Comments on: The Terrifying Truth About Jellyfish

By: eric

eric — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:51:39 +0000

This article has too many inflammatory statements unbacked by real scientific data. “Creationist scientists must be rejoicing”? This statement either implies that creationists love when science is wrong, or that new scientific data implies accuracy in the creationist model. Both of these are false implications. If you truly understood evolution, you would surly know that evolution in animals does not stop. If evolution stopped, random mutations would eventually render a species incapable of surviving to breeding age. To think that Jelly fish stopped evolving is ridiculous. They have faced many new pressures and stresses as the oceans around them has evolved. I really would not have had a problem with your article as it does, in a way, highlight the fact that Jelly fish are still evolving which is good info to the general publics understanding of evolution. However, the inflammatory statement in the first paragraph does more damage to any possible good than your article produces.

You sir, in your attempt to catch more attention have earned my disdain.

-Eric

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:01:49 +0000

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.

By: Cian Gill

Cian Gill — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:23:21 +0000

A fair question Darwinbots, and one that is not quickly answered. Though I would repeat that the reason science is not religion is because (in theory at least) it allows itself to correct its ideas as new evidence comes to light.

For a quite in-depth look at some ideas relating to exactly what biologists do currently think regarding jellyfish evolution, try

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/07/diploblasts_and_triploblasts.php

and

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/05/jellyfish_lack_true_hox_genes.php

This guy is a biology professor and he specializes in embryonic development. He does appear to have a serious anti-creationist bias, so it’s not a site I’d normally send someone to support a ‘balanced’ debate…but these articles are pure science and they explain in great depth how it’s reckoned these early lineages differ from one another, particularly in terms of alignment of Hox genes. And he does it far better than I could!

By: webdesign nürnberg

webdesign nürnberg — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 08:59:56 +0000

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

By: Those Pesky Darwinbots

Those Pesky Darwinbots — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:44:56 +0000

LMAO! Its funny how the Devolutionists have shifted the weight of the actual message. The Jellyfish have genes that have dormant potential coding genes ready to be expressed and yet the Darwinists think these genes are just “there” because of Darwinism, and yet there is no adaptive significance whatsoever that explains their existence. That is the whole point of Darwinism, adaptation equals new function, and yet there is no adaptation that would explain it. It all makes sense to the Darwinists, ofcourse. Its their religion, they are free to modify it whenever they see fit.

By: Alfonso Bravo

Alfonso Bravo — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 18:33:59 +0000

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”.

By: casino610

casino610 — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:19:39 +0000

I think it is egotistical of us to assume we understand the world and all its inhabitants

By: Steampunk

Steampunk — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:51:44 +0000

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

By: Mat Falkowski

Mat Falkowski — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:50:52 +0000

This article is misleading. The evolution of similar genes, functions or even bilateral symmetry does not mean something does not fit evolution models, or is some unsolved riddle. The world of morphology and evolutionary relatedness should be treated very separately. Jellyfish are amazing, and the branching of there evolution may have occurred multiple times from various past relatives post Cambrian or even post some other evolution driving event. Jellyfish are cool i agree and have lots to teach us. Cool riddles are the entire world of invertebrate immune systems. In the future try to reference at least on real science article from a pier reviewed journal.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:07:26 +0000

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”)?