On The History Channel they sometimes run these “Crazy Talk” shows. I like to watch them as they keep my ability to be tolerant of “Odd Thoughts” open, while at the same time keeping the “Skeptical Skills” exercised. Often these cycle around various odd theories about Aliens. ( I have no idea why Aliens became a hot topic on a channel that’s supposed to be about history, but I presume it’s because more folks like watching “crazy talk” about space aliens then like to watch a show about Napoleon…)
At any rate, a recent advertisement had one of the Crazy Talk Stars / Darlings ranting on about how dinosaur bones were radioactive. How they were covered in lead paint in museum displays, and how this indicated that Space Aliens had (with a low voiced ‘perhaps’) wanted to clear the Earth of dinosaurs and replace them with humans (that they had quasi created via genetic manipulation of some sort). Never mind the roughly 50+ Million Years gap between the exit of the dinosaurs and the arrival of Hominids…
Yeah, pretty crazy. But fun to watch. And it does give a chance to play:
“Spot The Bogosity!”
What he clearly didn’t get (or didn’t care to admit) is that a “dinosaur bone” isn’t.
It is a rock in the shape of a dinosaur bone that “went away” millions of years ago. Water leaches away the calcium compounds in the bone and replaces them with mineral silicates. If the bone is in a place with Uranium or Thorium in the water, the bone is replaced with those minerals. The result is a U or Th bearing radioactive rock. No real surprise there.
Implications for Liquid Stone
What got me thinking, though, was the simple fact that this is rock formation from a liquid solution. It gives some ideas about how to make “liquid stone”. What it indicates is simply that metal silicates, in aqueous context, will displace Calcium Phosphate minerals. So one might conclude that a mix of minerals with some metal silicates and some calcium phosphates (and perhaps other calcium and magnesium mineral, like sulphates or carbonates) would eventually solidify into a mineral rock rather like that which is a ‘dinosaur bone’. A bit of experimentation with pH might be helpful to accelerating the process. In a way, the formation of dinosaur fossils is a confirmation of the potential to make liquid stone.
Silicates mobilized either by a process like that used to make water glass sodium silicate or via other acids like organic acids, then forming a cast stone when mixed with a basic calcium or magnesium rich material to make a cementicious matrix.
It looks to me like the process is likely to have many variations ‘that work’ and that it would be fairly easy to identify several that do. Furthermore, I’ve run into several patents that seem to show folks are rediscovering some of this technology. (Such as the one in that cementicious link that uses the byproducts of metal refining. The Egyptians did metal refining…)
Radioactivity
There is also a hint, here, that one could make an ion substitution system to selectively remove U or Th from water. Rather like a water softener, but concentrating a useful fuel rather than ‘hardness’ minerals. Would such a system be more effective than the one the Japanese invented using a specialized plastic? I don’t know. It almost certainly would not be cheaper than the present extraction of Uranium from deep deposits with a leaching solution. But a point to keep in mind for ‘someday’. We have a natural existence proof of how to capture U and Th from ordinary rain runoff.
How radioactive?
Well, here’s a video that finds about 200 counts per minute. Not all that high. (Then again, natural Th isn’t all that radioactive and natural U doesn’t spit out that much more). Enough to be an energy source? Maybe, but I think the selective extraction from the ocean would be cheaper. Less need to crush minerals…
In Conclusion
So that’s how I see things. A “Crazy Talk” advertisement for a show about space aliens nuking dinosaurs leads to an idea or two about extracting Uranium and Thorium from dilute solutions using ion replacement with water softener like ion exchange in minerals and the interesting fact that some folks use Geiger Counters to look for fossils.
Somewhere in the garage, buried in the old box of Cold War Preparation Crap, I have a Geiger Counter. I don’t remember what kind, or if it’s appropriate for fossil hunting, just that it takes a 22 V battery that may no longer be made ;-0 Maybe some time this summer I’ll dig it out and make a 22 V batter replacement power supply (ought to be just one or two chips and a transformer, plus a capacitor).
Given how wide spread Uranium and Thorium are, over the surface of the world, it might be fun just to see where it concentrates naturally.
Musings from the Chiefio 
History, Discovery, Animal – they all have some very fascinating shows (I have a Himilayan Cat, but did not know of its origins until watching Cats 101). But they are a commercial enterprise, so they have to make a buck. So yes, you get the kook shows as well. I rarely watch the kook shows.
I love the 360 series, Modern Marvels and Tank Battle series on History, Deadliest catch on Discovery, and of course the 101 series on the Animal Planet channel. Indeed, if one of those shows are on, I prefer them to commercial (or any other) programs.
But I do happen to know that the radio activity dinosaur bones show is a FACT! The aliens told me so when they abducted me. LOL
“I have no idea why Aliens became a hot topic on a channel that’s supposed to be about history”
Since the UN appointed an Ambassador for aliens in 2010
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-09/27/alien-ambassador
Natural radioactive materials easily leach out of igneous deposits and are concentrated and deposited in carbonaceous layers that they encounter. Most uranium ores are created in this manner and there are theories that this has resulted in natural critical reactions of great size. A natural thermal reactor. Bone is mostly carbon. pg
One of my early analysis was on noble gases extracted from a carbonaceous mineral rich in Th, U, C and H, and appropriately names “Thucholite” [“Noble gas anomalies in the mineral Thucholite,” J. Geophys. Res. 70, 703-708 (1965)].
We hoped to see evidence of the natural, self-sustaining critical reactors that Kuroda predicted:
[“On the nuclear physical stability of the uranium minerals,” J. Chem. Physics 25, 781 (1956); “On the infinite multiplication constant and the age of the uranium minerals,” J. Chem. Physics 25, 1256 (1956)].
Scientists at the French Atomic Energy Commission confirmed Kuroda’s unpopular prediction sixteen years later, in 1972 [”The Oklo phenomenon,” Naturwissenschaften 70, 536-539 (1983)]. http://www.springerlink.com/content/n556224311414604/
Instead, we discovered that carbonaceous material in Thucholite selectively adsorbs large amounts of the heaviest noble gas, xenon, from Earth’s atmosphere.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
http://www.omatumr.com
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/
I have stopped watching Discovery channel, National Geographic Channel, and all the other snake oil selling media.
That only leaves me with the internet.
Something is seriously wrong with our media, our political and scientific institutions.
Take the Scientific Society for example. They appointed a new fellow last month.
Curious about who they have chosen?
http://sonofsoylentgreen.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/in-case-you-missed-it-the-royal-society-named-a-new-fellow-last-month/
Ron: you inhabit some strange sites. ;-) pg
Except they are starting to find dino bones that aren’t fossilized. For example:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090501-oldest-dinosaur-proteins.html
I know what I think about 80 million year old identifiable protein. What do Y’ALL think??
As far as collecting radioactive material, I thought our coal power plants were doing that for us!!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
8>)
@Kuhnkat:
Somewhere or other I saw a statistic that there was more energy in the Uranium in coal ash than in the coal carbon… We really ought to be using it.
Oh, and I could see finding some dinosaur protein bits in fossils. Think leather… in a reducing environment. Now if they find any DNA, that would be cool…
@R. de Haan:
OMG. They made HIM a fellow? Never been right, constantly histrionic, crazy loon?
@P.G. Sharrow:
Yes, he does. Don’t click on the Spassfabrik link if anyone can see your screen, you are at work, or you don’t want the FBI guys watching traffic to spend hours there and get fired… ;-)
Nobody checks up on my surfin except my tom cat and he only talks to me, As long as the FBI is watching that site’s visitors then they are not wasting their time watching me! Damn I never even thought about checking out that link, must be getting old. pg
There are ongoing discussions as to whether what has been found includes hemoglobin.
Mainly it should be noted that the bones have NOT completed the transference to rock even after millions of years!!! On the original find the scientist saw what looked like dried blood vessels and rehydrated them successfully. The partial DNA results have been strenuously rejected. Tastes like chicken. There has definitely been DNA found in insects and plant debris found sealed in amber, but, this is more reasonable based on assumed age.
The “bogosity” runs much deeper than this on the topic of aliens. It’s quite a simple topic in that the answer is that there ain’t any! Some months ago you had a thread on aliens in which you waxed eloquent on the topic and it was all yawn, yawn, yawn for me. If you want to exercise those skeptical muscles, work on this topic as Fermi did: “So where are they?”. For 100 million years the Earth was a fertile oxygen-bearing planet perfect for colonization, but nobody came. What does that tell you about the density of alien civilizations out there — duhh?
A simple non-confrontational way of looking at it is that in all the plethora of galactic civilizations, there must be a first one. Guess what, the first one is also perforce, at the time of its arising, the only one. That’s us.
[ Reply: The problem with that ‘analysis’ is the speed of light. All it takes is to assume that the speed of light really is a hard limit, that energy really does rise so fast that even 1/2 of it is a practical barrier, then note that it’s 100,000 light years across this one puny galaxy. Every galaxy out there could have life in it and we will never know. Even inside this one galaxy there could be a million places with life, just not evolved to the point of space travel (rather like us… touching our moon once isn’t ‘travel’…) or evolved to the point where travel isn’t interesting anymore. One final note: How do you know they have not been here? They could be sitting in an observation blind right now… -E.M.Smith ]
In reply: The speed of light is not a barrier because a spacecraft with an acceleration of 1g will, in 1 year, achieve a speed so close to C that you (on board) can travel across the galaxy in just one year, spacecraft time. And as to your final note, we know they are not here because if there is one, there are many, and they do not all follow the same script. The only way they all behave the same is if the count is zero. This is the big leagues for those skeptical muscles.
@N.Z. Willy:
There are some other problems with the “we’re first” answer.
