Sharks do it slowest according to articles in Nature News and New Scientist 8 Jan 2014 and Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature12826. Scientists have sequenced the genome of an Australian shark, known as the Elephant Shark, because of its enormous snout. The scientific name for this shark is Callorhinchus mili. It is not classified as a true shark, but a member of a group named chimaeras. Like rays, skates and true sharks, it has a skeleton made of cartilage, rather than bone, and the researchers found it lacked genes for calcium-binding phosphoproteins, which are used in converting cartilage to bone. The research team also reported: “We find that the C. milii genome is the slowest evolving of all known vertebrates, including the ‘living fossil’ coelacanth”. According to Nature News: “Because the elephant shark is an early jawed vertebrate and has changed little since bony fishes appeared around 420 million years ago — making it the slowest-evolving of all known vertebrates — it serves as an important baseline for comparative genomics”.
Editorial Comment: Now let’s be objective! Since no-one has any 420 million year old elephant shark DNA to compare it with, this genome study can only show scientists what genes this shark has now. The fossil record is not much help either to evolutionists even using their vast dates. Because sharks do not have a bony skeleton, fossils of whole sharks are rare. The oldest whole shark fossil (not an elephant shark) is dated as 409 million years (see National Geographic news 1 October 2003). However, even we at Creation Research have hundreds of fossil shark teeth and denticles in our collection, and the only change they reveal is that some sharks used to be a lot larger than any living shark. Otherwise, shark denticles and teeth have the same structure as those of living sharks, and so provide no evidence sharks used to be anything else. Objectively, there is no evidence that this creature has evolved at all, slowly or quickly. So is it time again to state the obvious? Sharks have provably produced after their own kind as God made them to, and secondly, evolution again turns out to be a lie forced on innocent students with only one purpose in mind: to make them abandon the real Creator. (Ref. genetics, genome, fossils, ichthyology)
Evidence News, vol.14, No.2
26 February 2014
Creation Research Australia