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Someday we may get tired of being vindicated. But not yet! Günter Bechly recently discussed a new paper that confirmed Stephen Meyer’s claims in Darwin’s Doubt that arthropods appeared abruptly in the Cambrian explosion, without evolutionary precursors in the Precambrian. Another recent groundbreaking paper in Nature Communications has also provided massive confirmation of Meyer’s arguments in the book that new genes were required at the origin of animals.
An Uncontroversial Idea?
Whether you’re an evolutionary biologist or a proponent of intelligent design, the notion that the origin of animals required new genes — even numerous new genes — might strike you as uncontroversial. But this claim was strongly challenged by UC Berkeley evolutionary paleontologist Charles Marshall who reviewed Darwin’s Doubt in the journal Science. It actually became a centerpiece of the debate between Marshall and Meyer about the Cambrian explosion. (For replies to Marshall, see here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Here’s the substance of Marshall’s counter-argument, as it was published in Science:....
....In that regard, the new Nature Communications paper shows that Marshall’s evolutionary viewpoint faces information problems on two fronts. Figure 2c indicates that by far the largest classes of novel genes in the metazoa are related to generating nucleic acid binding proteins, and transcription factors. This suggests that not only were many new genes needed in the origin of Metazoa, but those new genes had profound influences on gene regulation — i.e., they were involved with rewiring of GRNs.
Thus both Meyer and Marshall were right that dGRNs needed to be wired to build animals — but they were right in the most devastating manner for Darwinism, namely that the rewiring of the dGRNS was mediated by entirely new genes. The paper’s demonstration that thousands of new genes would have been required during the origin of animals is nothing short of a spectacular vindication of Meyer’s perspective on this question, and a strong falsification of Marshall’s viewpoint.
https://evolutionnews.org/2018/06/g...f-new-genes-needed-for-the-origin-of-animals/
An Uncontroversial Idea?
Whether you’re an evolutionary biologist or a proponent of intelligent design, the notion that the origin of animals required new genes — even numerous new genes — might strike you as uncontroversial. But this claim was strongly challenged by UC Berkeley evolutionary paleontologist Charles Marshall who reviewed Darwin’s Doubt in the journal Science. It actually became a centerpiece of the debate between Marshall and Meyer about the Cambrian explosion. (For replies to Marshall, see here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Here’s the substance of Marshall’s counter-argument, as it was published in Science:....
....In that regard, the new Nature Communications paper shows that Marshall’s evolutionary viewpoint faces information problems on two fronts. Figure 2c indicates that by far the largest classes of novel genes in the metazoa are related to generating nucleic acid binding proteins, and transcription factors. This suggests that not only were many new genes needed in the origin of Metazoa, but those new genes had profound influences on gene regulation — i.e., they were involved with rewiring of GRNs.
Thus both Meyer and Marshall were right that dGRNs needed to be wired to build animals — but they were right in the most devastating manner for Darwinism, namely that the rewiring of the dGRNS was mediated by entirely new genes. The paper’s demonstration that thousands of new genes would have been required during the origin of animals is nothing short of a spectacular vindication of Meyer’s perspective on this question, and a strong falsification of Marshall’s viewpoint.
https://evolutionnews.org/2018/06/g...f-new-genes-needed-for-the-origin-of-animals/
