"Late last year..."
In spite of being told how incompetent I am, I think I'm going to give a lesson on how to respond to new information one comes across in the popular press. If you want to attempt to use it scientifically, there are important ways of establishing its, and your, credibility.
1) Drill down. What is the 'explosive' article really about? Upon what research is it based, what was the data collected and what was the conclusion the authors drew from it. For this, there is no option but to find and study the original paper.
2) Query. Unless it is a very new paper, immediately ask yourself, is it true? How has it been received by other scientists researching the same thing. Have any other papers been published on the same subject? Note that it is important to do this whether the new information supports or refutes your own ideas. If it supports your ideas, you are inclined to take it as Gospel without any further exploration, which is usually a mistake, and if it refutes your ideas, then maybe there are holes in it which other readers have already pointed out.
3) Apply. Think about how the new information fits into your whole paradigm. Does it actively support your ideas, or does it only refute your opponent's. Discovering that B is definitely wrong is not the same as proving that A is definitely correct. Sometimes new information damages A and B together, and sometimes the support it seems to give to A also turns out to support B as well.
With all that in mind, let's have a look at PaulSacramento's bombshell, which made the animal evolutionary tree quake at its root.
In an article dated 30 January 2014, three years ago, Amy Maxmen drew on a paper dated 13 December 2013 by Joseph Ryan, called
'The genome of the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi and its implications for cell type evolution.' Ryan and his colleagues studied comparable sections of the genomes of representative samples of five major divisions of the animal kingdom, in an attempt to derive the ancestral relationships between them. The five divisions were the bilateria, cnidaria, placozoa, porifera and ctenophora. Placozoa are a fascinating group of multicellular animals resembling amoebas, but not apparently very structurally organised, and porifera are sponges, which mostly stick to one place, but are also not apparently very structurally organised. Until Ryan's studies, it was assumed that the three more organised groups were more closely related to each other than to the two less organised groups, although the position of the placozoa was, and still is, rather uncertain. Ctenophores look very like cnidarians, but, significantly, have some characteristics of the bilateria (such as anal openings). This suggested that the ancestors of all animal life divided first into the 'ordered' and 'unordered' groups, and then the 'ordered' group divided into 'anus' and 'no anus', which finally divided into 'ctenophores' and 'bilateria'. Ryan's work queried this. He suggested that he had discovered that an 'anal' group was ancestral to all other animal life, and that the group I have called 'disordered', as well as the cnidaria, were the result of more severe genome simplification than had previously been considered reasonable. We should note that simplification itself was not then, not had been for many years, surprising. Many animals have 'simplified' features, and genomes, compared to the ancestors from which they undoubtedly descended. The loss of legs in various vertebrate groups is a classic case in point.
So far, so good, until almost exactly two years later, 15 December 2015, when Davide Pisani and colleagues published
'Genomic data do not support comb jellies as the sister group to all other animals', in which they reviewed Ryan's work in detail, and did not find that it supported the conclusions he drew from it. There are still many unresolved issues around the development of bilateralism, anuses and nervous systems, but porifera have been firmly relegated to a position outside these discussions. (Placozoa are still fighting for a place next to the bilaterans though, like poor relatives appearing at a wake and demanding a slice of the will...)
Does all this help any of the spontaneous creationist philosophies? Well, no. From some of this research, one might make a good case for God creating a single original blob containing every single genetic possibility, from which all other creatures are derived, gradually selecting whichever genes were appropriate to their 'kind' and losing the others, until we end up with the rich diversity of life we see today, when plants have lost the genes for making legs, and animals hve lost the genes for photosynthesis. But this is surely just another form of evolution, not a case for successive spontaneous creation of individual organisms.
Mazzy wrote: ... [stuff ]...
No response needed. I've put my case and you don't like it. Fair enough. We differ. The discussion is not personal but for the consideration and deliberation of all our readers. Let them assess our different opinions for themselves.
One more thing though. The idea that a complex phylogeny "ought to" be represented by a complex genome, and what we mean by complex. An analogy might be that of the human brain, which achieves its maximum neuron complexity at the age of about 20, after which it begins to lose neurons at the rate of about 2% per decade. However, knowledge, wisdom and intelligence increase.