The octopus genome: Not “alien” but still a big problem for Darwinism

RAEL’S COMMENT:

Yes, of course, the first octopus came from the sky piloting a ufo… Maybe it’s time for these “scientists” to consider a more rational approach like… life having been created by the Elohim?

These days, new genomes of different types of organisms are being sequenced and published on a regular basis. When some new genome is sequenced, evolutionary biologists expect that it will be highly similar to the genomes of other organisms that are assumed to be closely related.

As ENV already noted, the latest organism to have its genome sequenced has confounded that expectation: the octopus, whose genome was recently reported in Nature. It turns out to be so unlike other mollusks and other invertebrates that it’s being called “alien” by the scientists who worked on that project.

One article on the subject was titled “Don’t freak out, but scientists think octopuses ‘might be aliens’ after DNA study“:

Not to send you into a meltdown or anything but octopuses are basically ‘aliens’ — according to scientists.

Researchers have found a new map of the octopus genetic code that is so strange that it could be actually be an “alien”.

“The octopus appears to be utterly different from all other animals, even other molluscs, with its eight prehensile arms, its large brain and its clever problem-solving abilities,” said US researcher Dr Clifton Ragsdale, from the University of Chicago.

Analysis of 12 different tissues revealed hundreds of octopus-specific genes found in no other animal, many of them highly active in structures such as the brain, skin and suckers.

Obviously no one thinks the octopus is an “alien” from another planet. (Nature News quotes one co-author of the paper on the genome noting that the alien quip is a “joke.”) But it certainly is alien to standard evolutionary expectations that genomes of related species ought to be highly similar.

The Octopus Genome: Not “Alien” but Still a Big Problem for Darwinism