I saw it coming. The octopus genome was sequenced, and one scientist gushed about the differences between cephalopods and vertebrates, calling them “alien”, and that became the news. People really need to read the paper before reporting on it, because it emphasizes the relatedness of octopuses to other animals.
But the creationists don’t care about facts. They’re motivated to lie. The latest: Darwinism Versus the Octopus: An Evolutionary Dilemma.
No, it’s really not.
The author, Eric Metaxas, cites his friend, the intelligent design creationist Stephen Meyer, so it’s no wonder he gets everything wrong. Really, read the paper, rather than relying on second or third or fourth hand anecdotes filtered through other creationists, and you wouldn’t say stupid things like this.
A study published in the journal “Nature” describes how researchers sequenced the octopus genome and found something surprising. Compared with other invertebrates, the DNA of the octopus was “alien”: nothing like the genetic codes of what they thought were similar animals, like clams and sea snails.
Pet peeve: the “genetic code” refers to the triplet nucleotide code that translates a DNA sequence into an amino acid sequence in a protein. It does not mean the genetic sequence itself. Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick use the same English code to translate a collection of 26 letters into words and sentences and paragraphs, but the words and sentences and paragraphs are different. The genetic code of octopus is the same genetic code used by humans.
But the rest of that claim is flatly contradicted by the paper. For one, the word “alien” isn’t used once in the entire paper; for another, they didn’t find octopus and clams and sea snails radically different.
In gene family content, domain architecture and exon–intron structure, the octopus genome broadly resembles that of the limpet Lottia gigantea, the polychaete annelid Capitella teleta and the cephalochordate Branchiostoma floridae. Relative to these invertebrate bilaterians, we found a fairly standard set of developmentally important transcription factors and signalling pathway genes, suggesting that the evolution of the cephalopod body plan did not require extreme expansions of these ‘toolkit’ genes.
Read those two sentences carefully. They say the exact opposite of what Metaxas wrote! Keep that in mind when you read the rest of the essay: Eric Metaxas has not read the paper, does not understand the paper, and is making shit up that is contradicted by the paper.
Now, octopi aren’t from another planet, but they are, figuratively speaking, out-of-this-world. They can change color and texture, they use ink to make a quick getaway, and they’re shockingly clever. They can unscrew jar lids and squeeze their soft bodies through just about any opening. One nineteenth century naturalist tells of an octopus climbing out of its tank, ambling across the room to a neighboring tank, and gorging itself on fish before returning home!
The key to this uncanny intelligence is the octopus’ so-called “alien” nervous system, brain, and eyes. But these features are not alien to the animal kingdom at all. In fact, they’re quite common in higher vertebrates. The octopus genome shares key similarities with ours, including the development of high-powered brains and “camera eyes” with a cornea, lens, and retina.
Now here’s the problem for evolution: according to Neo-Darwinists, we’re not related to octopi—at least not within the last several hundred million years. That means all of these genes, complex structures, and incredible capabilities came about twice.
We’re related to octopus (not “octopi” — how much can this guy get wrong?), but we’ve diverged for over half a billion years. What was found is that we share the same basic toolkit, a collection of genes that evolved before the expansion of multicellular animals 600-700 million years ago. We find the same gene families in cephalopods, vertebrates, fruit flies, whatever: the genome work did not discover aliens, but familiar genes for zinc finger proteins, protocadherins, G-protein coupled receptors, sialins, etc., etc., etc. They were just expanded from their simpler beginnings in different ways.
In just the same way, Herman Melville and Mark Twain learned the same ABCs and grammar and rules of writing as young people, and then went off and wrote their own damned books. You can read them and see very different stories, but at the same time they aren’t alien to each other: same language, same culture, same American roots.
A comparison of cephalopod genomes to other animals reveals the same phenomenon: the same metazoan roots, the words writ in unique arrangements.
But I imagine we’re now going to see a couple of decades worth of creationist distortions, all built around the one word “alien” rather than the actual data. They should be ashamed, but they never are.
Creationists. I wish they surprised me more and annoyed me less.
Yeah, this one was utterly predictable, as was the dishonesty, fractal wrongness and will to mislead and misinform that creationists would display.
Ahh come on now PZ, this was good:
Darwinism Versus the Octopus: An Evolutionary Dilemma – Eric Metaxas – September 08, 2015
Excerpt: What’s the difference between evolutionary theory and an octopus? Well, one is a slippery, color-changing escape artist that can get out of any tough situation and the other is an aquatic invertebrate.
http://www.christianheadlines.com/columnists/breakpoint/darwinism-versus-the-octopus-an-evolutionary-dilemma.html
Fucking context! How does it work?
if I were creationistic, I would “gotcha”, by noting that your use of Mark Twain is a fictional character who supposedly wrote those masterworks of American fiction. Samuel Clemens was the real name of the author who was too embarrassed to use his real name so created the pseudonym to hide behind. So how dare you compare the holy Melville to some fictional character? You be sayin the comparison of human DNA to octopodes DNA is “real” v “fictional”. Gotcha.
ack.
