Claiming to be wise, they instead became utter fools.
Romans 1:22 NLT
"A team from the University of Bristol argues that gene-duplication events shared by all eukaryotes push the origin of complexity far deeper into Earth history than anyone expected.
Ho-hum. So far, so ordinary.
But then comes a revision of staggering proportions: eukaryotes were apparently evolving complex features for a billion years before mitochondria arrived, all while living in oceans devoid of oxygen.
Evolutionary biologist Philip Donoghue summarizes the surprise:
arose significantly later than expected. The timing coincides with the first substantial rise in atmospheric oxygen… The archaeal ancestor of eukaryotes began evolving complex features roughly a billion years before oxygen became abundant, in oceans that were entirely anoxic.”
The Metabolic Problem:
Readers familiar with basic bioenergetics may pause here. Mitochondria are not decorative extras, they are the ATP engines that make eukaryotic complexity metabolically possible. An archaeal cell attempting to evolve membranes, cytoskeletons, phagocytosis, and all the other high-energy traits of eukaryotes without mitochondria is like a stone-age village attempting to develop skyscrapers before the invention of steel.
The metabolic math simply does not work.
The Narrative Method Revealed:
Q: So what do the researchers do with this contradiction?
A: They do not open the obvious question – how a metabolically impossible cell could evolve for a billion years – they expand the narrative. The timeline is redrawn, the mitochondria are repositioned, and the new picture is carefully fitted into the broader evolutionary story.
Study coauthor Christopher Kay makes the method explicit:
Indeed, it was.
Each discipline listed already presupposes the evolutionary timeline used to calibrate the others. Fossils inform the molecular clocks, which structure the phylogenetic trees, which reinterpret the fossils.
Study coauthor Christopher Kay makes the method explicit:
“It has required the combination of a number of disciplines to do this: palaeontology to inform the timeline, phylogenetics to create faithful and useful trees, and molecular biology to give these gene families a context. It was a big job.”
Indeed, it was.
Each discipline listed already presupposes the evolutionary timeline used to calibrate the others. Fossils inform the molecular clocks, which structure the phylogenetic trees, which reinterpret the fossils.
The appearance of interdisciplinarity becomes
a kind of narrative triangulation.
The story confirms … the story:
This is why the metabolic impossibility of billion-year pre-mitochondrial complexity does not register as a conceptual red flag. It becomes a storytelling opportunity. The contradiction is absorbed into a more sweeping arc where complexity, oxygenation, and the rise of mitochondria are harmonized, even if the harmony exists only at the narrative level.
Evolution once again shows itself as a self-correcting story, not a self-correcting science."
CEH