1) Prey species and predator species both evolve toward very quite species. For some odd reason, monkey make a lot of noise. It is highly likely most species ‘out there’ will have either the predator or prey behaviour, and not shout much at the world. Monkeys may not last long…
2) Our sun is relatively young. About 1/3 the life of the universe (as presently projected.. it maybe even older as we can’t see the outer edge due to speed of light limits…) Given that there as astounding numbers of billions of stars, the odds that the one that got out of the gate in the last 1/3 of the pack won the race is, er, slim to none.
3) Much more likely is that we’re just not very interesting.
4) Which implies a small observation group of a few dozen exo-anthropology students in an observation blind / ship; not a delegation and treaties.
5) Most life is likely to find that other planets with life already on them is toxic to them. That’s been the history of earth. As the Oxygen Catastrophe happened, millions of species died. As continents drift, then reconnect, populations isolated for just a few million years die of new diseases and / or bad interactions. Nothing makes ‘oxygen rich’ a feature to any biological critters but those that evolved here. Any that DID like oxygen rich would probably not like our viruses and bacteria.
5.a) They may be tied to the nature of particular star types. Just as we are dependent on a yellow sun with modest UV for Vitamin D production. We would do poorly with either red giants (not enough UV) or bluer stars (sunburn / cancers too much UV).
6) Once you have a really spacefaring cohort, the LAST thing you want to do is get stuck on a planet at the bottom of a gravity well again. You can’t get out of the way WHEN a giant rock fall comes. It costs $10,000 lb to put mass on orbit. It’s just a losing idea. Better to build self contained space colonies out of rubble / asteroids / comets and just park them around convenient stars.
7) That, then, makes an uninhabited star near your starting star much more valuable (nearby help, support, cultural exchange, technical exchange). Spreading too far out gives no advantage and brings costs.
8) Which then implies you have a length cubed issue as life spreads out into a volume that rapidly becomes very large. Species are unlikely to go 100,000 light years when 10 is enough.
9) It may also be that the ‘noisy ones’ don’t last long in the galactic jungle… We started making radio noise only about 100 years ago worth mentioning. Anyone 200 light years away still thinks we don’t exist. Anyone outside a 100 light year sphere couldn’t even have gotten an answer to us yet.
10) Between “Bad Idea” to make noise, noise not gone very far, and answers can only be from a very small part: We may yet be the focus of unwanted attention… Barely 1/1000 th of the linear dimension of THIS galaxy can even know we exist. That’s about 1/1,000,000,000 of the volume of space including it, and the local dwarf galaxy bits. It is sheer hubris to think that we can say “nobody ever visited” in the prior 4 billion years (as they could have found it uninteresting, or studied it and moved on) and sheer folly to think anyone out there knows that’s changed (since we’re here now) and notice of our presence is still very local.
There’s more, but those are the big lumps, IMHO.
Could we be first? Yes. But it is also possible for all the molecules of air in your room to go to one corner and stay there for 10 minutes. Just it’s so vanishingly small it’s hardly worth thinking about.
Far more likely is that they came, they saw, they put “Stupid Monkeys” in their species book, went back to the colony ships around a nearby star, and got their Ph.D. in exobiology and are teaching and going to dinner out at the next colony over… Expecting anything much more than that starts to stray into the land of Hubris….
In brief: (1) We’re dodos, not monkeys. And we rule, just as the dodos ruled, before those darn French came along. Fortunately for us, no French aliens will appear this time around. (2-5) The error you make is assuming that there is some finite probability of life (never mind intelligent life) arising, given friendly conditions. However, we have no basis to quantify the spark of life occuring, because we cannot be used in the sample, because our presence is required for the question to arise. We are required, so our sample size is zero. Therefore your other postulates 6-10, of this odds or that, do not arise.
Looking at it another way, can the spark of life be created in the laboratory? So far, no dice. There’s every reason to suppose that in a billion years of trying, with increasingly sophisticated technology, we still won’t be able to rub those sticks together to make life. Basically the chance of life spontaneously arising is zero. So how did we get here? How many universes have come & gone, devoid of life, before the impossible happened and we arose, and looked around us, proclaiming that this universe must be teeming with life. Ha!
Speaking of radioactivity in rocks: There’s an interesting conference going on at “Politecnico di Torino” in Italy as I write this – “The Atom Unexplored” – about (I quote their main page) “Two issues are addressed in two different sessions: Low Energy Nuclear Reactions and High Energy Nuclear Reactions.”
Browsing their pages, I found this paper about “Piezonuclear Fission Reactions in Rocks”. The measure elevated He3 emissions when rock is put under stress and write in their abstract: “our conjecture is that piezonuclear reactions involving fission of iron into aluminum, or into magnesium and silicon, should have occurred during compression damage and failure”!
Thoughts-
750M years of life is the ‘blink of an eye’, relatively speaking. People really do need to get a sense of perspective regarding their place in the Universe (and when I say Universe, I’m not referring to the little bubble we’ve thought of as THE universe for the past few decades, I’m speaking of ALL THAT THERE “IS” this side of death and ‘the spiritual’ — whatever that means;-)
Paradigms shift and change. Usually, in human terms, the shifts and changes have been gradual. Lately, the shifts and changes have thrown the current paradigm into a tissy. When the current paradigm is in a tissy people get confused and anxious. When people get confused and anxious thay say stupid things about everything, like CO2, and do stupid things, like building Chinese Giants and burning down their own economies.
Those old Dino Bone Rocks were painted? Bet the lead in the paint had some effect too. Lead is still BAD, right?
When people start watching Ghosts and Aliens on the History Channel, or ‘competitions ad nausium’ on the Food Network, then you can pretty much bet someone who doesn’t like them spiked the punch (or water) and is about to flush the toilet.
What made Rome fall? The water. What made the West fall? The water?
PS: Late Breaking Phantasm –
If the Defense Department is the designated hitter to make sure the USofA stays strong and is able to properly defend itself (and it’s vital interests around the World –after all no Nation is really an island, even if it is geographically;-), then why don’t we hear and see more out of this Department about what we ought to be doing to rebuild our economy? (I’m speaking about the economy we threw in the trash the past 20 years.) Let’s pretend we’re all a bunch of Generals, Admirals, and an X-CIA Chief who now has his finger on the button. Let’s say we’re sworn to do all that stuff we were sworn to do. Let’s say the economy is a mess. OK? Say something intelligent about something meaningful about how to fix and rebuild the things that protect and defend all the stuff you swor to protect and defend. Any suggestions? Adimral? General? Mr. Secretary? …. (the silence is killing me;-(
There just has to be something in the @#$@#% water!
@E.M.: That “hint” you say about replacing ions it is, as you know refers to ions exchange resins..….Well, bones and Uranium: Uranium is commonly present in phosphates deposits (calcium try-phosphate). So, “dust we are….and radioactive our bones will become” :-)
FBI…? They’re for pussies. ;-)
http://sonofsoylentgreen.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/see-mcgoo-i-told-you-they-assigned-me-a-satellite/
[ Reply and Notice: I generally try to run a fairly “clean” blog. Family friendly, if you will. At the same time, I’m all for freedom of speech and diversity of styles. Let folks choose what they want. Normally I would “edit” for an R rating more or less, and most of the key words I have in the SPAM filter are “naughty words” (which gives you an idea about what I care about and what I don’t care about; for example “denier” is not a banned word here, nor is Nazi.) With all that said: Deciding to let this comment through took a tiny bit of thought. First off, it has a sexual innuendo / double entendre. Secondly, the link has several “F Bombs” scattered through it along with some “soft porn” pictures (though well done). BUT: The story it tells is an interesting one. Either an “Agency” is doing surveillance or someone at “work” isn’t working so much. I think that matters. So, with a “You have been forewarned” and a “Not the normal style for here”, I’m letting this one through. Personally I’m not bashful about “soft porn”, “F Bombs”, rough language, or just about anything else; but the spouse is. So I’m sensitive to the fact that many folks don’t like their sensitivities suddenly jarred and try to stay “friendly” to all sides. OTOH, if there is an incipient move to censor the internet for “content” that will rapidly mutate into censorship for PC conformance and “deniers”, so needs to be resisted for all lest it be implemented against all. -E.M.Smith ]
The global climate debate has distracted us from changing fear-based energy policies adopted by world leaders in the mid-1940s.
We desperately need leaders – like former Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy in organizing the great creative talents of humans to confront the Sputnik threat in 1957 with the Apollo landing on the Moon in 1969 – to develop the energy (<b<E) stored as mass (m) so mankind can continue to advance.
Fear-based policies promoted by the UN’s IPCC, the EU, the UK’s Royal Society and the US National Academy of Science threaten our survival, as noted in this draft letter to world leaders, editors and publishers:
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-55
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
http://omatumr.com
@N.Z. Willy:
Clearly you are speaking metaphorically while I’m speaking evolution. We are monkeys, and of a very particular sort.
It is not an ‘error’ to think there is a finite probability of life. Everything we find points that way (and at ever increasing odds for more life.) Stick basic chemicals in an environment like space and you rapidly get the “building blocks” of life. Organic acids. Amino acids. Etc.
Put those same things in a tub of water and shake, some compounds of life form spontaneously. Spheres of membrane like lipids form.
Frankly, the science says it’s almost impossible not to get life forming in a reducing environment with moderate energy flows ( light, UV, heat cycling).
We use the heat cycling technique and the self assembling nature of the chemicals of life in PCR machines for DNA analysis / replication. It is not a theoretical.
Per speed of light: One Small Problem… To get your spacecraft to the speed of light will take functionally infinite energy…. Ooops… So you’ve got an interesting bit of math, but left out the physics… Now, take your ship going at just 1/2 C and have it hit the tiniest bit of space dust. That’s one heck of a gigantic explosion. IMHO, the practical limit on speed of travel will be set by materials and how much dust erosion / detonation they can take. Probably in the 100,000 mph range.
