought.”
This pushes evolution into a time crunch.

Darwin is getting squeezed in two directions at once. At the far extreme, organisms are appearing “earlier than thought” with all of their complex traits fully in operation. At the near extreme, some of them have not evolved at all since their first appearance (22 Sept 2022).

Ion regulation at gills precedes gas exchange and the origin of vertebrates (Nature, 19 Oct 2022). Could you figure out how to do gas exchange without a college course? Well, animals did it at the very first stage in the “evolution of vertebrates.” An analysis of amphioxus, lampreys and acorn worms “suggests that ion regulation at gills has an earlier origin than gas exchange that is unrelated to vertebrate size and activity—perhaps at the very inception of pharyngeal pores in stem deuterostomes.”

Ancient Immunoglobulin Genes Help Cnidarians Decide to Fight or Fuse (The Scientist, 11 Oct 2022). Genes for recognizing self from non-self are important for immunity. Immunoglobulin genes take care of that important job. Sophie Fessl reports that “Immunoglobulin might have evolved much earlier than previously expected, perhaps even in the common ancestor of Cnidarians and Bilateria.” Did the Darwinians anticipate this?

The marine invertebrate Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus, a colonial cnidarian that lives on rocks and shells in coastal oceans, must be able to defend its territory from other individuals without attacking itself in the process. A study published on September 26 in PNAS probed the underlying genetics of the animal’s allorecognition—the animal’s ability to distinguish itself from other members of the same species—and to the researchers’ surprise, the proteins involved in such recognition bear a striking resemblance to immunoglobulin proteins. The findings suggest that immunoglobulin genes evolved much earlier than previously thought.

Plants evolved even earlier than we thought, exquisite 3D fossils suggest (Live Science, 26 Sept 2022). In her customary Tontological style, Stephanie Pappas claims that “we” thought plants evolved later than new evidence shows (who’s “we,” paleface?) They must have been very hardy when they first appeared, because no further evolution was necessary. “These organisms have survived virtually unchanged through 5 mass extinctions and half a billion years.” Amazing how evolution works.

The researchers named the new species Protocodium sinese, which means, roughly, “first Codium from China.” The algae is a survivor, Aria said. The fact that it has remained basically unchanged since the late Ediacaran suggests that this group of green algae figured out their evolutionary niche early and somehow managed to hang on through five mass extinctions and more than half a billion years of change.

Rare fossil teeth overturn long-held views about evolution of vertebrates (Chinese Academy of Science via Phys.org, 28 Sept 2022). Push the origin of vertebrates back 20 million years. It’s easy to do, because Darwinians rely on institutions that let them get away with reckless drafts on the bank of time.

An international team of researchers has discovered 439-million-year-old remains of a toothed fish that suggest the ancestors of modern osteichthyans (ray- and lobe-finned fish) and chondrichthyans (sharks and rays) originated much earlier than previously thought.

Shark-like dentition was not expected so early. Will the Darwinians worry about this falsification? No; they rather enjoy being falsified, as long as they can still censor alternatives and hang on to their power.

The discovery of Qianodus provides tangible proof for the existence of toothed vertebrates and shark-like dentition patterning tens of millions of years earlier than previously thought. The phylogenetic analysis presented in the study identifies Qianodus as a primitive chondrichthyan, implying that jawed fish were already quite diverse in the Lower Silurian and appeared shortly after the evolution of skeletal mineralization in ancestral lineages of jawless vertebrates.

“This puts into question the current evolutionary models for the emergence of key vertebrate innovations such as teeth, jaws, and paired appendages,” said Ivan Sansom, a co-author of the study from the University of Birmingham.

30-million-year-old amphibious beaver fossil is oldest ever found (Ohio State University, 22 Aug 2022). The anklebone connected to the foot bone, and gave Darwinians two surprises for one:

A new analysis of a beaver anklebone fossil found in Montana suggests the evolution of semi-aquatic beavers may have occurred at least 7 million years earlier than previously thought, and happened in North America rather than Eurasia.