I’m sure they could do better than my attempt to use their gotcha-think
apologies for attempted derail. The Twain reference was the only thing that stood out as a minor error in the rebuttal to the octopodes=aliens nonsenses. I see that to use Clemens as the nome-de-plume would have complicated the comparison needlessly. sorry to waste the bandwidth…
Well, the camera eye did come about twice. So what? Wings are found in insects, birds and bats. Fish and dolphins have a similar streamlined shape. And so on. What’s the point, again?
History Channel Ancient Aliens: when in doubt -> Aliens
History has invaded cephalapodia
Yeah, but no one has witnessed a transitional form between cephalopods and chordates!
Maybe they are basing their reasoning on one of these guys?
SMBC- Radical empiricists: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3855
Scandinavian moose are big belligerent things that look likie they were made by secondhand parts. I suggest they are actually aliens.
(Statistically, these big critters are a worse threat than any immigrants…)
“Swede wins prize for elk sensor innovation” http://www.thelocal.se/20150909/swede-wins-prize-for-elk-sensor-idea
Obviously, the thing in Forbidden Planet was one of these.
I have found an alien hiding in plain sight! “Queen can kill a man with one finger” http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/celebrity/queen-can-kill-a-man-with-one-finger-20150818101232 Question: is she a Reptilian or a devolved Grey?
Amazing, PZ agrees with creationists, his title says “octopuses are aliens”!!!
*fails at trying to be as stupid as creationists, falls over.
Also from the article: “advanced brains defy reduction.” What, the advanced part?
I love the graphic! It is so apropos when applied to religion!
Religion leads to:
– Fundamentalism,
– Theocracy,
– Materialism,
– Sexual Control & Repression,
– Genocide,
– Perversion,
– Eugenics, and
– Racism
I would’t think that Intelligent Design proponents would want to bring up the octopus eye, as it raises embarrassing questions about why human eyes are in many ways more poorly constructed.
The plural of octopus is octopodes, pronounced oc-TOP-o-des.
Umm, it’s called convergent evolution.
I’m most befuddled by how they think this is a problem for “Darwinism” and not Creationism?
Darwin makes predictions about adaptation to niches, which the octopus has flourished in.
Even if we assume Octopuses came from another planet, the basic effort doesn’t really change, although part of it turns into a problem for physics.
Meanwhile, creationists now have to explain when and how god would create a wholly different planet, entirely unmentioned, with the means to get to another world. You would think if Octopuses were truly alien and god created them, at the very least the bible, when mentioning “all the creatures of the sea” in creation would give a special note to the fact that god created some of them elsewhere. Even “The fish and the octopuses and all the creatures of the sea” would be enough for me to say okay, maybe.
I mean, it’s all nonsense anyway, so it’s irrelevant, but there’s a reason most theologians consider the idea of life on other worlds to be a serious question with serious consequences, and our creationist here is happy to disregard all of that if it means a quick gotcha (that isn’t even a gotcha).
Ok so I went to the article and they do mention convergent evolution.
And then
There really is not point in a discussion if you are going to dismiss the explanation just because you don’t want to believe it.
derailing:
octopodes is NOT pronounced “oc-TOP-o-des”, but “OCto-poads”
in order to emphasize the number (oct) of feet (podes).
but whatevah, it’s all greek to me anywaze.
@16
The article responds:
I will grant that this particular creationist writer is wittier than the average. (Or rhymes with “wittier”.)
But not any more original…
====
So this pre-cambrian explosion… do creationists actually believe the shit they say? Do the seriously think god created the earth and single celled life forms, sat around and let it get all evolutionary and primativey for three billion years, then stepped in and created an “explosion” of phylla unlike anything previous known out of nowhere, then sat back for the next 650 million years and watched it evolve into different phylla including vertebrates? Is *that* their story and are they really sticking to *that*?
Tell that to my fifth lumbar vertebra.
There must be a distribution of convergent evolution frequencies somehow. Some structures and problems they solve must be more likely than others. (Anyone know if there’s any statistical analysis of this? I have no idea if it’s even possible.) The Luskin argument is a corollary of irreducible complexity and if he claims that biology is too complex to have arisen naturally, then he can’t possibly agree it could happen twice. Of course, Nature is better than he is at coming up with ways to do things and he has no explanation why his designer decided to do things more differently in proportion to the dissimilarity of their DNA sequences.
The most accurate plural of octopus is octopuses.
Octopodes is actually arguably the least correct, because “octopus” was not ever actually a Greek (or Latin) word.
