Teleology in biology

DAVID: Every living organism has the purpose of survival:
https://evolutionnews.org/2022/11/a-closer-look-at-the-science-of-purpose/

QUOTE: Then along came Darwin. As we all know, he said that creatures survived and speciated based on the random and blind — that is, purposeless — actions of a thoroughly uncaring natural world. He made it all seem so simple: survival of the fittest was all there is to it.

dhw: How can it be called “purposeless” when the purpose is survival? “Random” concerns the theory which you and I have long since rejected, that the process depends on random mutations, but that does not in any way remove the obvious fact that all life forms struggle to survive, and the struggle to survive constitutes the purpose of their actions!

QUOTE: "Today, modern science embraces Darwin, in part because biologists want to be physicists, and also because it allows them to continue to leave God out. So the myth of Darwinism, in its new guise of neo-Darwinism, endures.

Does he really believe that all biologists are atheists, and does he not realize that Darwin himself was an agnostic who, in later editions of ORIGIN not only makes many references to the “Creator” but also emphasizes that his theory should not “shock the religious feelings of anyone”. Even the Catholic Church has accepted that there is no intrinsic conflict between the theory of evolution and Christianity. What world is our author living in?

QUOTE: "The struggle, however, depends on something else that Darwin didn’t see, something more fundamental. Antecedent to it is the desire to struggle, that is, to act in keeping with the organism’s purpose, to live. […]

dhw: So Darwinism is purposeless because before you try to fulfil the purpose of surviving, you have to want to survive, and survival is the purpose. I reckon Darwin would have been as amazed as I am at such reasoning.

QUOTE: "Simply put: Teleology, the purpose-driven innate property of life itself, precedes natural selection as the primary source of agency that explains evolution. Darwinism utterly misses this elementary fact."

dhw: So apparently Darwin didn’t realize that although the purpose was survival, the purpose of survival was not the driving force behind evolution because the driving force was the desire to survive, which was the purpose. However, it’s true that the purpose of survival precedes natural selection, because obviously natural selection only decides what changes will help to fulfil the purpose of survival. I can’t see evolutionists quaking in their boots at any of this.

DAVID: so, the will to survive precedes survival itself as the driving factor. Why does that will come from? Why must it exist? If the survival struggle is so hard, why struggle? what agency implanted that drive?

dhw: Yes, the will to survive is the purpose that drives the struggle for survival, but according to our author, Darwin didn’t realize this, and nor do neo-Darwinists. Your own questions tie in with the biggest of them all: what agency created life? But that was not Darwin’s subject, which was the origin of species, not of life itself. In later editions of his book, he simply attributes that to the Creator, but presumably the author hasn’t read what Darwin actually wrote.

I appreciate your Darwinist criticism of the article.

DAVID: Every living organism has the purpose of survival:
https://evolutionnews.org/2022/11/a-closer-look-at-the-science-of-purpose/

QUOTE: Then along came Darwin. As we all know, he said that creatures survived and speciated based on the random and blind — that is, purposeless — actions of a thoroughly uncaring natural world. He made it all seem so simple: survival of the fittest was all there is to it.

How can it be called “purposeless” when the purpose is survival? “Random” concerns the theory which you and I have long since rejected, that the process depends on random mutations, but that does not in any way remove the obvious fact that all life forms struggle to survive, and the struggle to survive constitutes the purpose of their actions!

QUOTE: "Today, modern science embraces Darwin, in part because biologists want to be physicists, and also because it allows them to continue to leave God out. So the myth of Darwinism, in its new guise of neo-Darwinism, endures.

Does he really believe that all biologists are atheists, and does he not realize that Darwin himself was an agnostic who, in later editions of ORIGIN not only makes many references to the “Creator” but also emphasizes that his theory should not “shock the religious feelings of anyone”. Even the Catholic Church has accepted that there is no intrinsic conflict between the theory of evolution and Christianity. What world is our author living in?

