Lampreys Devolved

Another evolutionary transitional form
appears instead to be a degenerate form

 

 

The genes of lampreys, a type of jawless fish, indicate that they may have once had the toolkit for jaws but lost them. If so, they cannot be used to represent a missing link between suckers and jaws.

Lampreys possess a ‘jaw-dropping’ evolutionary origin (26 July 2024, Northwestern University). The discovery is “jaw-dropping” in the sense that lampreys dropped their jaws, if this new genetic analysis is true.

In a new paper, researchers compared lamprey genes to those of the Xenopus, a jawed aquatic frog. Using comparative transcriptomics, the study revealed a strikingly similar pluripotency gene network across jawless and jawed vertebrates, even at the level of transcript abundance for key regulatory factors.

But the researchers also discovered a key difference. While both species’ blastula cells express the pou5 gene, a key stem cell regulator, the gene is not expressed in neural crest stem cells in lampreys. Losing this factor may have limited the ability of neural crest cells to form cell types found in jawed vertebrates (animals with spines) that make up the head and jaw skeleton.

In other words, lampreys have the same gene network that jawed vertebrates have, but lost a genetic factor in the part that forms cell types for jaws. So instead of evolving upward from jawlessness to jawed, did they devolve from jawed to jawlessness? If so, that would be jaw-dropping in another sense: removing a key transitional form from the Darwinian storyboard.

“While most of the genes controlling pluripotency are expressed in the lamprey neural crest, the expression of one of these key genes — pou5 — was lost from these cells,” York said. “Amazingly, even though pou5 isn’t expressed in a lamprey’s neural crest, it could promote neural crest formation when we expressed it in frogs, suggesting this gene is part of an ancient pluripotency network that was present in our earliest vertebrate ancestors.”

Regarding these developmental genes, the team found “more similarities than differences” between the lamprey and the frog. Carol LaBonne adds that the expression of the pou5 gene was specifically lost in certain neural crest cells of jawless fish. It was “not something jawed vertebrates developed later on.” Does she know why it was lost?

“Another remarkable finding of the study is that even though these animals are separated by 500 million years of evolution, there are stringent constraints on expression levels of genes needed to promote pluripotency.” LaBonne said. “The big unanswered question is, why?”

About 18 species of lampreys are blood-sucking parasites on other fish, wreaking havoc in some midwestern fisheries, the article says. Like some other parasites, do they possibly represent degraded forms of more complex animals, having lost their jaws? After all, they contain all the other organ systems and complex eyes like jawed fish.

And Now, for the Darwin Propaganda

Sadly, the press release still uses this finding that lampreys already had the toolkit for jaw development to support evolution.

• “Invasive, blood-sucking fish ‘may hold the key to understanding where we came from’” [reads the subtitle of the article by Win Reynolds].
• One of just two vertebrates without a jaw, sea lampreys that are wreaking havoc in Midwestern fisheries are simultaneously helping scientists understand the origins of two important stem cells that drove the evolution of vertebrates.
• By comparing the biology of jawless and jawed vertebrates, researchers can gain insight into the evolutionary origins of features that define vertebrate animals including humans.…
• “In evolutionary biology, if you want to understand where a feature came from, you can’t look forward to more complex vertebrates that have been evolving independently for 500 million years. You need to look backwards to whatever the most primitive version of the type of animal you’re studying is….”
• “Neural crest stem cells are like an evolutionary Lego set,” said LaBonne.

Their paper was published July 26 in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Despite the finding that lampreys lost expression of pre-existing genes, these evolutionists still tell the public that our great-great grandpa was a blood-sucking parasite. Tragically, Live Science‘s write-up of this paper on July 29 ignored the anti-evolution facts and pushed the narrative of human ancestry from lampreys. Reporter Patrick Pester began that propaganda right from the headline: “Human origins tied to ancient jawless blood-sucking fish.” Aren’t we all grateful for such science. “Jawless, bloodsucking fish could help us understand how humans and all other vertebrates evolved, scientists say.” Do all scientists say this? No; just the ones whose ideas were not pre-censored.

Vertebrates, including humans, trace their lineage back to ancient fish that lived more than 400 million years ago during the Devonian period (419 million to 359 million years ago). At that time, jawless fish filled the seas, while jawed vertebrates were uncommon. Today, the opposite is true.

Did Pester or his handlers at Lie Science and pro-Darwin handlers at Northwestern witness the ocean 400 million Darwin Years ago? Only in their imaginations. But secular Darwin-loving reporters are trained to ignore difficulties, like what did those lampreys eat? Did they parasitize each other, attaching their suckers to one another in a giant collective food fight?  The Darwinians don’t care, because they don’t have to answer hard questions. Their censorship allows them to tell stories in peace and safety, using their divination tools to get “understanding.”

Lampreys and hagfish are the only surviving groups of the once-dominant jawless vertebrates. They are among the most primitive living vertebrates, so studying their genes can help researchers better understand early vertebrate evolution. 

But they don’t understand it! The evolutionists at Northwestern found that both lampreys and frogs possess the genetic toolkit for jaw formation, but those genes are not expressed in the lampreys’ neural crest stem cells during development. Why would evolution give these “primitive” swimming vertebrates genes for jaws that they wouldn’t use for millions of years?

Why don’t these Darwinians consider the possibility that jawlessness instead represents a devolution or subtraction of traits from a more advanced predecessor? Here’s why: such an explanation would favor the creation of the parents of today’s parasitic lampreys. Creation is a word that must not be uttered in polite “scientific” circles.

Is it credible to think that the only two species of jawless fish—lampreys and hagfish—missed out on natural selection’s gravy train and yet lived happily 500 million years without jaws? What did they prey upon with those nasty suckers before the jawed fish evolved? If they preyed on other jawless fish then all the jawless fish would have gone extinct.

As for evolutionary Lego sets, we know that it takes at least the mind of a child to organize Legos into a house or spaceship. Without a directing influence, Lego parts have no desire or power to self-organize. Natural selection is not a driver. Material pieces are much more likely to fall apart than to self-organize. They cannot understand or appreciate survival or ‘fitness’ (whatever that is). They don’t care. They can’t care. Why do we fall for this nonsense that “evolutionary pressure” is a “driver” pushing organisms to higher levels of complex functionality?

For previous articles on lampreys, see:

• Lamprey Larvae Are Not Vertebrate Ancestors (12 March 2021)
• Fish News and Fish Stories: Water You Know? (1 Nov 2014)
• Fossil Lamprey Changed Little in 360 Million Years (26 Oct 2006)
• Evolution of Jaws: A Hox on Storytelling (19 May 2004)