It was an English word coined based on the Latin word “polypus”, which was pluralled as “polypi”, which in turn was coined from the Greek word “polypous”, which was an irregular plural in Greek with several plural forms used over the years, of which “polypodes” was the least common one.
http://grammarist.com/usage/octopi-octopuses/
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/270/what-is-the-correct-plural-of-octopus
A mammal’s brain, huh? I was not aware there were mammals whose brains had a vertical lobe and were wrapped around the esophagus.
One of us has an eye wired backwards with a giant blindspot. The other has an eye that bleaches out when exposed to sunlight.
Those are the “best” designs? Methinks we could both be part of the same class action lawsuit.
And the nautilus should file a separate discrimination suit.
@woozy #20:
No, they won’t stick to their story, whatever it might be. The only bit they’ll stick to is Goddidit. Normally I don’t mind people changing their story, because people can often explain an honest change of heart or simply point to the evidence which prompted a rethink. But Goddidit is the one thing these people won’t change, however convoluted the apologetics become to explain the lack of evidence.
That’s what we have here: religious apologetics with a load of sciency words thrown in to confuse the target audience. Give it another week and they’ll be describing the octopus as ‘quantum’ (how else could it have teleported here, light-years from its alien homeworld?).
Slithey,
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopodes :
/ˈɒktəpəʊdz/, /ˌɒkˈtɒpədiːz/, /ˌɒktəˈpəʊdeɪz/
Mammals’ brain? Human eyes? They really don’t know anything about the features they are talking about, do they?
@25
But god did *what* exactly? The pre-cambrian explosion, even if it happened spontaneously by magic by a dude called Mr. God, doesn’t really resemble the god made Adam and the watermelon eating t-rexes in six days fairy tale in pretty much any way.
Brian:
“Mammals’ brain?”
Since Luskin’s brain has an even larger hole in it than an octopus, he thinks that this is a feature of all mammals. Interestingly enough, he is also far less clever than an octopus.
I’m willing to suspend judgment for now, zetopan. First, let’s see if he can unscrew that jar lid and crawl inside.
@woozy #28:
Anything. Everything. God wrote the Bible (inerrantly). God dictated the Bible to Man (who erred). God created Adam from the dirt. God created a couple of physical laws and set a handful of physical constants to the values necessary to ensure the evolution of humans. God interferes. God doesn’t interfere. All these things have been claimed, but none of them have been demonstrated as objectively believeable. They veer from blatant fantasy contradicted by evidence to shallow God Of The Gaps arguments, yet there are still enough Goddists in the world that you could spend your life unpicking every claim made by each of those who could be bothered to make one (which in itself tells you that none of them are in any way likely to have The Truth which some of them claim to have).
I’m in a mildly drunk and maudlin mood, so I’ll be more generous to Goddists than usual. I think that most people, of any religion, don’t think about it much from day to day. They have more important things to do, like putting food on the table or taking their kids to school (or building that school in the first place!). They might maintain customs and go through rituals, like going to church on Sunday or praying five times a day or not eating beef, but the whys and wherefores aren’t at the top of their list of things to think about. That isn’t to suggest that all those people aren’t intelligent or inquisitive or self-reflective, just that the fine detail which supposedly supports the foundation of their beliefs isn’t actually that important unless circumstances require them to face up to it. So good luck in finding out who thinks God did what exactly.
I hear Murdoch has bought National Geographic. I’m expecting a lot more dross like “octopus = aliens” and “Climate change is totes m’goats not real no backsies, see? Here’s reputable proof!” to follow on the social media ‘discussion’ pages I lurk about.
Even if they were correct, what is their point?
Is it that Dog created aliens? Or maybe it means that there is more than one Dog to account for the aliens?
That couldn’t be it, could it?
Since science has yet to attempt to explain alien evolution (as far as I know), again, what is the point?
Are they simply immature people trying to taunt others but not quite understanding how the game is played?
So many questions, right?
derail (tangent) alert!!
NatGeo has been bought by Murdoch to assimilate into his borg of FauxNoize.
ugh
I remember a bit about recently learning that Faux has owned NatGeo Channel for a while, accounting for a recent fauxdoc on NatGeo. Also, Fox bought ScienceBlogs inspiring PZ to jump ship and join FreeThoughtsBlog. Today’s news means Murdoch is completing his assimilation of all things sciencey to disseminate his propaganda to popular media that the plebes think is science media.
apologies for not seeking a more appropriate Thread to drop this turd but here you go. Redirect appropriately. This thread is associated with associating aliens and naturally occurring creatures; which I think that fauxdoc on NGC did also.
The week i first heard the “aliens” quip, I saw no less than 5 other science articles throwing “alien” around. I suppose they are amused or just like the sound of it, but i felt like yelling at all of them. Being, rather specifically, science communicators, they ought to be careful with their take-away concepts.