I'm (not very) shocked, shocked

Headline from Yahoo News:

Shock: First Animal on Earth Was Surprisingly Complex

Were you shocked? Presumably you're a Darwinist.

The story goes on to say that some researchers working in a study funded by the National Science Foundation (USA) concluded that the first animal, at the base of the inferred "tree of life", could not have been a sponge, but the substantially more complex comb jelly. The comb jelly possesses connective tissues and a nervous system.

The researchers were so taken aback by this finding that they repeated the study again - with the same results; their shock continues. Why are they shocked? Because they're working within the Darwinian framework, which teaches them that life's complexity developed over time, by natural processes. If they hadn't come to the study with that prior belief then they would feel like I do as I read Yahoo's story - as if another "dog bites man" headline were floating past me.

The researchers go on to speculate that maybe the comb jelly's complexity developed after it had branched from the tree of life, or that maybe the sponge's decreased complexity is because of loss over time rather than gain. The latter possibility, if seriously indulged or applied in other areas, may lead to the researchers being expelled from the church of Darwinist orthodoxy so unsurprisingly the alternative is labeled as the "first" possibility and this as the "second". That labeling doesn't come from the evidence - it comes from the researchers' prior philosophical beliefs. The same beliefs that led them to be shocked by their contradictory research results...

There's one important area in which the researchers should have been shocked and weren't. It's the fundamental complexity which exists in the sponge, within the cell. They seem to have been still locked in Darwin's delusion that the cell is a simple blob of primitive goo. Of course, they're not - they surely know far better than I do the essential and fundamental complexity of the cell and the staggering levels of multi-layered information contained in its DNA. It's just that that problem seems to be shoved aside by contemporary Darwinists. It's an "inconvenient truth". That is so because the only presently available answers to that problem lead to more shock than the system can take. Maybe the Darwinist back-story of fundamental simplicity re-organising itself into more complex forms via exclusively natural processes just isn't true.

David Anderson

David normally blogs at More Than Words, http://mothwo.blogspot.com