Health and Science

Comb Jelly Footage Surprises Scientists, Upends Evolutionary Expectations

Comb jellyAUGUSTINE, Fla. – Evolutionists are once again having to scrap existing beliefs and return to the drawing board after observing one type of sea creature perform a previously undiscovered function.

On March 14 and 15, several dozen biologists met in Florida for the Ctenopalooza workshop—an event designed to further the study of ctenophores, which are a type of jellyfish-like sea creatures. Speakers at the workshop presented ideas, discussed new areas of study, and shared recent research findings.

One of the speakers at the event, William Browne of the University of Miami, presented new video footage of ctenophores—also known as comb jellies—that shows the sea creatures digesting food and expelling indigestible waste. Because comb jellies are translucent, their food remains visible as it circulates through their bodies.

The biologists were stunned by what they saw in Browne’s videos. According to a report from Science Magazine, the footage “elicited gasps from the audience.” Why were the films so shocking? According to reports, they completely upended biologists’ expectations of how comb jellies process food and excrete waste.

Per conventional evolutionary wisdom, comb jellies are ancient animals who have roamed the seas for more than 500 million years. Because of their age and position in the evolutionary tree, scientists believed comb jellies both ingested food and excreted waste through a single opening. As a result, the Smithsonian describes the comb jellies’ anatomy as “basic,” saying the “single opening [is] where food enters, waste is eliminated, and reproductive cells are released and taken in.”

However, Browne’s videos at the Ctenopalooza workshop show a much different story. Rather than returning through the opening in which they came, waste particles actually exited through muscle-lined pores along the rear of the comb jellies’ bodies—a more complex process than anticipated.

“Looks like I’ve been wrong for 30 years,” said marine biologist George Matsumoto after viewing Browne’s unprecedented videos. “If people don’t see this video, they won’t believe it.”

This new discovery makes no sense in the evolutionary tree, because species thought to have developed after comb jellies do not have this ability to get rid of waste through pores. Evolutionists are now wondering if comb jellies somehow evolved these fancy waste-expelling capabilities on their own. Regardless, evolutionists are having to return to the drawing board.

“Browne’s as-yet unpublished findings disrupt the stepwise progression of digestive anatomy from one to two holes early in animal evolution,” Science Magazine noted.

“We have all these traditional notions of a ladderlike view of evolution, and it keeps getting shaken,” evolutionary biologist Kevin Kocot added.

Ph.D. scientist Jay Wile says these comb jelly findings are another example of observable data not lining up with the predictions of evolutionary theory.

“It’s not surprising that this revelation elicited gasps from the audience, because the majority of those in attendance no doubt think that evolution is a good scientific theory,” Wile wrote last week on his blog. “Thus, they are inclined to believe the predictions of evolution, and evolution clearly predicts that comb jellies should have ‘simple’ digestive tracts.”

“Now please understand that to true believers, the fact that yet another evolutionary prediction has been falsified isn’t a big deal,” he continued. “Indeed, the same report that described the audience’s reaction at Ctenopalooza already started trying to explain around this falsified prediction. It’s possible, the report suggests, that comb jellies evolved an ‘advanced’ digestive tract independently of the other animals that have it. While adding such an epicycle forces evolutionary theory to be consistent with the known data, it doesn’t erase the fact that this is yet another example of a failed evolutionary prediction.”

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