Per the behavioral argument: Need I point out that there’s a long history of records of potential contacts? That we ignore them does not disprove them. Need I point out that WE do study from blinds? Need I point out that WE have “domains of influence” and there is nothing at all to prevent some Greater Power from being dominant in this quadrant and having posted “Keep Out” signs for their study area (rather like we do)?
Skepticism runs both ways. We simply can not know if there are, or are not, Space Aliens at this point as both “stories” work. We can know that life of our form tends to ‘self assemble’ in an energy rich environment with a reducing atmosphere, and that once formed it evolves to higher forms. We can also know that those conditions are relatively common in the universe and that the numbers mean even a “one in a billion” odds means billions of “start of life” events.
Your dismissive argument reduces to “Life is highly improbable” and “We have no evidence of the probabilities”. Ignoring the conflict between those two… We do have evidence for the probabilities. Whole lots of “chemistry of life” happens spontaneously in the lab. We are on the favored path, energetically, through chemistry. There’s very little in life that is hard to evolve. Even the “complexity” argument is flawed as it assumes life started as a finished cell. IMHO, life started in a pond. No cell walls. That was a later addition. So you didn’t need all the nucleus and cell wall machinery. Free “swimming” mitochondria were likely the first ‘cellular’ life in a pond full of DNA chunks and metabolic cycles / and 1/2 cycles. Then a few million or billion years later the cell wall is invented. Later still we get eukaryotes and a nucleus. Look at the Archean group. Pretty simple machinery, really.
Look in the carbonaceous chondrites and you find pretty much all the materials needed for life, formed in space. Just needs a wet place with some energy cycling to set the self assembly in motion with increasing chemical complexity as the first step.
BTW, there is no “spark of life”. Just energy running down hill to entropy. Put energy into a chemical system, some of the materials get pumped up hill to higher energy states, then run down again. We’re on the ‘running down again’ side while plants are on the ‘pumping up hill’ side. All it really takes is a puddle of organics, and energy source (solar or geothermal) and time. Especially look at some of the Archean bugs that live on very simple chemical power. Just need a volcano to give the “fuel” and they do a minor bit of ‘self assembly’ out of common organics using that energy. Really simple metabolism. Really simple structure.
(BTW, I don’t see that as arguing against God or Creation. IMHO a God who creates the rules of chemistry such that life forms and then turns it loose is a much more interesting God…)
The odds of finding no other life in the rest of the Universe are zero. Period. Full stop. Basic biochemistry, physics, and math says so. It’s almost as certain that life of our level of intelligence evolved 10 Billion years ago “out there”. That implies that most of the place is likely controlled by a very advanced civilization and we’re primitive natives in a study reservation.
The argument about “sample size” is rather weak. We’ve effectively sampled no where beyond our planet. At present, the odds of life are 100% per solar system examined. There’s some evidence for primitive life having evolved on Mars, and the conditions are right for a couple of the major moons. We’ll have some better statistics in a few decades, most likely. So at best one can say that “Life does happen.” Asserting from that “but nowhere else” is one heck of leap off the cliff…
@Espen:
OMG! There goes my weekend ;-)
Piezofusion? What a concept…
@Pascvaks:
The “crazy talk” guy asserted the fossils were painted. I didn’t find any link searching on dinosaur fossil and paint; and the ones I’ve seen were not painted (frankly, I think, most folks studying the bones would be horrified at the idea of covering them with paint…)
BTW, it wasn’t just the water…
Roman women used a white powder on their faces as makeup. Yes, ‘white lead’…
Wine was boiled in lead kettles to make a lead rich seasoning widely used in cooking…
Lead cookware was common.
Ergot was used as a way to get closer to the Gods.
and so much more…. It was a long list of toxins they “hung out with”…
Per the Generals and Admirals: The report to The Commander In Chief. Think they would go against his “guidance”?
@Adolfo:
Wonder if I can arrange to be buried downstream of a radioactive mineral source? There’s something curiously intriguing about the notion of arranging things such that I fossilize and also get radioactive markers to make finding the fossil later an easy thing to do… Wonder if there’s a market for a cemetery with “fossil formation friendly” burial methods? :-)
@OManuel:
Unfortunately, I think the “Powers that be” have figured out it’s easiest to herd the cattle with fear than with freedom…
“What made Rome fall? The water. What made the West fall? The water?”
What made Rome fail: Taxes, corruption and… insanity by led poisoning?
What made the West fail: Taxes, bail outs, corruption and… drug use?
@E.M: It is not an ‘error’ to think there is a finite probability of life. Everything we find points that way (and at ever increasing odds for more life.)
You are a programmer, so you know there are no odds but certainties. Make the following experiment:
. Take any protein, say soybean cake .
. Dissolve it, destroying it to its components (amino acids) with NaOH or any other alkali at a pH over 9,0.
– You will get a solution. No more protein at all.
– Now, acidify it to pH=4,5-4,6 and Voilá! the protein will assemble again!
-“Matrix” is out there, its program taking care of it all.
– Some call that program orders ETHICS, and don´t like it, kind of “liberals” philosophy or “new age” way of life… but it does not matter, it keeps on running. Our choice? there are two options in the code: either blundering and getting all wrong and suffer the consequences (like playing the game of independence, like cancer cells do) or making it right and cooperating with the programmer following his negentropic software to avoid entropy : such a program he named it LIFE v.1.0
Download it now! You have this unique and FREE opportunity only every Platonic month, every two thousand years.!!!
Then there’s this. An all natural nuclear reactor and we have found evidence that there have been natural nuclear fission reactions in the past. http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/all-natural-all-nuclear
And here’s the thing that has always bugged me about U-235. 4 billion years ago there must have been about 37% U235. That is interesting because U-235 has a half life of 700 million years. That means that only 5 billion years ago there would have been about a huge abundance of U-235, as in so much that it would be unstable for there to be too much of it in one place. That would mean that the Earth must have started forming only very shortly (relatively speaking) after the supernova which formed the uranium. If you have 37% U-235 at 4 billion years and go back one more half-life, you are at 74% U-235 at 4.7 billion years. Earth must have begun forming within a half a billion years of the creation of the U-235 assuming that uranium has been here since Earth formed.
What that might ALSO mean is that a “nearby” supernova, one where Earth flies through the debris less than 500 million years after it happens, could pelt Earth with pretty significant quantities of U-235. U-238 is 40 times more abundant in the crust than silver. That means there’s a lot of uranium out there in space. But uranium is heavy, so I would expect it to have been mixed in with the mantle and core a little of it in the lighter volcanic rock of continental land masses unless the uranium arrived here later and in a more depleted state by later impacts after the continents had formed. I just find it interesting that Earth must have started forming so soon after the supernova that created the minerals happened.
“People have for 32 years observed helium with a mass of 3, as well as helium 4, in these basalts,” Herndon says. “Helium 4 is not a surprise; it comes from the natural decay of uranium and thorium. No fission need be involved. But helium 3 is a big surprise. It’s a fission by-product. No one knows how it could be made deep in the Earth. People think it must be left over from planetary formation.” He pauses. “No way. In the simulation we ran at Oak Ridge, we came up with a ratio of helium 3 to helium 4. Those numbers could have been anything, any ratio. But they turned out to be right in the range of the values observed in these basalts.” He looks up. “This ratio is compelling evidence. It knocked my socks off.” http://discovermagazine.com/2002/aug/cover
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2009/10/29-01.html Did earth go nuclear?
@George –
Maybe it only took six days?;-)
@EM –
“Per the Generals and Admirals: The report to The Commander In Chief. Think they would go against his “guidance”?”
Against his ‘guidance’? No! But EM, you’ve been there and done that, most of us have, when given ‘guidance’ one is always permitted to ‘consider’, ‘amplify’, ‘explain’, and if the final decision has not been made yet, and it’s not “Aye, Aye, Yes Sir!” Time, then one is honor bound, by one’s oath and one’s own integrity, to explain to the bloody moron we’re talking to that “this baby elephant won’t fly and if you can’t see that then I @#$#@$%% quit!” You must always comply with the guidance as you are given to understand the guidance and you must always tell the one giving you the guidance that he is a stupid idiot if you honestly think that is true, otherwise, you break The Code and are no better than the fool you are working for. In the end, we must all hang up our spurs or be piped over the side, sometimes it not our preferred time or location, it just happens. Life’s a real beach sometimes.
@George says:
5 May 2012 at 7:56 am
Sometimes the science we learn in school is based on misconception. pg
It is one interesting debate into which I’ve strayed. And rather than attempt to shore up one side or another, I’d prefer to point out that only one thing is certain. It is that our situation itself is uncertain. Let’s take the possibility of destroying ourselves off the table first. Really. The tectonic plates upon which our continents reside are slowly shifting. Subduction zones are subject to megaquakes, and the buildings that already exist in these regions are approximately impossible to retrofit in any kind of meaningful way. There are active calderas the supereruptions of which are overdue. Of course, let’s not forget the possibilities of earth-searing solar flares or life-extinguishing impact events. And to this mix we must add the fact that our solar system, which came from chaos, will revert back into that nadir long before the sun expands to the point where its radius exceeds the orbit of the Earth. Extensions of our so-called civilization must be established on other solar shores. We cannot stay here. And becoming interstellar isn’t nearly enough. The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are on a collision course. While we might have several billion years before the intergalactic catastrophe occurs, let us not continue in our complacency. The distances to the most nearby galaxies can only be expressed in hundreds of thousands of light years. Even enjoying the time-dilation of some kind of relativistic travel, such a crossing would require a multi-generational journey. Since we’d need to know where we were going, there would have to be probes send first. It could take each of them a million years to reach its destination, over a hundred thousand years to accomplish its survey, and another million years for us to receive the results. If we’re going to pull this off, we probably should have started yesterday. Let’s resume our debate about the esoterics of our existence after we have taken the necessary steps to assure its continuation. Can I please get someone to saliently second this motion?
