Comb Jellies Take the Lead Over Sponges!
Comb jellies pull ahead in an endless game to earn
the title Last Common Ancestor of All Animals
Evolutionists love games. In fact, evolutionary game theory is a big hit at Darwin Party confabs. Since they have job security and don’t have to work any more to gain power over the despised creationists, they can just make up fun competitions between themselves. With Big Science (BS) on their side, and Big Media (BM) their loyal propagandists, they can say whatever they want and reporters all over the world will promptly get out the pompoms and whip up excitement for the public. The teams, both controlled by BM and BS, try to outdo each other with marching bands and balloons at halftime shows for the Great Darwin. Announcers in the booth give each play-by-play description of the competing teams’ strategies with the fervor of Frank Gifford.
The point is not to win the game, but to keep it going. Darwin games have no timeout. What would Darwinists do if the game ever ended? It’s too awful a thought to consider. No; they must keep playing and whipping up excitement in the public, so that it will always appear as if they are making progress toward a goal that is always slightly out of reach: “Understanding” of the History of Life. It’s a bit like the proverbial carrot on a stick just out of reach of the horse’s muzzle as the Darwin Party takes it for a ride. Some day soon, Charlie Horse thinks, he will taste that sweet carrot if he just keeps watching it.
Several favorite Darwin games all start with the letter L:
- Last Common Ancestor
- Last Animal Ancestor
- Last Human Ancestor
- Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA, not to be confused with Lucy)
To look busy, the Darwin coaches will perform divination on genes or fossils, or stare at living representatives of these creatures (living fossils) until visions of the branching Darwinian Tree of Life enter their heads. Then they set to work drawing fancy diagrams called phylogenetic trees. They assemble numbers and names that serve as stats that the sportscasters in Big Media can use to fill the speaker horns with nonstop verbiage, whether or not anybody is listening. The purpose of the details, like the carrot on the stick, is to keep the crowd believing that ‘we are getting warmer’ toward understanding the history of life on earth.
Score!
The Comb Jelly Team has just scored a goal in the Last Animal Ancestor Game! The crowds go wild! The other team with its Sponge Bob mascot falls silent as the scoring team roars and does the Wave around the arena.
Comb jellies, not sponges, might be the oldest animal group after all (New Scientist, 17 May 2023). Offering a false dichotomy that nobody seems to notice, veteran sportscaster James Dinneen awes the crowd with stats on the long history of this game.
Were sponges or comb jellies the first to split from the animal family tree? A new approach at settling this question, which is critical to understanding the evolution of animals, points strongly to comb jellies – but not all researchers are convinced.
What’s a game without a crisis? Manipulating the game metaphor, Dinneen raises the emotion in his voice, worrying the crowd about all the injuries on the field. The Sponge team was long favored to win the title of Last Animal Ancestor (LAA) but a few years ago, the Comb Jelly Team won an upset. Nobody could believe it. The game really heated up!
All animals alive today are thought to be descended from a common ancestor that lived more than 600 million years ago. Until fairly recently, researchers thought that sponges were the first group to split from this common ancestor and begin evolving separately. The next group to diverge from the animal family tree was then comb jellies.
It seemed so logical. Sponges are simple;
sponges don’t have neurons, but comb jellies do. If comb jellies split first, it could mean neurons independently evolved in comb jellies and other animals [sic] groups.
It seemed preposterous to place the more complex LAA before the simpler one. That seemed to violate Darwin’s own principle that evolution goes from simple to complex.
Since then, papers using similar methods to argue both sides have flown back and forth “like a ping-pong match”, says Darrin Schultz at the University of Vienna in Austria. “People feel like they’ve been banging their heads against the wall.”
Oh, but controversy is good for business! It raises the fever pitch in the game which, as advertisers know, increases sales of Darwine, hot dogs and science fudge. The children apply Darwin Flubber to their tennis shoes and the adults toot their Bronx Cheer horns at the opposing team. Sales are great amid the cacophony.
How Broadcasters Hold Crowd’s Interest
Sportscaster Dinneen gives some stats at a lull in the game to keep the speakers filled with verbiage. Nobody understands what synteny means or why it favors the Comb Jelly Team, but they feel comfortable that the Experts know why it brings the carrot of Understanding closer. A rep for the Sponge Team congratulates the opponents for their latest touchdown, knowing that the game is not over till it’s over, which is never.
In seven of these groups of genes, the comb jellies had patterns of synteny present in at least one single-celled ancestor, but that were missing in sponges and the other animal groups. This suggests that the comb jellies split from the other animals prior to the reordering events that gave the other animals distinct shared patterns of synteny, says Schultz. The possibility that the pattern occurred by random chance is extremely unlikely, he says.
“I’d say this is the strongest evidence to date in favour of the jellies-first hypothesis,” says Aoife McLysaght at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, whose own work has come down in favour of sponges. But she would like to see more work to understand how to reconcile the finding with the small-scale DNA sequence-based approaches that have found sponges split first.
With that gracious deferral, McLysaght goes down to the field again to inspire the Sponge Team as they huddle for another scenario.
What did the earliest animals look like? (Cal Berkeley, 17 May 2023). Robert Sanders, cheerleader at Cal Berkeley for the Comb Jelly Team, whips up the crowd, reassuring them that this touchdown means the Comb Jellies are on a roll and will definitely win!
For more than a century, biologists have wondered what the earliest animals were like when they first arose in the ancient oceans over half a billion years ago.
They arose, remember? They just arose. It’s like a miracle, but not a miracle. It’s natural selection. All the major animal phyla appeared in a geological instant in the Cambrian Explosion. Such details are not necessary to explain again; animals just arose, because Evolution Is a Fact. That’s all the crowd needs to hear.
