Half-Billion-Year-Old Heart Found More Complex than Today’s

Some of the first comments submitted in this thread suggest to me that it may be helpful to review the various convergent lines of evidence for macroevolution, which along the way will help explain how biological evolution works and why very old &quot;complexity&quot; is not a surprise in the fossil record. (One problem is defining &quot;complexity&quot; adequately in this context.) See the very informative collaboratively edited website <i>29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent</i>[1] for the broad overview, and specifically the sections responding to &quot;complexity&quot;[2][3] for more details on that issue.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.talkorigins.org&#x2F;faqs&#x2F;comdesc&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CI/CI101.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.talkorigins.org&#x2F;indexcc&#x2F;CI&#x2F;CI101.html</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.talkorigins.org&#x2F;faqs&#x2F;behe.html</a>

Arthropod was supposed to be the next word of the title, but understandably, the author of the piece was short on time. The article&#x27;s about the fossil of an ancient great ancestor of shrimps. The fossil has spectacularly well preserved impressions of soft tissue.<p>Evolution is not a relentless forward march, and if it could have inclinations, streamlining its productions would not be one of them. Doing so only when necessary, in cases where replication is also somehow advantaged. Usually... <a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ItAintBroke" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;c2.com&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;wiki?ItAintBroke</a>

In case anybody is wondering, more complex != more better. Also, please apply this to your software design.

Interesting and weird! It&#x27;s similar when studying the evolution of the horse! The legs went from quite a few complex moving parts down to a much smaller number in a simpler configuration in the present day. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Horseevolution.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:Horseevolution.png</a>

This is from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maotianshan_Shales" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Maotianshan_Shales</a> at Fuxian Lake, Yunnan, China, which is where I live. In fact, I have friends who work in the geopark. If anyone&#x27;s ever out here it&#x27;s well worth a visit, with 3D models of various bygone critters and loads of fossils to look at, complete with magnification equipment. The lake which the fossil is named after (despite the temporal disparity!) is the second or third deepest in the country at 400m, 20km long, and resting at an altitude of around 2000m, and surrounded by pine forested mountains and archaeological sites of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dian_culture" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dian_culture</a>. Not a bad spot to ponder timespace.

Evolution allows unneeded features to fade away. My gills, for example, are almost completely gone. Specific complexities evolve when they serve a purpose and recede when no longer needed.

Headline and article are misleading - the paper actually doesn&#x27;t make any claim to the relative complexity of the cardiovascular system.<p>There&#x27;s a better summary from the NHM press office about what the research was really about: <a href="http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2014/apr/earliest-heart-and-blood-discovered129710.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nhm.ac.uk&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;news&#x2F;2014&#x2F;apr&#x2F;earliest-heart-a...</a>

&quot;We also used the Adobe Photoshop CS5 to manipulate the images in order to extract further information.&quot; Can&#x27;t believe they admitted to tampering with their scientific results in an image editing program ;)

Lots of evolutionary explanations suffer from tautology.<p>and it keeps getting parroted as you can sound smart.