Adolfo,
please don’t oversimplify the idea of protein production. There is an additional issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homochirality
http://www.godandscience.org/evolution/origin_homochirality.html
E.M.,
actually life does NOT just HAPPEN. It is not JUST HAPPENING!!! NOWHERE that we can investigate has life spontaneously HAPPENING!!! See the previous post to Adolfo.
I would point out that EVERY announcement by modern scientists about them creating life has simply been mix and match from optical protein taken from living organisms. A much more detailed Frankenstein. I am not telling you it can NOT happen spontaneously, BUT, the only PROOF we have of life is here on earth and there is no PROOF that it was spontaneous. Spontaneous is an ASSUMPTION of evolutionists.
This type of logic is what has gotten us the big bang with its faith based dark energy, matter, and black holes and Gorebull Warming among others.
@ kuhnkat
Perhaps life just happens naturally on Earth-like planets. Life is sustained there by an abundant stream of energy (radiation, particles and fields) flowing outward from the star’s pulsar core:
Releasing “Genie from the lamp” – shatters the ~67 year government barrier to information on Earth’s heat source – the Sun !
[“Neutron repulsion,” The Apeiron J. 19, 123-150 (April 2012)] http://tinyurl.com/7t5ojrn
The current demise of society and loss of confidence in scientists and politicians are the direct result of politicians fear-based decisions following the vaporivation of Hiroshima on 6 Aug 1945.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/05/04/week-in-review-5412/#comment-197877
The rest of this sad saga of misinformation is documented here:
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-55
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
http://www.omatumr.com
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about
PS – My comment on Professor Curry’s blog may dispel any erroneous assumption that science and spirituality are incompatible.
Kuhnkat,
See my second and third comments on the Socialism thread. Every argument for a supernatural creator is an example of erroneously assuming that some consciousness has primacy over existence. That requires an infinite regression: where did your creator come from? Some other, pre-existing creator? And so on?
To put it another way: I assume you will agree that we–the universe–had an irreducible starting point. You are jumping from the fact of existence–which we know–to an unknowable creator that explains nothing. I.e., it just leaves you with the same question: where did he/she/it come from?
However, I will grant you that the cosmology boys have left good science practice behind with dark energy, dark matter, etc. They should just come out and say “our current model doesn’t explain what we observe unless we apply huge fudge factors so we have to go back to the drawing board.” String theory is, as a famous man has said, “not even wrong,” because it hasn’t produced any testable hypotheses (that I am aware of). But just because we don’t have an adequate explanation yet doesn’t mean a supernatural one is required. The nature of light and how it functioned was just the same before the electromagnetic spectrum was understood (and those photon thingies are still a bit of a puzzle).
Personally, I think the universe is such a big place that there may well be life all over the damn place. But, I’ve read enough of hard sci-fi writer Larry Niven’s essays on the results of his and his author friends’ and peers several decades of trying to think through the issues of spreading humanity though space to think that we are unlikely to run into anything sentient here or elsewhere. It’s a big universe and, unless someone out there has figured out FTL travel, they haven’t come all this way to watch us from a blind. (If someone has economic FTL travel, who the hell knows what they would be up to? [But the SF guys have some guesses.])
Omanuel,
Yes, it MAY BE that life does occur naturally in the universe. I am simply pointing out that what is called Science is actually rife speculation with little backing it up. The problem with homochirality could be resolved tomorrow and the evolutionists could be quite happy, or not. The point is that we are fed all this BS as PROVEN FACT when it really is speculation.
There is no known method for LIFE to have occurred spontaneously. That statement does not preclude that it did. It is just saying our SCIENCE is LACKING and we have no mechanism or observations to back up spontaneous life.
There is no know method for evolution to have progressed from the unknown beginning to the current level within the time limits of the alledged 4. whatever billions of years theorized. This is why a certain well educated atheist allowed himself to be videotaped saying he would accept aliens having created life on earth AS LONG AS THE ALIENS EVOLVED!! He is realistit enough and well versed in the SCIENCE enough that he recognizes the current paradigm that we are fed simply does not work in the time frame given.
This is also a large impetus for the Science Community to continue to interpret everything possible as needing enormous time to have happened. It is also why people like Velikovsky are treated so poorly and their ideas rejected out of hand. Without the alledged billions of years for the earth to form it highlights how STUPID the idea of evolution really was and is.
Even the evolutionists are starting to admit that there simply isn’t a continuous record of evolution on this planet. The fossil record after 200 years shows 2 separate periods that are interpreted as evolution. This has engendered the theory of evolution happening in leaps. This makes it even worse based on the KNOWN ratio of bad mutations to good or at least neutral mutations. Having mutations speeded up by magnitudes would simply kill everything off UNLESS THERE ARE UNKNOWN MECHANISMS!!!
Again, there is little SCIENCE there. It is mostly speculation.
There is such a thing as liquid rock. It’s called Geopolymers. The guy who invented it believes it was how the pyramids were built. I think he’s got it half right. There are many blocks in the pyramids that you can see were roughly finished. Casting rocks does explain all the granite and hard rocks that are fitted so close you can’t get a credit card between them. Examples are in the galley to the kings chamber, the kings chamber and the sarcophagus. It also explains the close fitting limestone casing. It also would explain of why they stopped building them. They ran out of easily mined minerals to make the binder that is used to make the stones.
@ Mike Churchill “I assume you will agree that we–the universe–had an irreducible starting point.”
No. Why do you?
“You are jumping from the fact of existence–which we know–to an unknowable creator that explains nothing. I.e., it just leaves you with the same question: where did he/she/it come from?”
No. The creator may by its creation in this infinite universe.
“However, I will grant you that the cosmology boys have left good science practice behind with dark energy, dark matter, etc.
Yes.
@ kuhnkat “There is no known method for LIFE to have occurred spontaneously. That statement does not preclude that it did. It is just saying our SCIENCE is LACKING and we have no mechanism or observations to back up spontaneous life.”
I agree.
“There is no know method for evolution to have progressed from the unknown beginning to the current level within the time limits of the alledged 4. whatever billions of years theorized.”
I cannot accept or disprove that statement.
“This is why a certain well educated atheist allowed himself to be videotaped saying he would accept aliens having created life on earth AS LONG AS THE ALIENS EVOLVED!! He is realistit enough and well versed in the SCIENCE enough that he recognizes the current paradigm that we are fed simply does not work in the time frame given.”
The time established by several radioactive decay methods for the birth of the solar system is five billion years (5 Gyr) ago.
http://www.omatumr.com/Data/1994Data.htm
http://www.omatumr.com/Data/1996Data.htm
“This is also a large impetus for the Science Community to continue to interpret everything possible as needing enormous time to have happened. It is also why people like Velikovsky are treated so poorly and their ideas rejected out of hand. Without the alledged billions of years for the earth to form it highlights how STUPID the idea of evolution really was and is.”
The five billion year (5 Gyr) time frame seems to be well established, unless decay rates change with time of distances from the Sun’s pulsar core.
“Even the evolutionists are starting to admit that there simply isn’t a continuous record of evolution on this planet. The fossil record after 200 years shows 2 separate periods that are interpreted as evolution. This has engendered the theory of evolution happening in leaps. This makes it even worse based on the KNOWN ratio of bad mutations to good or at least neutral mutations. Having mutations speeded up by magnitudes would simply kill everything off UNLESS THERE ARE UNKNOWN MECHANISMS!!!”
There are always UNKNOWN MECHANISMS at work unless we know everything.
“Again, there is little SCIENCE there. It is mostly speculation.”
I agree.
Corrections:
1. No. The creator may be its creation in this infinite universe.
2. The five billion year (5 Gyr) time frame seems to be well established, unless decay rates change with time or distances from the Sun’s pulsar core.
@ Sam
Thanks for information on “geopolymers”! That is important information I had overlooked:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geopolymers
A good polymer chemist should be able to analyze blocks of stone in pyramids to see if they were formed as “geopolymers.”
Have you heard of any such analysis been made?
@Sam:
If you hit the link in the “Liquid Stone” hot key word in the article you will find an earlier article where I explored evidence for Egyptian liquid stone and covered Geopolymer.
@Kuhnkat et. al.:
Per the argument that we’ve not seen spontaneous formation of life therefor it isn’t happening or can’t happen: “Absence of evidence is not evidences of absence.”
All we can really say is that when we test the pieces of the chemical assembly, they tend to be energetically favored and tend to run toward the direction of self assembly of life.
Realize that once life forms, it changes the environment in ways that then prevent the formation of new life. (Oxygen removes the reducing environment, nutrients are made scarce, etc.) So to say we don’t see it happening now is not very convincing.
Per evolution:
I don’t really want this to turn into another “Does SO!” “DOES NOT!!!!” evolution vs creationism debate. They never end and get exactly nowhere. They are pointless. Frankly, the major reason they are a waste of breath is because a creator God could easily have just created the laws of nature such that evolution happens, so there is no conflict between creation and evolution. Neither one can defeat the other as they are NOT mutually exclusive.
With that said: We have LOADS of evidence for evolution leading to new life forms. It’s all over the place. Most strong is the genetic affinity maps of various organisms and the gene drift demonstrated in populations. Just looking at hominid fossils you can see it happening. Lucy was about 4 foot tall and very modestly developed in normal “human” features. We can see these consistently advance over time to become a 6 foot tall 100 kg modern with a brain case about double the size. The same is true for basically all forms of life on the planet (now, or in the past).
