4 ms·
This article is deeply unsatisfying. Too much fluff for a very basic point: ctenophores are different kinds of organisms than we’ve come to expect. That’s it. “
by modwest 7y ago
This article is deeply unsatisfying. Too much fluff for a very basic point: ctenophores are different kinds of organisms than we’ve come to expect. That’s it. “Different” appears 24 times in the article, almost every single instance of which is just, “ctenophores are different.”
There’s not much more information in this article than that. I was hoping for some compelling science writing. But this feels like a tiny story (for now) stretched way too far. In a year or five when there are some interesting hypotheses about WHY they’re different, then we’ll see.
- raducu 7y agoI was hoping that the article would detail what those not-dopamine, not-serotonine neurotransmitters were and what they did.
- modwest 7y agoYeah, exactly the info I was looking for. "They're different" is like half the story. How do they work?
- SamBam 7y agoI think you're missing the key point (and perhaps the article doesn't explain it clearly): if the nervous system is completely different from other animals, then that implies (maybe) that the nervous system did not just evolve once, and then branch from there, but evolved multiple times, each time slightly differently but with similar results. This is called "convergent evolution," and is fairly common (though not necessarily common for big systems like the nervous system), but what it implies is that there is something fundamental about the structure of the nervous system that leads it to being evolved again and again, even if in slightly different versions. Contrast that to other things that are evolved, let's say endoskeletons (bones). These seem fundamental to us, but (as far as I know) they only evolved once, and it would be perfectly reasonable to imagine a world where they never evolved, and all the animals had exoskeletons. Indeed, if endoskeletons really only evolved once, then we might really have no reason to expect them in any alien species. But if something like the nervous system evolved multiple times, then we expect that to be a solution that evolution finds again and again.
- modwest 7y agoYeah, I understand all that going in to the article. I have, let's call it, an advanced beginner's understanding of neuroscience & evolutionary biology. It was just an extremely long article, in my personal opinion, for "this is different."
- onychomys 7y agoThe article makes the case that they're the outgroup to the entire rest of Animalia. I don't really know what you'd consider a tiny story, but that's certainly not a tiny claim!
- Someone 7y agoMaybe we’ll eventually conclude they aren’t even Animalia? If life came to earth on meteors, there might be life from different corners of the universe on earth.
- rini17 7y agoHe did sequence the genome which has shown that ctenophore lacked too many nerve-related genes that are shared in whole animal kingdom, and other genes were very different too, the article explains how...isn't that satisfying answer WHY it is different?