QUOTE: "The struggle, however, depends on something else that Darwin didn’t see, something more fundamental. Antecedent to it is the desire to struggle, that is, to act in keeping with the organism’s purpose, to live. […]

So Darwinism is purposeless because before you try to fulfil the purpose of surviving, you have to want to survive, and survival is the purpose. I reckon Darwin would have been as amazed as I am at such reasoning.

QUOTE: "Simply put: Teleology, the purpose-driven innate property of life itself, precedes natural selection as the primary source of agency that explains evolution. Darwinism utterly misses this elementary fact."

So apparently Darwin didn’t realize that although the purpose was survival, the purpose of survival was not the driving force behind evolution because the driving force was the desire to survive, which was the purpose. However, it’s true that the purpose of survival precedes natural selection, because obviously natural selection only decides what changes will help to fulfil the purpose of survival. I can’t see evolutionists quaking in their boots at any of this.

DAVID: so, the will to survive precedes survival itself as the driving factor. Why does that will come from? Why must it exist? If the survival struggle is so hard, why struggle? what agency implanted that drive?

Yes, the will to survive is the purpose that drives the struggle for survival, but according to our author, Darwin didn’t realize this, and nor do neo-Darwinists. Your own questions tie in with the biggest of them all: what agency created life? But that was not Darwin’s subject, which was the origin of species, not of life itself. In later editions of his book, he simply attributes that to the Creator, but presumably the author hasn’t read what Darwin actually wrote.

https://evolutionnews.org/2022/11/a-closer-look-at-the-science-of-purpose/

"The first thing to notice is that there really cannot be a science of organisms, i.e., biology, without understanding purpose. That this fact has been so neglected is, of course, a consequence of neo-Darwinism, which purports to show that purpose and design in life are only apparent, not real. Organisms that survive simply appear to be purpose-driven because those that are not driven by purpose suffer extinction as imposed by natural selection.

***

"In biology we are dedicated to studying the behavior and physiology of all living things. Extraordinary examples of animal behavior include the 70-mile trek by some emperor penguins to feed their young, the 1,000-mile journey that sockeye salmon may navigate to return to the small stream of their birth in order to spawn and die, and the 3,000-mile annual migration of certain caribou in North America.

"Yet as a physician I am equally if not more astounded by the dazzling display of goal-attainment that takes place in every human body in every second of life. Your heart has been pumping since a time about eight months before you were born. Your kidneys filter metabolic waste and retain life-sustaining fluid and electrolytes without fail and without interruption. The hemoglobin in your red blood cells procures, transports, and delivers life-giving oxygen to every corner of your body, every second of every day. And this can only happen because your lungs expand and contract, again without fail, ceaselessly, even while you sleep. Your body cannot survive outside of a very narrow range of temperatures and fluid and electrolyte concentrations. These are assiduously and jealously monitored, adjusted, and normalized. Without this oversight, your life would come to a rapid end.

"Purpose is the sine-qua-non of life. It permeates every organism, in every ecosystem.

***

"The short answer is that biology grew up out of the physical sciences. Even Isaac Newton himself was at pains to eliminate purpose, i.e., teleology, from his science. But Newton’s motivation was entirely different from that of modern scientific atheists. Newton believed firmly in the reality of teleology and purpose, but he also believed that it was outside of the ability of the human mind to reduce God’s purposeful wisdom to scientific terms. Some 250 years after Newton, and following the success of the Industrial Revolution, 19th-century scientists began to see themselves as understanding the world without God’s help. Then along came Darwin. As we all know, he said that creatures survived and speciated based on the random and blind — that is, purposeless — actions of a thoroughly uncaring natural world. He made it all seem so simple: survival of the fittest was all there is to it.

"Today, modern science embraces Darwin, in part because biologists want to be physicists, and also because it allows them to continue to leave God out. So the myth of Darwinism, in its new guise of neo-Darwinism, endures.