Just ONE example:
The Rutabaga.
It’s a hybrid of a turnip and a cabbage. Two plants with different numbers of genes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_U
Gives a detailed look at how the mustards, cabbages, and turnips cross to make 3 new families of species.
The Siberian Kale is in the same hybrid family as the Rutabaga. It has been recreated from the parent species. This is NOT a hypothetical.
The Polar Bear is a relatively new variation on the Grizzly (Brown Bear) and they can cross with each other. Examples have been found in nature.
The point? Evolution is going on all around us all the time, is visible in action, and it HAS made new species. Demonstrably so. (That typical classification schemes refuse to accept ‘hybrids’ as a species event does not change the fact that they are.)
Heck, I’ve made a new kind of kale in my back yard. Crossed a cabbage with a kale. The cabbage was glossy leaved, the kale had a ‘keel’ on the stem that was distinctive. I got a glossy leaved kale with a ‘keel’ on the leaf stem. Better vigor than the parents and much more bug resistant. Similarly I created a new squash. It’s an oblate pear shape and lime green. One parent was a lime green patty pan, the other a zucchini.
The point is pretty simple. Life does evolve, and visibly so. Life does make new species (often via an interspecies hybridization) but it is a much more rare event. Evolution is visible in real time in antibiotic resistant bacteria. New species is visible in real time in how the flu virus does a ‘reshuffle’ of genes and comes up with new variations each year.
Heck, you can even see the evolutionary step that made humans from chimpanzees. It is largely on chromosome #2. We have 23 chromosome pairs. Chimps have 24. They have two short chromosomes that got stuck together in humans as what looks like a set of two fused chromosomes ( has two crossing points) largely because that’s exactly what it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee_genome_project
Picture here:
And yes, for the inevitable “BUT how could the one lone new human reproduce if they were a new species!!?” the fact is that the species “barrier” is more like a species strong suggestion and very often critters that are closely related but with slightly different chromosome counts can reproduce. Eventually a new stable cross results often with one or the other parents chromosome counts and a new species is formed. That is how humans came to be. The first one crosses with their Chimp siblings and the stable one was the human form of Chromosome #2. It is not clear when the other gene changes happened, but inversions are VERY common changes on chromosomes.
The only reason for saying “We’ve never seen a new species form!” is because the folks making the claim have either not looked or rejected what they saw.
Brussels Sprouts, for example, were a spontaneous mutation in a field of Kale back in the 1800s sometime. Yes, it will cross with other kales. Given time, though, it would drift enough to not cross and be called a new species.
So please, can we skip the endless Creation / Evolution wars? Evolution happens. Clearly visible to anyone who looks. And a creator God who can think up evolution is, IMHO, a much more cool and clever God than one who has to hand craft each critter.
@T.L.Binninger:
You can take that as a second…
@All:
BTW, while most gene transfer is “vertical” from parents to offspring, there is a fair amount that is “horizontal”. Mostly in bacteria eating other bacteria, but even Planaria worms have been shown to gain the knowledge of a maze when fed a chopped up kin who had learned it…
There’s some evidence for “horizontal transfer” in organisms higher than bacteria. That’s part of why I’m not so keen on GMO foods. It really IS possible for some of those genes to get into your gut bacteria and perhaps then also into your guy lining cells.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
Not Good…
(Oh, and per the ‘handedness’ problem: I forget exactly which one it is, but there’s one or two odd molecules in living things that break the standard chirality. Also, all it takes is for life to evolve in a puddle of mixed stuff, with a slight selective pressure for one handedness over the other, and pretty soon all the stuff being made is of that handedness. Nothing requires early life to have been chiral, BTW. It may well be the result of a long series of simplifications. It is also possible that the early precursor sugars and amino acids were made chiral due to the presence of other stuff in the reaction area. Same way we promote one path over the other. Could be as simple as minerals with a chiral bias to the surface chemistry acting as selective catalysts. Like zeolites as a “molecular sieve” (zeolite is a natural mineral used in chemical synthesis in many interesting ways. Arguments of the form “I don’t see how it could happen so it can’t happen” are not very convincing…)
Oh, one other “BTW”: The bunnies in my back yard have evolved over just 6 or 8 generations. They are now smaller than when started (by about 1/2) and with a panda pattern. The originals were about equal panda (though only black and white – now they are in three color mixes) and solid (of only one tan color). I didn’t particularly “push” for those changes, they just happened. “Jack The Pirate” was a smaller than average bunny but managed to do a ‘Jackie Chan’ leap up the wall and then bounce off it from the boys side to the girls side. That probably was the start of the ‘smaller more agile’ bias… So yes, evolution clearly happens; and fast enough you can watch it.
The fact that they evolved does not in any way remove my presence as a “superior being” who has control of their fate, environment, and development…
Remember fellow cave dwellers, we’re still very much tied up and looking at the flickering light and shadows on the craggy back wall of our prison. Don’t you just love the pretty pictures and sounds when The Master gets real mad and jumps up and down, and throws those light bolts, and empties his bladder so much we nearly drown in our chains?
I have a feeling this is Heaven. I have another feeling: we don’t want to know what Hell is like.
Being a single cell life form is pretty exciting. Wonder what life would be like if we were bigger, and smarter, and could move around. Wonder what life would be like if there were ‘girl’ cells and ‘boy’ cells –not sure what would happen, having a one cell structure doesn’t leave much room for a brain or imagination. Oh well, tomorrow is another day!
LIFE is wider than we can imagine. Do not forget that “settled science” definition of life it is and it has been biased from the time of the “enlightenment”, only for purposes of economical and political domination, which we are now realizing. At the beginning bankers/lenders and their “initiated” butlers fulfilled their goal of taking the land properties of the church, then taking them from the hands of the nobility, and after and right now, from the hands of local people all over the world. From governments, academia to “science” and even philosophy, has been extensively contaminated and poisoned. One of the last examples is the fallacious “precautionary principle” or Jerome Ravetz´s “Post-Normal Science”.
Thus we should revisit ALL those “products” made by this “international corporation”, and their marketing and merchandising made possible through the appropriate “sales channels”, through the greed of ignoble people and through the naiveté and silliness of the rest, who just “repeat”, parrot like, those “truths” from the “educated elites” as it is “cool” to show one´s “intelligence” and “deep knowledge”.
Olliver,
observations have been reported that the decay rate of radiactive elements on earth actually changes a.) with earth’s distance from sun and b.) some days preceding an energetic solar flare. What do you think about these experiments? The solar flare relation has the potential to shift the isotope clocks in both directions, much like it is known for the C14 method for a similar reason.
@Hugo M: You are right. Dating is just one more of the many tales….
Chiefio, snip if you think this is going to lead to a furball, but I’d like to engage Oliver Manuel through at least one more round on the primacy of existence vs. the primacy of consciousness.
@omanuel–
That was a bit cryptic and I want to make sure I understand you. Are you saying that the “creator” of life as we know it is a being that was “created” by the universe itself–i.e. that the universe is itself conscious. Or are you saying that the “creator” created the universe? Or something else.
If the second: “Existence exists” is one of three fundamental axioms of philosophy. Look around you. That there is something rather than nothing is inherent in your every perception, your every thought, your every act. All depend on the fundamental fact that there is something, as opposed to nothing. I used the term “universe” in my previous comment to refer to all of existence. Whether you think that is an inadequate term or not, my point is that “existence” had no beginning and no creator. Any attempt to prove that “existence” did not “exist” at some time in the past must fail, because it must assume the existence of something before “existence” came into being that brought it into being. But the existence of such an assumed “creator” requires an infinite regression loop.
If the first, or something else, well, I’ll wait for any clarification you care to provide.
By the way, I read your Apeiron paper and found it very interesting. I haven’t formally studied physics since High School more than 25 years ago, but I look forward to learning more about your hypothesis. Do you have any links to a general overview of the iron sun hypothesis written at a level accessible to the educated layman? (How big is the neutron core? How big is the iron shell? What is the evidence besides the exotic Xenon and neutrino levels? etc.)
@ Mike Churchill
1. Consider the concept of God as another way of describing the great reality (universe) that surrounds and sustains life. The idea of God and Universe being the same came from the Bhagavad Gita. That is an attractive concept for something that is infinite and timeless.
I referenced that in the paper, “Is the universe expanding?” J. Cosmology 13, 4187-4190 (2011): http://journalofcosmology.com/BigBang102.html
2. The Apeiron paper cites experimental data from analyses of meteorites (1975), the solar wind (1983) and Jupiter (1995) that independently point to an iron-rich solar interior. Hundreds of other analyses on meteorites, planets, solar ejecta, solar flares, solar neutrinos, etc point to local synthesis of our elements and formation of the Sun on the supernova remnant.
Get Fred Hoyle’s autobiography, “Home Is Where the Wind Blows”(University Science Books, Mill Valley, CA, 1994, 441 pages), and you will see how abruptly the interior of the Sun suddenly changed from iron to hydrogen after the A-bombs ended the Second World War:
In describing a conversation with Sir Arthur Eddington on a spring day in 1940, the late Professor Fred Hoyle reports:
_a.) “We both believed that the Sun was made mostly of iron, . . .” (page 153)
_b.) “The high-iron solution continued to reign supreme in the interim (at any rate, in the astronomical circles to which I was privy) until after the Second World War, . . .” (page 153)
_c.) “when I was able to show, to my surprise, that the high hydrogen, low-iron solution was to be preferred for the interiors as well as for atmospheres” of stars. (page 154)
@Mike Churchill:
As I understand the idea, it is just that there can be a self creating consciousness. The “Ommmm” of reality “wishing itself into existence”. I suppose you could paraphrase it as “In the beginning was the consciousness that spoke the word and created reality, including itself.”
