blog

I had the pleasure of talking with Doug Erwin a little while back. Doug is Curator of Paleozoic Invertebrates at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and a Faculty Member in Developmental Evolution. We were discussing a paper on the genome of a marine sponge, evaluated in F1000 and selected for our ‘Literature’ section in The Scientist (look out for it in about a week).

During our conversation, Doug mentioned the write-up that the genome paper got in Nature. He said his quote had been “completely bollocksed up“:

According to Douglas Erwin, a palaeobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, such complexity indicates that sponges must have descended from a more advanced ancestor than previously suspected. “This flies in the face of what we think of early metazoan evolution,” says Erwin.

Doug said that when this was published, he was getting calls from colleagues asking if he’d gone mad.

What he was saying is that the idea that modern sponges have descended from a more complex ancestor “flies in the the face of what we think…” Or, as he said to me, “that’s almost certainly wrong.”

Just in case there’s still any doubt: Doug Erwin doesn’t think that sponges evolved from a more complex ancestor. We’re happy to help set the record straight.