***

"Realizing that, we recognize that the entire edifice of Darwin’s theory is based on a single, demonstrable falsehood. Darwin looked at the natural world and observed organisms of every kind striving to survive, competing for food, shelter, and mating privilege. This was the struggle for existence at the core of his theory.

"The struggle, however, depends on something else that Darwin didn’t see, something more fundamental. Antecedent to it is the desire to struggle, that is, to act in keeping with the organism’s purpose, to live. Only with this desire does the living thing then go out and fight for its life. The point may seem subtle but it really is not. If as we are told, life is ultimately purposeless and organisms have no innate purpose… then why struggle?

"Simply put: Teleology, the purpose-driven innate property of life itself, precedes natural selection as the primary source of agency that explains evolution. Darwinism utterly misses this elementary fact."

Comment: so, the will to survive precedes survival itself as the driving factor. Why does that will come from? Why must it exist? If the survival struggle is so hard, why struggle? what agency implanted that drive?

DAVID: As I've pointed out in the past, you favor God two to one. Your first two proposals are God sourced. And you reject chance.

If you find three hypotheses equally difficult to believe, it means you do not favour any of them. Nice try, though!

DAVID's comment: These are transitional forms of mammals, but the transitions are giant gaps in physiology again unsupportive of the gradualism proposed by Darwin.

dhw: Just to clarify: transitions are transitions, thus providing evidence for evolution. Although Darwin thought gradualism was essential to his theory, many evolutionary scientists disagree with him and accept that there have been saltations.

DAVID: Unexplained saltations unless God is accepted. Darwin's only contribution is common descent after life began.

dhw: A huge contribution to our understanding of life’s history, since he was the one who made the theory known and acceptable to the world.

One can indeed explain saltations as being individually preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago or dabbled by an unknown, hidden, sourceless power about which we know nothing. Or one can explain them as being due to an autonomous mechanism invented by an unknown, hidden, sourceless power about which we know nothing. Or one can explain them as being due to an autonomous mechanism that came into existence by sheer chance. All three explanations are so nebulous that one can only marvel at the faith of those who believe in one and reject the others.

As I've pointed out in the past, you favor God two to one. Your first two proposals are God sourced. And you reject chance.

dhw: Just to clarify: transitions are transitions, thus providing evidence for evolution. Although Darwin thought gradualism was essential to his theory, many evolutionary scientists disagree with him and accept that there have been saltations.

DAVID: Unexplained saltations unless God is accepted. Darwin's only contribution is common descent after life began.

A huge contribution to our understanding of life’s history, since he was the one who made the theory known and acceptable to the world.

One can indeed explain saltations as being individually preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago or dabbled by an unknown, hidden, sourceless power about which we know nothing. Or one can explain them as being due to an autonomous mechanism invented by an unknown, hidden, sourceless power about which we know nothing. Or one can explain them as being due to an autonomous mechanism that came into existence by sheer chance. All three explanations are so nebulous that one can only marvel at the faith of those who believe in one and reject the others.

DAVID's comment: These are transitional forms of mammals, but the transitions are giant gaps in physiology again unsupportive of the gradualism proposed by Darwin.

dhw: Just to clarify: transitions are transitions, thus providing evidence for evolution. Although Darwin thought gradualism was essential to his theory, many evolutionary scientists disagree with him and accept that there have been saltations.

Unexplained saltations unless God is accepted. Darwin's only contribution is common descent after life began.

Just to clarify: transitions are transitions, thus providing evidence for evolution. Although Darwin thought gradualism was essential to his theory, many evolutionary scientists disagree with him and accept that there have been saltations.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wallaby-milk-acts-as-a-placenta-for-babies/?...

"'Wallabies are kicking over scientific conventions surrounding mammalian placentas, the organ responsible for protecting and nourishing a developing fetus. A study finds that contrary to what scientists thought previously, mother tammar wallabies (Macropus eugenii) have both a functioning internal placenta and milk that performs some of the organ’s usual roles.