A form of “spontaneous generation” writ large and philosophically.
As Physics has run off to things like 10 dimensional phase space (and more sometimes) and we only live in 4 of them that we can sense, there is plenty of room for a ‘higher consciousness’ in the other dimensions choosing to “think into being” these 4 as a model / reality…
My favorite example of the way “our reality” is a bit daft involves the P orbital of every atom. It is roughly shaped like a couple of teardrop shaped balloons jointed at the point. That is the iso-probability map of where the electron may be. All well and good, except…
There is a non-zero chance it may be at almost an infinite distance from the nucleus way out there somewhere. There is a ZERO chance it can be exactly on the mid-line between the two bow tie parts. Now think about that for a moment. The electron can be on either side of the nucleus, but NEVER crosses the mid-line… Ooops….
The Josephson Junction device works based on the quantum mechanical tunneling that lets that happen, so we have physical devices that depend on that property. I think that makes it pretty clear that we’re a subset of the total reality (or we sense only a small part of it). Something doesn’t add up in our world.
Given that, the idea of “reality” in toto, including those other parts, “thinking itself into being” as we perceive it is not so far fetched.
Put in more picturesque terms: We may just be a mental model of an alternative reality thought into being by the higher dimensional consciousness of total reality.
While I don’t know if I believe it, I see no way to demonstrate that it isn’t that way.
Hope that helps more than distracts. It’s not a particularly easy thought process to explore (but feel free to explore… it’s more interesting than watching the Socialists destroy global economies or see the masses herded by AGW Panic Mongers into the financial pens to be plucked…)
To the average guy on the street, the beauty of a universe with multiple demensions is that if the one you’re in gets you too down you can always escape and go somewhere else. You don’t suppose the folks who invented multiple demensions were depressed do you? Maybe they were Celts who stopped by their local Pub to down a few before staggering home to the wife and kids? Or not, we didn’t discover everything.
FWIW, the biggest problem I have with Indian Philosophy is the language. I have to look every word up and connect the definitions and the definitions don’t tell me when I’m entering and/or leaving a different paradigm. I’ve truthfully found it easier to ignore Indian Philosophy this time around, and I haven’t quite decided if I want to come back next time with the preprogramed ability to make sense of it all. Life is too short to do it all in one go and that, in my mind, is why people are so different and why it’s so hard to find someone we can really talk to and understand.
@Pascvaks: Easy!: “As above so below”. For example: What are we made of?: Carbon, oxygen and hydrogen and a few bits of Nitrogen…any resemblances above?
About dimensions: First of all, dimension IS SIZE.
@Adolfo-
A thought on size. A singularity is a ‘something’ (as opposed to a ‘nothing’). It explodes. Gravity that once was infinite in this mini-universe disapates and eventually no longer influences the expansion, the ‘whatever’ continues to expand but eventually stops due to loss of momentum (or not). The mini-universe is now a ‘something’ in another dimension, let’s now call it a ‘string’. Etc. Etc.?
Maybe our mini-universe is on it’s way to becoming a ‘string’ in another dimension?
Aren’t you glad you’re immortal and can go anywhere and do anything at anytime in this Playhouse called The Universe? Immortality would be mighty painful if we didn’t have all these Heavens to romp around in forever and always. I’ll bet we can even be on different levels and at different places on the same level cause I can’t think of a good reason why we couldn’t.
@E.M. and Omanuel,
Sorry to be nonresponsive on all threads all week. A bad migraine knocked me off kilter and off line. Only have a few moments this evening….
I haven’t read Oliver’s linked paper yet (and will comment further on his statement once I have), but my initial thought on E.M.’s postulate is that any attempt to prove that our universe is the mental model of an alternate reality thought into being by some higher dimensional consciousness would also run aground on the necessity to rely on the axioms of existence and identity while then assuming one or both doesn’t apply halfway through the argument. If that assessment is correct, then it would be a religious position–i.e. not susceptible to proof. As such, it does not appear to be of any use or value to those who are concerned only with objective reality, whatever our current limitations may be in understanding all its myriad wonders. Rather, it is a position that at best would lead to more infinitely regressive navel gazing. (But feel free to show me where I’ve made a mistake in my off the cuff reasoning. I’m no expert on quantum mechanics.)
Mike Churchill,
Your argument that the universe has an irreducible starting point is just as speculative as those who claim there is a creator. You have no observations and no facts to support that point of view. In fact, the idea of a Big Bang can only reasonably reduce to something having been somewhere to explode which means there was something before the BB. Basically we don’t know and CAN’T know with what we have at this time.
Unless you are one of those who claim that there is an inherent BIAS in the something from nothing that causes the special conditions for the earth and life here??
Or maybe you are one of those who believe in infinite universes where everything will happen at least once??
Of course that is only a couple of the many speculative ideas that have been advanced to explain our current existence.
All pure speculation.
Oh, when did I argue that there is a creator?? I may do that if I ever understand the arguments better, but, not today.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
omanuel,
4 billion, 5 billion, 6 billion, the problem is that STATISTICS which the scientists love, give numbers exceeding the alledged life of the UNIVERSE at around 13 bilion years for the creation of life and evolutionary development of us. The number of possible combinations amongst the chemicals that needs to go happen under conditions supportive of their continued development, ASSuming the unknown mechanism isn’t intelligent or BIASED, means it didn’t happen.
Some have tried to suggest that the universe developed accidentally with a BIAS toward life. Why would that happen?? The number of points in the BB that has to be in a specific order, timing, magnitude for this bias to have occurred is even worse odds than the ones for the development of life given our known universe.
Nope, a couple of people have actually tried to compute the odds of life happening accidentally or by chance and the numbers are ridiculous.
EM,
you did not spend much time looking into racemic mixes and the other links I put up. The combinations for LIFE do NOT happen without the presence of the correct optical material.
The popular experiment that produced the alledged proteins of life had two problems. The first is that the conditions to produce the proteins also destroys them so the experiment had to have a trap that allowed the created proteins to be removed. I accept that there could have been a special “place” where this could actually happen in nature. Low probability, but possible. The second and more important problem is that the produced proteins were mixed chirality. All life on earth we have checked are homochiral. NO ONE has produced homochiral without the use of homochiral material.
I will wait for this before committing to the idea we happened accidentally.
I agree that absence of proof is not proof of absence. I agree that we may stumble on the solution for the optical proteins tomorrow. Until then it is speculation and claiming it is or has happened is unsupportable.
EM,
your bunnies have “evolved??”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Be serious man. What mutations have happened in your bunnies!! They have bred fruitflys for about a hundred years. Fruitflys have a life cycle of DAYS!! They have observed mutations and only a couple were even vaguely considered positive. All mutations died out. This is what we are seeing in current animals. Virtually ALL mutations are negative and quickly remove themselves from the gene pool.
Apparently you are considering natural selection, where conditions help the organism select for particular combinations ALREADY PRESENT in the genome, as evolution. This is alledgedly a PART of evolution. Selecting for preexisting combinations is not introducing anything NEW nor modifying anything old. I think one of the famous studies was a tropical bird and bill size. The evolutionists always talk about how the bills went from small to large based on a change in food supply. For some reason they don’t talk much about how even after the birds appeared to all have the different size bills, birds with the original size would still be born and reproduce and with availability of the original food supply they would start becoming more numerous. Not a mutation or evolution but a shift in selection in the rich ALREADY EXISTING gene pool.
EM,
” Now think about that for a moment. The electron can be on either side of the nucleus, but NEVER crosses the mid-line… Ooops…. The Josephson Junction device works based on the quantum mechanical tunneling that lets that happen, so we have physical devices that depend on that property. I think that makes it pretty clear that we’re a subset of the total reality (or we sense only a small part of it). Something doesn’t add up in our world.”
it couldn’t be that QM is as incorrect as everything that went before??
All science is wrong. Some science is useful.
Unfortunately we get tied up with what is useful thinking that how we believe in it is the truth when it may be as wrong as all the theories that it displaced. My favorite example is phlogiston. Apparently it was an active theory being “fitted” to observations up to the day it was replaced. People talking about Quantum Mechanics, Evolution, Big Bang, AGW and others exhibit all the fervor and absolute BELIEF of religious converts. Seriously, IT IS WRONG!!! We may not know how and why for decades, but, it is one of the things I am more certain about!! 8>)
Not long ago the model of the atom of miniature solar systems was the reality. What is being done in high energy physics is so far divorced form reality and so heavily based on statistics I wonder how we have ended up in this kind of fantasy world!!! Mathematics and computer modeling have definitely assisted it though.
EM,
you are familiar with computation and information theory. Evolution and genetics IS information theory in the physical world. Have you ever heard of a program that was improved through parity errors or a malfunctioning routine overwriting sections of another program with useful results?? Mutations improving the genome is even less likely even considering SELECTION being available to cull the mistakes.
You mentioned that moving from asexual to sexual reproduction is conceivable. I agree IF mutations actually could do it. Let’s move a little closer to home. There have been numerous experiments in cloning. In ALL attempts of cloning an organism using only a single donor there have been problems. For quite a while they did not know why there were so many problems with messed up development of the clone. Not too long ago they found why cloning with a single genome ain’t as easy as it would seem. In natural reproduction some of the instructions for one set of genes is used to control the timing of development of the expression of the genes from the other partner. If you use only one set of genes you are missing some instructions to stop development of specific areas. Dead is the word. Again, there will eventually be a way around this. Again, how did it develop naturally in a short enough time to fit in with every other quite difficult thing that has to happen for chemicals to become thinking individuals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_imprinting
You might find this paper interesting:
Click to access AML_3497.pdf
I believe he is arguing that life is a violation of entropy or the second law and does it reasonably persuasively.
