Thanks Squawk 8888. Good one for the Digest ping this week.
Posted on 11/14/2013 9:57:54 AM PST by onedoug
Reconstructing the rise of life during the period of Earth's history when it first evolved is challenging. Earth's oldest sedimentary rocks are not only rare, but also almost always altered by hydrothermal and tectonic activity. A new study from a team including Carnegie's Nora Noffke, a visiting investigator, and Robert Hazen revealed the well-preserved remnants of a complex ecosystem in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old sedimentary rock sequence in Australia.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Very exciting.
I see some people are still trying hard to prove the discredited THEORY of evolution. Kinda sad.
“Years ago, speaking in a tone of subdued irony for my benefit, Donn Rosen, a curator of ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, wryly summarized what is involved: “Darwin said that speciation occurred too slowly for us to see it. Gould and Eldredge said it occurred too quickly for us to see it. Either way we don’t see it.”
From an American Spectator review of “Darwin’s Doubt”
the tinier a life organism is, the greater likelihood that it survives the least hospitable conditions for life
Very interesting, particularly in view of the lack of sedimentary rock that old.
Did the bacteria live on O2 or methane?
Are they sure the rock wasn’t 3.4 billion years old?
Ping.
This is biogenesis. Though that God got life to where it is now is interesting inquiry for its own sake too.
The fossil traces are from sedimentary rocks of the Pilbara formation. At that age, sedimentary formations unaltered by geological processes are rare, but the do exist,
They do but imagine the odds against their preservation over such time and through so many plate shifts and restructuring. A whole lot of recycling going on.
Please, dry your tears, FRiend. ;-)
Far from being "discredited", the basic evolution hypothesis (speciation through descent with modifications and natural selection) is innumerable-times confirmed, making it a theory -- and that's about as close to "truth" as science can ever get.
So, let not your heart be troubled, there's no need for grief, the scientific theory of evolution is solidly grounded and confirmed too often to count.
It has never been seriously falsified.
So rejoice! Don't worry, be happy! ;-)
In fact, evolution can be seen every day in DNA studies mapping the occurrences and transmissions of mutations in everything from plants & animals to human beings.
When, precisely, all these observed mutations add up to separate races & breeds (i.e., dogs), sub-species, species, genera & families, etc. -- these are all matters of careful scientific definitions and debates.
For example, you might remember that Polar Bears & Brown Bears were recently reclassified from separate genera down to just separate species of the same genus.
Reason: it was discovered that Polar & Brown (Grizzly) Bears can and occasionally do interbreed in the wild.
By biological definition, natural interbreeding means they can still be separate species, but not different genera.
I believe the two oldest cratons are in Australia and South Africa.
A related fact is that half of all the gold ever mined comes from a very large meteorite that impacted what is now South Africa some two billion years ago.
Your arguments here sound the same as those of the Global Warming Alarmists.
That’s what I was thinking. Aren’t the ones they found near what would have been the shorelines of Australia?
Up till recently, the earliest evidence of life on Earth.
Thanks BroJoeK for all you do.
As would arguments on any scientific subject.
It's the nature of science itself.
But there are huge differences between the "Anthropogenic Global Warming" (AGW) hypothesis and evolution theory.
We begin with the fact that evolution theory was first developed independent of government grants or political agendas.
It was and remains purely a scientific exercise.
By contrast, from the beginning, AGW research was government sponsored and politically infused.
Second, evolution theory has been developed, tested and confirmed for over 150 years, while by contrast: the AGW hypothesis is only decades old, at most.
Indeed, prior to circa 1980, AGW was preceded by scientific & political fears of an imminent new Ice Age!
Third, as was learned in recent years, although AGW is based on huge databases of weather information processed through massively large super-computers, come to find out: much of the data was skewed and the super-computer programs were biased to produce dramatic results for political purposes.
More importantly, AGW has been grasped to the bosoms of world-wide leftists who see it as their next great train-ticket to world political domination.
FRiend, you may realize that the left's old slogans -- i.e., "workers of the world unite", etc. -- don't have the same, ah, cachet they did, say, 80 years ago.
So the left needs some new cause to propel them to absolute domination of every human on the planet, and they see "Anthropogenic Global Warming" as their new big ticket.
But no similar motivations exist behind the basic scientific theory of evolution.
Indeed, it is simply one of many related scientific theories which describe the natural world as we know it today.
In other words: if basic evolution theory is wrong, then so is all of natural-science, and that is a hypothesis for which there is no -- zero, zip, nada -- supporting evidence.
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