A Triassic stem-salamander from Kyrgyzstan and the origin of salamanders (PNAS, 11 May 2020). In one of her articles at CEH, Dr Margaret Helder showed that no viable ancestor for tetrapods makes an airtight case for evolution. Now, this find pushes the first salamander back almost 75 million years ‘earlier than thought’ (by evolutionists).

The origin of modern amphibians remains controversial, and especially the fossil record of salamanders remains poor. Their tiny, feeble skeletons are rarely preserved in rocks of the early Mesozoic era, the time frame in which they are believed to have originated. Here we report 230 million-year-old fossils from Kyrgyzstan, Inner Asia, providing the most ancient evidence of salamanders. They enable us to reconstruct crucial steps in the evolution of the salamander body plan, sharing numerous features with ancient amphibians, the temnospondyls. These finds push back the rock record of salamanders by 60 to 74 Ma [millions of years] and at the same time bridge the wide anatomic gap among salamanders, frogs, and temnospondyls.

The authors boast of this ‘primitive’ salamander filling the “wide anatomic gap,” but the differences as seen on their diagrams are trivial: shape of the head, number of vertebra, and such things. These “apomorphies” (innovations) are nothing like the origin of new body plans or organs. Earlier fossil ‘missing links’ are few and far between, and range from Eurasia to China. This specimen was found in Kyrgyzstan. Did frogs hop and salamanders crawl from continent to continent? Putting these disparate fossils into an evolutionary timeline seems forced. How can these things be related by evolution when they don’t connect geographically?

Batrachian stem taxa are known from North America and Europe, whereas salientians evidently dispersed rapidly to Europe, North America, and southern Gondwana (Madagascar). Thus, batrachians are likely to have originated in the Early Permian somewhere in the Variscian mountain belt, with frog ancestors extending southward into Gondwana and salamander ancestors eastward into Inner Asia.

“Thinking about Deep Time” – this Smithsonian display shows all of recorded human history as a tiny sliver at the right end of the timeline. But how can they know everything left of that sliver without making assumptions about deep time?

Geology, Too

Tectonic plates started shifting earlier than previously thought (Phys.org). The “earlier than thought” meme appears often in evolutionary science, both physical and biological. The announcements are put into Tontological form, making it sound like everybody was thinking what evolutionists thought. But closer reading shows that evolutionists always allow themselves ample wiggle room:

An enduring question in geology is when Earth’s tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some researchers theorize it happened around four billion years ago, while others think it was closer to one billion.

The writer indicates the Earth’s uniqueness in regard to plate tectonics. They would like to have it earlier, because they believe it helped life evolve. But if Earth is uniquely gifted this way, it would cast doubt on life on other planets – something evolutionists would not like to do.

“Currently, Earth is the only known planetary body that has robustly established plate tectonics of any kind,” said Brenner, a third-year graduate student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “It really behooves us as we search for planets in other solar systems to understand the whole set of processes that led to plate tectonics on Earth and what driving forces transpired to initiate it. That hopefully would give us a sense of how easy it is for plate tectonics to happen on other worlds, especially given all the linkages between plate tectonics, the evolution of life and the stabilization of climate.”

So let’s take stock; Earth is the only planet with plate tectonics, and the only planet with life that we know of. One would think that to be a problem for evolutionists. But their faith is strong: “Plate tectonics is key to the evolution of life and the development of the planet.” Give a planet plate tectonics, and evolution is sure to come rushing through the open door! Now you know.

They almost never say things evolved “later than thought.” Evolutionists, why not be done with it and push the origin of everything to the beginning?

Chance or “Stuff Happens” is not a scientific explanation.

Actually, creationists believe everything originated much later than thought by evolutionists—just thousands of years ago, not millions of mythical Darwin Years. Intelligent design can accomplish things quickly. It doesn’t depend on lucky accidents. Like our online book indicates, an 8-year-old child can put numbered pennies in order within a few moments; chance would take 1,500 years, working day and night (p. 51).

Chance is not a creative power. It is dumb, hopeless, and uncaring. Choose intelligent design, and biology starts making sense.