EM,
I realize I missed your most important statment:
“(Oh, and per the ‘handedness’ problem: I forget exactly which one it is, but there’s one or two odd molecules in living things that break the standard chirality. Also, all it takes is for life to evolve in a puddle of mixed stuff, with a slight selective pressure for one handedness over the other, and pretty soon all the stuff being made is of that handedness. Nothing requires early life to have been chiral, BTW. It may well be the result of a long series of simplifications. It is also possible that the early precursor sugars and amino acids were made chiral due to the presence of other stuff in the reaction area. Same way we promote one path over the other. Could be as simple as minerals with a chiral bias to the surface chemistry acting as selective catalysts. Like zeolites as a “molecular sieve” (zeolite is a natural mineral used in chemical synthesis in many interesting ways. Arguments of the form “I don’t see how it could happen so it can’t happen” are not very convincing…) ”
Sounds very reasonable, but, where is any kind of observations or evidence?? Again, speculation does not get us anywhere.
What needs to be shown is not that there are bits of non homochiral protein in life but that there is ANY life that has NO homochirality. The other thing that would go a long way to damping my enthusiasm for this point is if it could be shown that there is naturally occuring homochiral nonliving stuff.
Sorry, still laughing about the EVOLVED bunnies!!! You aren’t the first quite intelligent person I have run into that mistakes selection for evolution, or, used evidence of selection for evidence of evolution. There simply isn’t any NEW INFORMATION (as opposed to DAMAGED information) in the genetics of your bunnies. If you thinik there is I would suggest that you have full gene scans done on them. The experts would be quite eager to see evolution in real time.
Nothing but a Babilonian tower confusion of tongues, words. Find the truth, it is not esoteric, it is out there carved in the symbols of the eternal tradition.
@Pascvaks:
Multiple dimensions was created to fix problems with the math of quantum mechanics, as I understand it. I’m not so sure I believe in all of it ;-)
Per Indian philosophy and language: Not only is Sanskrit a PITA, but the Veda’s have some odd bits in them. The technical ones have some interesting ways to do math, but they are sometimes weirdly complicated at it. I’ve tried whacking at it a few times, but always given up as something more interesting with less effort came along ;-)
On Singularities:
There are two kinds of them. Black Holes where everything falls in and never comes out, and a White Hole where everything comes out and nothing falls in. The only White Hole we know of is the Big Bang at the start of time. IMHO they are two sides of the same object.
@Mike Churchill:
A family member used to have problems with migraines. Was prescribed a new drug for them (about a decade ago) and they slowly went away. Also avoids some particular foods. It’s worth looking for patterns. Best of luck with it.
Comments tend to run async anyway. Sometimes things will pick up again on a year old thread ;-)
Going down the philosophical rat hole:
The first problem you have is that there is no way to prove there is an objective reality.
I’ve not found any way out of that. Even “I think, therefore I am.” is a bit of a dodge…
For that reason, I generally think that ALL philosophy is rampant naval gazing…
So I just Assume there is an objective reality, and that my senses detect it. Anything beyond that is ‘recreational use only’ ;-)
@Kuhnkat:
I am serious. Evolution does not depend on mutations. They are the sporadic seasoning, but it is recombination that does most of the evolving.
Under strong selection, you can get a shift of genetic mix in 5 to 10 generations. At the end of 30 generations you have gotten the maximal response. I’m at about 16 generations now…
The original genetics came from two different lines. Separated by about 100 years. Different genes in each set. Mix them, you get different critters. Select on those difference, you get evolution.
Line One was a medium large sized tan solid bunny with grey eyes.
Line Two was a “panda” pattern, medium sized, black / white, black eyes.
I now have a SMALL sized, panda pattern, mix of at least: Tan, Black, White, Brown, Golden, and with eye color from black to light grey. Oh, and the very soft fur that Line One had with short ‘guard hairs’.
If I had done the selection deliberately, we would call this a selective breeding program. I didn’t. They changed on their own in response to their environment.
Furthermore, due to a cat deciding to thin them… the present youngest rabbit has longer ears than prior generations.
That is evolution.
It does not take millions of years. It does not require mutations.
So yes, selection within the established range of available genes IS evolution.
In fact, it is the largest part of evolution.
After that, there are a half dozen other major methods of change that rank ahead of point mutations. There are ‘translocations’ for example. And ‘inversions’. They change which genes are activated when, but don’t actually change the gene (most of the time). Then there are ‘horizontal transfers’ and… well, let’s just say the popular notion of a mutation being Step One is very very wrong.
(I only had upper division genetics at U.C. and that was back in the 1970’s, so there may be more interesting stuff added since then.)
ONE small example:
The Rutabaga. It is a cross between a turnip and a cabbage. Study:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_U
We have recreated Siberian Kale (similar cross) from the parental species.
So that’s an existence proof of 3 species families created from cross species hybrids from 3 other species families.
The “species barrier” is more of a “species strong suggestion”.
While I find the whole topic highly interesting, if you intend to make this into a long discussion of it, I’d rather make a new posting laying out some of those “methods of evolution” in more detail first.
Per ‘programs’ evolving: Yes, there are many. It is an interesting field with great promise:
Click to access genetic_algorithm.pdf
For more exploration, see:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=computer+programs+that+evolve
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=genetic+algorithm
Life is not, in any way, a violation of entropy. All we are is a ‘heat engine’. We take energy and move it downhill, in complete accord with entropy. Along the way, some chemicals are moved uphill. Absolutely in keeping with entropy. UV hits an oxygen molecule and increases the energy in that molecule. That doesn’t violate entropy either. Things CAN move “uphill” when energy flows in.
Per Chirality:
It simply isn’t a problem. There are all sorts of reactions with slightly different ratio of reactants and products. All it takes is one winning the race. I can’t make it any more clear, or simple, than that.
An example of metabolism of an L type drug:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11259570
http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Paper/6791579.aspx
Some bacterial uses of L type sugars for immunity mechanism:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1432-1033.1990.tb15473.x/abstract
Note the “L”, that’s the Levo form.
There’s more, but frankly I don’t find it very interesting.
Yes D forms are much more common. Yes, L forms ARE used in come critters and for some purposes. NO, none of it matters at all. Yes, steroisomeric rock like catalysts can form:
http://www.devileye.net/catalog/glow_discharge_detector/stereodifferentiating_hydrocarbon_conversion.html
So all it takes is that the folks doing “experiments” didn’t have any zeolite like rocks in their bottles. I’m not going to get excited about that. Realize that any difference in ratio in one spot then makes a catalyst that biases ongoing selection toward one stereoisomer. “Your case” basically reduces to “At ALL times and in ALL places there was NEVER any concentration other than EXACTLY 50/50”. I find that the harder case to accept.
All it takes is that the first “bug” to make a sugar only made one kind, and the “bug” that ate it grew more, and more “bugs” ate them, and only need the R enzyme, so were energetically favored by not needing to make both R and L enzymes. Pretty soon everything is doing R and the L forms are just mostly wasting your time.
Also, please realize that NONE of this is an argument for, or against, creation.
A “creator God” can just as easily make D or L life. Just as easily create evolution, as not.
The whole “Levo vs Dextro” backwater is just a waste of breath.
Or, in short: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
And yes, lots of evolution can happen without mutations. In fact, THE biggest change between use and Chimps is that Chimp chromosomes 2A and 2B had a failure during mitosis, so our chromosome 2 is their 2A and 2B fused with two centers. That first HUMAN then had one choice, to mate with a chimp with a different chromosome count. The human line resulted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee_genome_project
Sure, since then MOST of the point mutations were ‘not so good’. But some were. So we got bigger, for example. Still, the species creation event was the enhancement of one thing: Neotony. With that ONE change came almost everything that makes us different from Chimps.
And it was NOT a point mutation that made us.
Nor does creation via evolution state that a creator God was not setting up the system.
Frankly, I find the whole attitude of “science vs religion” artificial and offensive. IMHO the study of nature and science is just the study of how the very best programmer did the very best job.
At present, the entire universe can “evolve” out of a set of equations that can be written on a 3×5 card. Now THAT is impressive coding!
EM,
“. In fact, THE biggest change between use and Chimps is that Chimp
chromosomes 2A and 2B had a failure during mitosis, so our chromosome 2 is
their 2A and 2B fused with two centers.”
This is SPECULATION!!!! You and the people who told you this have ZERO proof
that this or any of the other BS they shovel happened. Whether it is micro,
macro, or magic, is simply semantics and I won’t shovel semantics with you
and waste both of our time. I would also point out that chimps were a
PARALLEL evolution to the human. That is, they developed from similar
ancestors to us. They were in no way our ancestor any more than we were
theirs IF we evolved.
http://evolution-101.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-did-humans-evolve.html
“So, humans and chimpanzees are both descended from an ape-like concestor.
When did the lines split into human-only and chimpanzee-only lines? The
answer may not be as cut and dry as you might think. The best theories based
on the fossil evidence indicate that our concestor lived between 5 to 7
million years ago, at which point evolutionary forces caused one population
to evolve human-like characteristics while the other line evolved more
chimpanzee-like characteristics. However, new evidence has just been made
available that shows by examining the human and chimpanzee genomes that human
and chimpanzee ancestors diverged and then converged, before diverging for a
final time less than 5 million years ago. Genetic analysis suggests that
humans and chimpanzees evolved into separate species which then interbred,
forming a hybrid species which then bred back into one of the parent
populations. It’s not clear whether this human-chimpanzee hybrid returned to
the human or the chimpanzee population, but the molecular evidence is clear
that the hybridization did happen- the X chromosome has a particularly recent
connection to the chimpanzee genome. This means that human-chimpanzee hybrid
males would have been infertile, but the females were not, and thus returned
back to the parental population, mixing chimpanzee and human genes each time.