Searching among today’s most primitive-looking animals for the earliest branch of the animal tree of life, scientists gradually narrowed the possibilities down to two groups: sponges, which spend their entire adult lives in one spot, filtering food from seawater; and comb jellies, voracious predators that oar their way through the world’s oceans in search of food.
One thing the Comb Jellies have going for them: they’re cool. They have flashing lights on their sides. Sponge Team uniforms are boring.
In a new study published this week in the journal Nature, researchers use a novel approach based on chromosome structure to come up with a definitive answer: Comb jellies, or ctenophores (teen’-a-fores), were the first lineage to branch off from the animal tree. Sponges were next, followed by the diversification of all other animals, including the lineage leading to humans.

Comb jellies are equipped with nervous systems, digestive systems, and muscles. Living ctenophores have 8 comb rows of cilia that flash with colorful lights. Some fossils had 24 comb rows plus protective armor. (Marco Fasse, Creative Commons)
Images of comb jellies are broadcast on cue on the giant screens around the arena. The crowd looks in awe at their great-great-great-great…[n]…great-grandparents from billions of years ago. Junior tells pop that he wants some of those flashing lights on his helmet. Pop grins, encouraging his kid that “The Scientists” are getting warmer to that elusive goal, Understanding.
[See “You are not a comb jelly,’ 14 Dec 2013.]
Sanders keeps the crowd excited, quoting another one of the Experts, who are known as Evolutionary Biologists, Researchers, and Scientists. They proudly flash their D-Merit badges on their lapels.
“It’s exciting — we’re looking back deep in time where we have no hope of getting fossils, but by comparing genomes, we’re learning things about these very early ancestors.”
Understanding the relationships among animal lineages will help scientists understand how key features of animal biology, such as the nervous system, muscles and digestive tract, evolved over time, the researchers say.
Nervous systems? Really? A neighboring spectator looks puzzled, wondering how complex systems like muscles, nervous systems and digestive systems could have just “evolved.” Overhearing this, other spectators complain; ‘Who are you, a science denier? Didn’t you learn your lessons in school?’ Quickly shouted down, he is told that like everything else, those complex systems “arose” by Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law. They emerged. They appeared. They popped into existence. The Experts all agree on that. After all, Experts are Researchers. They do Studies. None of them believes in miracles, like those ignorant creationists who say ‘Goddunnit’ about everything. Evolution! It’s all you need to know. Just believe! Shamed into silence, the questioner, feeling goofy, hunkers back into his seat.
Sanders the Announcer tells about the new strategic play of divination that scored this latest touchdown, bringing the Comb Jelly Team closer to the goal of Understanding. That carrot is now just inches away from the nose! (at least till the Sponge team gets the ball and tries their next divination strategy).
“We developed a new way to take one of the deepest glimpses possible into the origins of animal life,” said Schultz, the lead author and a former UC Santa Cruz graduate student and researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna. “This finding will lay the foundation for the scientific community to begin to develop a better understanding of how animals have evolved.”
They don’t have Understanding yet, apparently; they are still hoping to begin to develop it. Maybe, like a functioning eye, it it will pop into existence on its own. Maybe the new divination exercise will lay the foundation for it. Maybe it will arrive like a UFO if the Scientific Community builds a landing pad for it.
Pre-Emptive Strike
Sanders handles another necessary item of business. Lest anyone encounter one of those soapbox preachers in the parking lot telling spectators they were taken for a ride, because magical appearance of complex animals is impossible, and the fossil record denies universal common ancestry, and the Cambrian Explosion is a major problem for Darwin, Sanders points them to the explanatory notes below the fold in their printed programs:
The evolutionary relationships among these diverse creatures — specifically, the order in which each of the lineages branched off from the main trunk of the animal tree of life — has been controversial.
With the rise of DNA sequencing, biologists were able to compare the sequences of genes shared by animals to construct a family tree that illustrates how animals and their genes evolved over time since the earliest animals arose in the Precambrian Period.
Now we know, he assures them. See that colorful Phylogenetic tree in the sidebar? It proves that animals arose. Just flash that in the face of the dude on the soapbox, and he will feel silly, now, won’t he? No matter which team eventually scores next, the divination work on the chromosomes proves Darwin was right!
“We found a relic of a very ancient chromosomal signal,” he said. “It took some statistical detective work to convince ourselves that this really is a clear signal and not just random noise, because we’re dealing with relatively small groups of genes and perhaps a billion years of divergence between the animals and non-animals. But the signal is there and strongly supports the ‘ctenophore-branched-first’ scenario. The only way the alternative sponge-first hypothesis could be true would be if multiple convergent rearrangements happened in both sponges and non-ctenophore animals, which is very unlikely.”
Pity those skeptics on their little soapboxes. They just don’t Understand. The prize, Understanding, belongs to the Darwin Party—don’t ever forget it. Why, you yourself are living proof that you descended from a Comb Jelly! or a Sponge!
“The fingerprints of this ancient evolutionary event are still present in the genomes of animals hundreds of millions of years later,” Schultz said. “This research … gives us context for understanding what makes animals animals. This work will help us understand the basic functions we all share, like how they sense their surroundings, how they eat and how they move.”
Having pre-empted the preacher on the soapbox, the announcer says, ‘Play ball!’ again. The audience sits for the next exciting scenario. The game goes on. and on. and on. Fully inebriated and happy, the crowd sings the Darwine drinking song,
The Darwin in the tale,
The Darwin in the tale,
Hi-Ho scenario,
The Darwin in the tale.
What a scam. Don’t be a sucker. Watch this, and help this certified ethical hacking group get their message up on the screens at the stadium.