***

"'marsupials develop simple, placenta-like structures during the end of pregnancy, just before the underdeveloped baby crawls from the uterus into the mother’s pouch. These placental structures, just two cell layers thick, provide oxygen, nutrients and molecular signals that drive development to the fetus while protecting it from the mother’s immune system.

"It shouldn't be surprising that marsupial placentas look different from those of other animals since even closely related species can have very different-looking placentas that perform the same functions, says Derek Wildman, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. “It is the most variable organ in mammals in terms of anatomy and physiology,” he says.

"Marsupial pregnancy is remarkably short for mammals of their size. Tammar wallabies, which can grow to between 6 and 9 kilograms, are pregnant for just 26.5 days — barely longer than rats. Yet the baby, or joey, spends nearly a year continuing to develop and nurse inside the mother’s pouch: a long time compared to other mammals. This developmental mismatch led researchers to suspect that the majority of a joey’s development is driven by specialized features of the mother’s milk.

***

"Baker thinks that the rapid evolution could be necessary for the placenta to effectively shield the fetus from the mother’s immune system, which treats the offspring as a foreign invader. “The placenta is evolving, trying to evade the mom, and comes up with these really bizarre strategies” — including taking liquid form in the mother marsupial’s milk, she says.

"Wildman says that the finding suggests that lactation may have evolved before eutherian placentas, as egg-laying mammals such as platypuses and echidnas lactate but do not have placentas. The egg-laying group came before marsupials and eutherians. He praises the paper, but says that the researchers could compare gene expresssion across more species than just mice and humans. A paper he published of 14 animals found that placentas did express different genes depending on the species."

Comment: These are transitional forms of mammals, but the transitions are giant gaps in physiology again unsupportive of the gradualism proposed by Darwin.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-did-life-move-to-land-for-the-view-20170307/?utm_sou...

"Life on Earth began in the water. So when the first animals moved onto land, they had to trade their fins for limbs, and their gills for lungs, the better to adapt to their new terrestrial environment.

"A new study, out today, suggests that the shift to lungs and limbs doesn’t tell the full story of these creatures’ transformation. As they emerged from the sea, they gained something perhaps more precious than oxygenated air: information. In air, eyes can see much farther than they can under water. The increased visual range provided an “informational zip line” that alerted the ancient animals to bountiful food sources near the shore, according to Malcolm MacIver, a neuroscientist and engineer at Northwestern University.

"This zip line, MacIver maintains, drove the selection of rudimentary limbs, which allowed animals to make their first brief forays onto land. Furthermore, it may have had significant implications for the emergence of more advanced cognition and complex planning. “It’s hard to look past limbs and think that maybe information, which doesn’t fossilize well, is really what brought us onto land,” MacIver said.

"MacIver and Lars Schmitz, a paleontologist at the Claremont Colleges, have created mathematical models that explore how the increase in information available to air-dwelling creatures would have manifested itself, over the eons, in an increase in eye size. They describe the experimental evidence they have amassed to support what they call the “buena vista” hypothesis.

***

"But once you take eyes out of the water and into air, a larger eye size leads to a proportionate increase in how far you can see.

***

" They found that there was indeed a marked increase in eye size — a tripling, in fact — during the transitional period [to land]. The average eye socket size before transition was 13 millimeters, compared to 36 millimeters after. Furthermore, in those creatures that went from water to land and back to the water — like the Mexican cave fish Astyanax mexicanus — the mean orbit size shrank back to 14 millimeters, nearly the same as it had been before.

***

"In water, a larger eye only increases the visual range from just over six meters to nearly seven meters. But increase the eye size in air, and the improvement in range goes from 200 meters to 600 meters.

***

"MacIver’s background as a neuroscientist inevitably led him to ponder how all this might have influenced the behavior and cognition of tetrapods during the water-to-land transition. For instance, if you live and hunt in the water, your limited vision range — roughly one body length ahead — means you operate primarily in what MacIver terms the “reactive mode”: You have just a few milliseconds (equivalent to a few cycle times of a neuron in the brain) to react. “Everything is coming at you in a just-in-time fashion,” he said. “You can either eat or be eaten, and you’d better make that decision quickly.”

