Environmental Graffiti

I suppose it’s true that creation ’scientists’ may be rejoicing, but they really have no basis for that reaction to these developments. If true scientists, studying evolution, had never gathered these new data — based on their present understanding of the evolutionary history of jellyfish — and arrived at these findings, creation ’scientists’ would have had nothing to say on the matter, just as they had nothing to say on the matter before. Creationist ’science’ doesn’t provide for a timeline of development from one form of life to another, so the fact that evolutionary scientists may have had the timeline reversed in their model of jellyfish evolution doesn’t all of a sudden lend credence to a creationist explanation. There’s still a timeline that must be understood and explained.

Creationists’ potential for rejoicing is par for the course — they take whatever evidence appears on the scientific landscape and assert that it supports their view of the world. It doesn’t matter what the evidence suggests, because in a creationist perspective, if we observe it, it fits the model. It has to, because at its core, their model of the world is simply that it was created and now it exists.

What’s so great about this story as an argument *for* evolutionary theory is that, once again, we find that (a) there is always something to be learned and true scientists don’t back away from evidence that contradicts their original ideas, (b) we can advance our knowledge by careful study and reasoned analysis, and (c) by pushing scientists to collect and to confront these new data, evolutionary theory will ultimately do a better job of making sense of the full scope of the genetic history of jellyfish — and all life on earth — than creationist ideas that don’t provide for any way to acquire new information, much less explain it.

But the fact that jellyfish are not some sort of unchanged relic makes sense, and actually supports the idea of evolution- that species are constantly changing. It’s also not altogether surprising that they have the coding for bilateral symmetry, since they have many of the same HOX genes as all other animals. I would agree that it was cool, but probably not threatening to the idea of evolution.
Expecting today’s jellyfish to be exactly the same as their ancestors from millions of years ago simply does not make sense, through natural selection, changes in habitat, etc. they SHOULD have changed in the millions of years interim, that’s just what happens. Species are not static, they constantly change to fit their environment, eventually that’s evolution. So how is that threatening (or “terrifying”)?

Hey all,

I really appreciate the time and depth of though you all have put into your replies.

Actually, I pretty much agree with all of you. Perhaps in my attempt to streamline the details of the story I didn’t get the point across clearly enough that while these kinds of discoveries do somewhat upset the exact successionary outline that scientists had previously accepted, they in no way invalidate our ideas about the basic evolutionary process- they merely remind us that things are usually more complicated than they first seem.

As some of you point out, the continued evolution of jellyfish actually makes more sense than if their development had remained static. If we still had a clear succession of simple-to-complex animals on the planet (sponges-cnidarians-bilaterans, etc), none of which had changed since their inception, this would mean that none of them had adapted since, despite the changing of the world around them. This is of course not what evolution predicts at all. Each of these lineages has of course continued to change as they fit in with the world as it altered around them.

The ‘cost’ of this (to science, at least) is that it becomes more difficult to pinpoint the exact relationship between various early lineages. Of course, it’s not ‘threatening’ to evolution in the least. I merely mentioned creationists as I find it an interesting social phenomenon how they continually jump upon any such revision of minutia, using it as a propaganda tool without truly understanding the true implications. They seem to regard it as a sign of weakness every time science admits it’s mistakes, when in fact this in-built propensity to self-correct (at least in theory) is science’s greatest strength.

I hope I’ve made my position clear! Thanks for your interest.

Cian

There’s nothing like “highly evolved animals” all the creatures present in the world today had exactly the same time to evolve to get today’s form. We always have to have in mind that evolution is something cumulative and cumulative means time, 4,6 billion years for all of “us”.

great article! thanx also for the pictures. I saw some box-jellyfish on my australia trip (safe distance) – SCARY!

A common (and increasingly discarded) creationist argument is, “If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”

We didn’t evolve from chimps, our closest living relative. The relationship is not that of parents and children, but of cousins. We evolved from a common ancestor that is now extinct. Chimps evolved from that same common ancestor some 6 million years ago. Chimps have continued to adapt to better suit their environment and are just as “evolved” as we are.

So its really not surprising as it is interesting that jelly fish are so amazing.