Tree of life has complexity at its roots
| April 11, 2008 | Posted by idnet.com.au under Intelligent Design |
A new find has shocked scientists who didn’t imagine the earliest critter could be so complex. “This was a complete shocker,” said study team member Casey Dunn of Brown University in Rhode Island. “So shocking that we initially thought something had gone very wrong.”
“Our data reinforce several previously identified clades that split deeply in the animal tree, unambiguously resolving multiple long-standing issues. We find strong support for the placement of ctenophores (comb jellies) as the earliest diverging extant multicellular animals. A single origin of spiral cleavage (with subsequent losses) is inferred from well-supported nodes. A diminishing number of lineages remain recalcitrant to placement on the tree.
The spiral cleavage programme, a complex and highly stereotyped mode of early embryonic development, is present in at least Annelida, Entoprocta, Mollusca, Nemertea and Platyhelminthes. If corroborated by further analyses this would have major implications for early animal evolution, indicating either that sponges have been greatly simplified, or that the complex morphology of ctenophores has arisen independently from that of other metazoans.”
Casey W. Dunn et al Nature Vol 452 10 April 2008 p745 (thanks bFast)
35 Responses to Tree of life has complexity at its roots
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To Allen_MacNeill, In an earlier post I suggested to you a third scenario that your dichotomy did not cover.
“What if there is more “downhill” to evolution than even your friend supposed?”
This was written four days before the current thread “Tree of life has complexity at its roots” was started (although this is far from the first case of “more complex than we expected”).
Suppose we consider a front-loaded ID scenario, one that designs and builds in sufficient information, complexity and control such that it can adapt flexibly through subsequent undirected processes.
I’m wondering if you would agree that the kind of empirical evidence we would expect from such a scenario would be that we observe that the “Tree of life has complexity at its roots”? Would you also agree that, if intelligence is required to get things started, we should find that attempts to explain the origin of the original language, information, specified complexity, control mechanisms, etc. as the result of undirected processes should ultimately fail?
Put another way, I would be interested in your thoughts on how one should approach the empirical evidence to evaluate that hypothesis.
Since some would reject that hypothesis from an ideological objection (regardless of the empirical evidence), how should others who reject ideological prejudice approach the matter? Specifically, what would you find relevant and potentially persuasive to you?
ID.net said,
That is certainly not a universal truth. YEC simply think that basically the earth is about 6000 years old and the universe was created 6 modern days. Its a literal biblical interpretation of creation or evolution of the universe (evolution being defined as change over time). They can certainly belief that the complexity in DNA or in the cell warrants a design inference. Even an atheist can believe in the theory of ID. Dogmatic atheists excluded because their religion is the destruction of divine faith of any kind and ID supports many divine faiths.
I was not conflating ID and creation except for in the general sense that both cannot be reconciled with a methodologically materialistic interpretation of Darwinian Evolution.
And now I would like to comment on a topic of recent interest in many of the posts that I have been reading.
Natural laws seem to have a special almost agnositic but at least desitic leaning relationship with interpretation of empirical sceince. Certinaly natural laws have been used to strengthen the argument for God and they definetly do dont do anything to negate God’s existence. But where do natural laws sit in regards to ID.
I recently was corrosponding via email with Mike Behe on the sub ject of natural law and ID and this is what I and he said…
Me:
Mike’s response :
The laws of Newton, Keplar, Einstein, Maxwell and the like are mrerly beautifully simplified formulations of what nature is actually doing. Nothing in any of these will give you life by necessity. You would need a sting theory or Mach theory with elvendy zillion dimentions to get a proof by physical necessity for DE.
Laws will only get you so far and as we learned from Godel, will never get you all the way there. Obviously some form of nature brought about the universe and all of its complexity but, where it all came from and how you can get specified complexity out of nothing is at the end of the day, outside of sceinces reach. Even the Darwinist will say as much- they just take the initiative of eliminating intelligence from of the mix a priori.
idnet.com.au:
Yes, ID is an evolutionary theory. The paper I sited provides evidence that evolution has a direction — complexity. This finding is contrary to the prediction of neo-Darwinism, and is consistent with the prediction of ID.
Frost22585:
However, the YEC community points to “scientific evidence” all of the time. Certainly if life came to being in all of its glory about 6000 years ago, it did so because it was designed. The YEC strong assumption is that the 6000 years ago scenerio can be validated by evidence. Idnet.com.au, statement, “YEC do hold to the idea that design is real and can be detected” is absolutely correct.
Bfast, thank you for correcting me. Obviously I knew this. I thought the statement read “do not” because some YEC may not like ID while I thought it an obvious fact that ID is not limited to YEC.
I have no idea why I thought it read “do not” other than that and except that Id.net seemed to be implying that I was conflating YEC with ID- which I was not trying to do at all- as I know the differences well. The reason why I used them both (YEC and ID) was because I was talking about the fossil record and DE and such and wanted to exemplify the detractors from common ancestry with a real example- YEC. If you go back and read my posts obviously I was focusing on the differences between DE and ID with also a focus on special creation or special design which is the opposing view to common ancestry. I think that nowhere in the posts will you find a direct illogical contradiction or conflation between ID and YEC.
I might add, just to convolute things even more- people can believe in special creation or design and not be a YEC.
[...] the ink is dry on the revision of the tree of life, giving comb jellies pride of place near the base , we now need to redraw the tree [...]