"But for a land-based animal, being able to see farther means you have much more time to assess the situation and strategize to choose the best course of action, whether you are predator or prey. According to MacIver, it’s likely the first land animals started out hunting for land-based prey reactively, but over time, those that could move beyond reactive mode and think strategically would have had a greater evolutionary advantage. “Now you need to contemplate multiple futures and quickly decide between them,” MacIver said. “That’s mental time travel, or prospective cognition, and it’s a really important feature of our own cognitive abilities.”

"That said, other senses also likely played a role in the development of more advanced cognition. “It’s extremely interesting, but I don’t think the ability to plan suddenly arose only with vision,” said Barbara Finlay, an evolutionary neuroscientist at Cornell University. As an example, she pointed to how salmon rely on olfactory pathways to migrate upstream.

"Hutchinson agrees that it would be useful to consider how the many sensory changes over that critical transition period fit together, rather than studying vision alone. For instance, “we know smell and taste were originally coupled in the aquatic environment and then became separated,” he said. “Whereas hearing changed a lot from the aquatic to the terrestrial environment with the evolution of a proper external ear and other features.'”

Comment: Fascinating theory. Raises the issue again of why pre-whales entered the water.

Thank you for editing the article. If you believe in evolution, then of course origin of life and evolution are one continuous system: you could hardly have evolution if one life form didn't develop from its predecessors right back to the first form(s)! But Creationists deny common descent and argue that God created different forms of life separately,in which case the process was not continuous. As for the rest, we might as well say that all matter has mental qualities that look for “stability”: another form of panpsychism.

https://aeon.co/essays/paradoxes-of-stability-how-life-began-and-why-it-can-t-rest?utm_...

"Living things might be made of the same fundamental stuff as the rest of the material world – ‘dead’ atoms and molecules – but they do not behave in the same way at all. In fact, they seem so purposeful as to defy the materialist philosophy on which the rest of modern science was built.

"how did life on Earth actually come about? Both at the abstract level and in the particular story of our world, there seems to be a chasm between the animate and inanimate realms.

***

"The name we give to the process by which simple life emerged from inanimate matter is ‘abiogenesis’. Evolution, on the other hand, is the biological mechanism by which life branched out into Darwin’s ‘endless forms most beautiful’. Traditionally, these are viewed as quite different things: the former, one of nature’s greatest mysteries; the latter, broadly understood, thanks to Darwin. Through systems chemistry, however, they stand revealed as a single continuous progression. (my bold)

***

"Evolution exhibits an identifiable driving force, a direction if you like, and this ‘teleological’ tendency acts at both the chemical and biological stages; that is, it operates both during, as well as after, what we think of as abiogenesis. Thus the purpose-driven character of life, the very thing that seemed to distinguish biology from the rest of nature, turns out not to be unique to life after all. Its beginnings are already discernible in certain inanimate systems, provided they are replicative and able to evolve. And this driving force can be described in strictly physical terms.

"Put simply, it is nature’s drive towards greater stability – a drive that is as ubiquitous in physics as it is in biology.

***

"High entropy and low energy, however, are just one manifestation of stability. Does nature offer others? It does. It turns out that stuff can be highly persistent even when it is highly unstable energetically. Indeed, that’s precisely what we find in the world of replicators.

"Living things are low-entropy and energy-consuming, so they are unstable in the thermodynamic sense. Nevertheless, they can still be remarkably stable in the sense of persisting over time. Some replicating populations (certain bacterial strains, for example) have maintained themselves with little change over astonishing periods – millions, even a billion, years.

***

"Why do replicating molecules give rise to replicating cells? In a word: evolution. Or, in four more: replication, variation, competition, selection.

