For instance, this proclamation comes from Fiona McDonald at Science Alert:
"Most of us know that at some point in our evolutionary history around 600 million years ago, single-celled organisms evolved into more complex multicellular life."
We do? All the text books say so, but what evidence did they use to convince us? The fossil record offers paltry evidence to show a steady, concerted flow of transitional forms. Saltations predominate. To paraphrase famed anthropologist Dr. Richard Leakey, "The fossil record is so incomplete that most of it is "imagination made of plaster of paris." And that's just the vertebrates. Soft tissue organisms by definition are non-existent in the fossil record.
McDonald correctly continues, "But knowing that happened and actually seeing it happen in real-time in front of you is an entirely different matter altogether." This is true. So when a headline appears which proclaims "Scientists Have Witnessed a Single-Celled Algae Evolve Into a Multicellular Organism," it has Darwinists cheering with excitement.
It all started with a research paper published at Nature.com entitled, "De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation." De novo is a ten dollar word that means 'from the beginning.'
The authors summarize the research: "In this study, we present experiments in which we used the ciliate predator Paramecium tetraurelia to select for the de novo evolution of multicellularity in outcrossed populations of C. reinhardtii. We describe the heritable multicellular life cycles that evolved and compare them to the ancestral, unicellular life cycle. In addition, we show that the evolved multicellular life cycles are stable over thousands of asexual generations in the absence of predators."
I'm impressed with the detail and determination to understand this process against predation within this macroscopic organism, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (reinhardtii). And as I understand it, the researchers did confirm the observation of micro-evolution within the species to adapt to an introduced threat.
But that doesn't confirm the grand Darwinian assertion of macro-evolution put forth by the very first sentence, in the very first paragraph of this research abstract, which states, "The transition from unicellular to multicellular life was one of a few major events in the history of life that created new opportunities for more complex biological systems to evolve."
Perhaps. But the 'de novo origins' evidence is not found in this research. To headline such a conclusion is deceptive. These 2 sentences reinforce the point:
"...that the founding population in our experiment already possessed a toolkit for producing multicellular structures.
"...that this basis involves the co-option of a previously existing plastic response."
In other words, no new genetic information was created. There were simply variations within an already existing gene pool to allow the organism to adapt to an introduced threat. The grand Darwinian assertion of macro-evolution necessitates the introduction of new genetic material in order for the evolutionary tree to branch. It was not found in this research.
'De novo origins' is more accurately defined as 'extant processes.' The headline should be changed accordingly.