***

"In the replicative world, stability can be unrelated to energy content. Provided there is a source of metabolic energy to keep the thermodynamic books balanced, anything goes. So this is genuinely a different kind of stability.

***

" Some replicators are indeed astonishingly durable, but, crucially, DKS always remains circumstantial. Change the environmental conditions and the winner of the replicative race can change. In fact, that’s exactly what makes life so capricious and the evolutionary path largely unpredictable: the mathematics of replication forces it into a paradoxically restless search for rest.

"Why are living things so complex? Here’s another seemingly eternal riddle that we’re now in a position to answer. As many a systems chemist has learnt to his or her sorrow, the simplest molecular replicators can be quite finicky. You need fancy labs, specialised equipment and dedicated researchers to get them to replicate and, even then, it can be hit or miss. By contrast, biological replicators – living things – are extraordinarily robust.

"Consider some of the simplest life forms, bacteria. These highly complex entities can survive and prosper pretty well anywhere – some deep within the Earth, some high in the atmosphere, some in boiling water, some in nuclear reactors, no labs, equipment or human assistance required. The inordinate complexity of all living things has emerged for one reason alone – to facilitate the replicative function, thereby enhancing the stability of the replicating system.

***

"So complexity and function go hand in hand. Joyce’s RNA experiment demonstrated the first (conceptual) step on a thousand-mile journey – toward that stupendously effective (and inordinately complex) replicator, the bacterial cell.

***

"Nature’s most fundamental drive, dictated by logic itself, is toward greater stability. That drive has a thermodynamic manifestation, as expressed through the ubiquitous Second Law, but it also has a kinetic manifestation – the drive toward increasingly persistent replicators. Two mathematics, two material forms. This distinction does not trace the dividing line between living and dead matter precisely – but it does explain it, and many of the other riddles of life into the bargain."

Comment: Read the whole article. I think it is ridiculous reasoning, but he makes some reasonable observations. Highly complex bacteria are stable because of the unexplained source of the complexity they exhibit. Note my bold: origin of life and evolution are one continuous system.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2146256-weird-fish-fossil-changes-the-story-of-how...

"Fossils have revealed many of the stages in this iconic evolutionary event. The evolutionary tree of species involved in the switch from sea to land has remained stable since the late 20th century, even as new fossils have come to light.

"However, a fossil discovered in a quarry in Ningxia, north China, now threatens that stability. It was discovered in 2002 by Min Zhu at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and Per Ahlberg at Uppsala University in Sweden.

"The fossil belongs to a new species of lobe-finned fish, named Hongyu chowi. It was about 1.5 metres long, and lived 370 to 360 million years ago.

"But when the researchers tried to fit H. chowi into the existing evolutionary tree, it didn’t fit easily.

"That’s because in some respects, H. chowi looks like an ancient predatory fish called rhizodonts. These are thought to have branched off from lobe-finned fish long before the group gave rise to four-legged land animals.

"But Ahlberg says H. chowi has aspects that look surprisingly like those seen in early four-legged animals and their nearest fishy relatives – an extinct group called the elpistostegids. These include the shoulder girdle and the support region for its gill covers.

"This implies one of two things, the researchers say. The first possibility is that H. chowi is some sort of rhizodont that independently evolved the shoulders and gill cover supports of a four-legged animal.

"Alternatively, the rhizodonts may be more closely related to the four-legged animals and the elpistostegids than we thought. But this would also imply a certain amount of independent evolution of similar features, because the rhizodonts would then sit between two groups that have many features in common – features the two groups would have had to evolve independently.

"This implies one of two things, the researchers say. The first possibility is that H. chowi is some sort of rhizodont that independently evolved the shoulders and gill cover supports of a four-legged animal.

"Alternatively, the rhizodonts may be more closely related to the four-legged animals and the elpistostegids than we thought. But this would also imply a certain amount of independent evolution of similar features, because the rhizodonts would then sit between two groups that have many features in common – features the two groups would have had to evolve independently."

Comment: Apparently more than one type of fish tried to evolve into a life on land. Appears to be an example of convergence.

Since the Burgess Shale discoveries about 1880-90, no intermediates worthy of the name have been found. The layers of the Earth are not missing for those Geologic periods. Bad luck or no fossils? We don't know and either possibility still exists.-Now we know a bit. Very elementary Eukaryote forms have been found about 500 million years before the Cambrian Explosion according to an article in Nature just published.-http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7348/full/nature09943.html


> *** My thanks again to David for his post (6 January at 15.10) summarizing a study which again cannot explain the mechanism for innovation. (I don't know why Natural Selection can even be considered as a source, since it doesn't originate anything.) We know that all of us animals do actually unite a variety of "intelligent" systems that function independently of our own volition (the senses, digestion, circulation, immune system etc.). So maybe the concept of intelligent cells forming new combinations can at least give us a different angle of approach from the highly unsatisfactory one of random mutations, even if it still doesn't offer an explanation.-Here is an article from the pre-Cambrian fossil fields in China, studying the development of exo-skeletons in Ediacaran fossils, which then led to endo-skeletization in the Cambrian Explosion. The article does not explain the Cambrian Explosion, really, nothing does, but this is one of the important steps.-http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-skeletons-pre-cambrian-closet.html

Look at the article "From Simple to Complex". The genomics studies are finding many genes in single-celled organisms that prepare for multicellularity. I still view this as pre-planning in DNA by the UI.
> 
> http://www.the-scientist.com/2011/1/1/38/1/-
Another genome article on the sponge, which turns out to be a very complex genome, 18,000 genes, very much like US, with many genes for future use. Genes for nerves, and the sponge has none! Pre-planning?-http://f1000.com/4788960?key=q7cvxd7y9w7mcc6


> > My question is: where the heck did these new creatures spring from?
> 
> Novel forms that became the 37 animal phyla appeared in the Cambrian Explosion appeared by that same mechansim, whatever it is.-A new study of how genes derive complex organisms does not find the mechanisms:-The paper concludes that:
Gene duplication and subsequent evolutionary divergence certainly adds to the size of the genome and in large measure to its diversity and versatility. However, in all of the examples given above, known evolutionary mechanisms were markedly constrained in their ability to innovate and to create any novel information. This natural limit to biological change can be attributed mostly to the power of purifying selection, which, despite being relaxed in duplicates, is nonetheless ever-present. 
the various postduplication mechanisms entailing random mutations and recombinations considered were observed to tweak, tinker, copy, cut, divide, and shuffle existing genetic information around, but fell short of generating genuinely distinct and entirely novel functionality.
The author concludes his review by offering the following advice:
Gradual natural selection is no doubt important in biological adaptation and for ensuring the robustness of the genome in the face of constantly changing environmental pressures. However, its potential for innovation is greatly inadequate as far as explaining the origination of the distinct exonic sequences that contribute to the complexity of the organism and diversity of life. Any alternative/revision to Neo-Darwinism has to consider the holistic nature and organization of information encoded in genes, which specify the interdependent and complex biochemical motifs that allow protein molecules to fold properly and function effectively.- 
Research Article
Is gene duplication a viable explanation for the origination of biological information and complexity?
Joseph Esfandiar Hannon Bozorgmehr
Article first published online: 22 DEC 2010
DOI: 10.1002/cplx.20365
Copyright © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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Complexity
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Bozorgmehr, J. E. H. , Is gene duplication a viable explanation for the origination of biological information and complexity?. Complexity, n/a. doi: 10.1002/cplx.20365
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39 Princedom Street, Manchester M9 4GQ, United Kingdom
Email: Joseph Esfandiar Hannon Bozorgmehr (bozorgmehr@hotmail.co.uk) 
*Correspondence: Joseph Esfandiar Hannon Bozorgmehr, 39 Princedom Street, Manchester M9 4GQ, United Kingdom
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