This new study by the Broad Institute in Massachusetts is scheduled to be
published in Nature later this year, but the results have been made available
on the Internet, so I’m sharing the scientific cutting edge with all of you.”
Nice speculative fairy tail backed up by the same style models Climate Science and BB theory uses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolutionary_genetics
Here they show that there is only 2% difference in the genetics between chimps and humans. Unfortunately this is already old manure. Again that link I gave showed that at least SOME of that 97% junk DNA is control information. Since they have not run this the 2% difference is most likely a minimum. The 2% is only in the coding, that is the actual structure and not the control code of when, how long etc. development occurs.
Sit down and compute how many changes it would take to change a scale into a feather and then tell me how many millions of years it would take with the known mutation rates. Then give me YOUR excuse for no transitional fossils.
My definition, your bunnies are perfectly normal bunnies with the same number of chromosomes and all major and minor features. There is nothing new except a few of your point mutations that probably make no difference to the function or look of the bunny and haven’t added or subtracted to the amount of information in the genome, just minor changes in the values contained.
Try this to understand what I am saying.
Take 10 dies with 4 sides covered with various numbers and symbols. Start picking them up and dropping them and recording the positions. You can compute the total number of combinations. I
do not consider the results mutation, but, apparently, you do. The difference is that unless the dies are damaged, modified, removed, or added to there is no change in what was originally designed.
You claim that reorganizing the dies are mutations. I disagree. You claim that damage, miscopies, etc is mutation. I agree, but, am waiting for evidence as opposed to speculation as to whether they can actually create something viable and new.
New information can be positive or negative. The majority of mutations are negative. Really negative are quickly purged due to their killing the organism or making a major change in survivability. Minor negative can build up in the genome. In the past it was claimed that 97% of the genome was JUNK or not used. Since those expostulations it has been found that some of that JUNK DNA is actually control information. (see the previous link on one parent controlling the development of some of the other parents selected features explaining the failure of cloning) It is only reasonable that there would be more information needed to control the development and running of the organism than the simple structure, or coding, so, it may be there is very little junk dna (my speculation). So how do you get development without destruction?? That is, there are mechanisms to insure correct copies. Some good mutations will also be erased as they are changes the genome doesn’t know about. How does it know to allow good and not bad?? Obviously it doesn’t and more negative mutations are collecting than good in the areas where there is no back up or copy check. Sit down with the currently accepted numbers and see how many generations before the genome is more negative than positive.
Unless you can come up with a new mechanism not currently known we should be pretty decrepit based on the assumed age of our genome and the mutation rate .Here are some guys who say it much better than I can:
http://creation.com/time-no-friend-of-evolution
Yup, fits the entropic model a lot better than Consensus Evolution.
So, you are stuck. How can we get such an unbelievable number of positive, mutually supportive mutations without negative mutations interrupting?? The math ain’t there. Now, you obviously don’t think this is a problem as I am sure you have been through this logic yourself. You may even have considered that many of these major changes in the organism are happening during the same time period. I mean, we are talking going from fish to land animals for one so there are changes going on in many systems at the same time.
Rebuilding a nuclear submarine into a spacehsip while continuously operating would be childs play compared to what you are claiming happens with RANDOM CHANGES THAT ARE AT LEAST EQUALLY NEGATIVE!!!
Of course, what was the mechanism before genetics evolved?? Why do the evolutionists arguments seem to start and stop with modern organisms that invariably already have genetics?? This is where a number of geneticists have lost their belief in evolution. Every discovery of a new feature in our genetic structure enormously increases the complexity of the path that would be required, not to mention the time, for this to have evolved. Again, Dawkins is probably smarter than I am and he realizes that there simply wasn’t enough TIME for man to have evolved on earth. Heck, there wasn’t enough time for the genetic structure as we know it to have evolved given some rudimentary level!!!!!
We have an unknown of how homochiral protein came into existence. One questionable observation is not a good base and does not establish the mechanism.
We have a total absence of knowledge of how, assuming homochiral components happened, they combined and eventually became an organism. Much speculation and no observations or experiments. We have had several experiments where scientists have played parts bin assembly with genetic material and the media claims creation of life. Huge misconception.
We have a total lack of knowledge of how hypothetical organisms produced the genetic structure.
Finally now that we have genetics we can start to actually compute probabilities and find that even if the earth had perfect conditions it would take longer than the earth was in existence for random mutations of any type to produce a human or pretty much any other animal living today.
Oh, have you looked into the work on the genetics of insects and bacteria captured in amber and salt dated at a really long time ago?? Sorry, apparently once a good genome is established it sticks around. Kinda like the coelacanth and others thought to be extinct that have been found!! Oh, and the chemical makeup of the amber itself?? Pretty much the same. Wouldn’t you
think there would be some changes in 95 million years?? And since changes are incremental, shouldn’t we see at least a FEW examples of those transitional forms THAT WERE SUCCESSFUL.
But hey, your bunnies evolved in 16 generations. Sorry if I am not impressed.
http://www.mhrc.net/ancientDNA.htm
http://whyfiles.org/008amber/molec_bio.html
http://phys.org/news189695597.html
The discussion here is that they have found NEW fungi, bacteria, and insects in amber, salt, and other long age deposits. One of the researchers has a patent based on one of his new bacteria. Kinda removes the possibility of contamination. They have also found organisms such as mosquitos and bacteria genetically identical to modern organisms with minor point mutations
different.
So, all your evidence of genetics gets strained again with the necessity of such a fragile thing surviving in only somewhat special conditions for millions of years. Or, I have come to believe that all the circular reasoning and poorly established dating is a crock and it just ain’t so.
http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/Encyclopedia/12fos04.htm
Down in the strata section I will point you to that scholarly term overthrusts. Have you read any realistic mechanism for OVERTHRUSTING thousands of square miles of sedimentary rock INTACT from below later layers of strata to on top of them?? Yet, this is the bilge evolutionists expect us to swallow.
Another fun one is:
http://evolutionfacts.com/Evolution-handbook/E-H-12a.htm
down here we find an recap of Lyle’s work that originally dated and sequenced the strata BEFORE radio dating. Seems he was using the number of modern species found in the layers to decide how old it was. The older the layer the fewer the modern species. We apparently still are using his general dating with name changes to protect the innocent. Pretty sad when you realize that a couple hundred years later we realize there isn’t that much difference between the number of modern species found in most of the layers.
“The Cambrian has invertebrate (non-backbone) animals, such as trilobites and brachiopods. These are both very complex little animals. In addition, many of our modern animals and plants are in that lowest level, just above the Precambrian. How could such complex, multicelled creatures be there in the bottom of the Cambrian strata? But there they are. Suddenly, in the very lowest fossil stratum, we find complex plants and animals—and lots of them, with no evidence that they evolved from anything lower.”
“It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families, appear in the [fossil] record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.”—*George G. Simpson, The Major Features of Evolution, p. 360.”
Lack of evidence and all that. Funny how there is lack of evidence of evolution everywhere we look while there is abundant evidence of DESIGN!!!
“”The time required for one of these invertebrates to evolve into the vertebrates, or fishes, has been estimated at about 100 million years, and it is believed that the evolution of the fish into an amphibian required about 30 million years. The essence of the new Darwinian view is the slow gradual evolution of one plant or animal into another by the gradual accumulation of micro-mutations through natural selection of favored variants.
“If this view of evolution is true, the fossil record should produce an enormous number of transitional forms. Natural history museums should be overflowing with undoubted intermediate forms. About 250,000 fossil species have been collected and classified. These fossils have been collected at random from rocks that are supposed to represent all of the geological periods of earth’s history. Applying evolution theory and the laws of probability, most of these 250,000 species should represent transitional forms. Thus, if evolution is true, there should be no doubt, question, or debate as to the fact of evolution.”—Duane T. Gish, “The Origin of Mammals”
in Creation: the Cutting Edge (1982), p. 76.”
When you accept a hypothesis you really need to evaluate the reality of what it means in the real world.
Scan down and read the section on “Rocks Are Dated By Index Fossils”. Turns
out that isn’t how it was really done either!!
The preCambrian has only the occasional algae and soft organisms. So, what do we find in the Cambrian immediately following it??
“”Until recently, the oldest fish fossils known were from the Middle Ordovician Harding Sandstone of Colorado. These were of ‘primitive’ heterostracan fishes (Class Agnatha) which are jawless. The Vertebrates were the only major animal group not found as fossils in Cambrian rocks. “[The 1976 discovery of heterostracan fish fossils in Cambrian is discussed in detail] . . This discovery of fishes (vertebrates) in the Cambrian is without question the most significant fossil discovery in the period 1958-1979. The evidence is now complete that all of the major categories of animal and plant life are found in the Cambrian.”—Marvin L. Lubenow, “Significant Fossil Discoveries Since 1958,” in Creation Research Society Quarterly, December 1980, p. 157.”
You want hard headed realism here it is. From algae to “all of the major categories of animal and plant life” in no time at all. What were you telling me about your bunnies evolving in 16 generations again?? I think you need to feed them more Darwin and Evolution books, they are lagging.
“”Just as fossils of most of the other land plants have been discovered in Cambrian deposits, so it is with the flowering plants. In 1947, Ghosh and Bose reported discovering angiosperm vessels with alternate pitting and libriform fibres of higher dicotyledons from the Salt Pseudomorph Beds and the Dandot overfold, Salt Range, Punjab, India. These are Cambrian deposits. They later confirmed that further investigation confirmed their original report, and the same results were obtained from the Cambrian Vindbyan System, and the Cambrian of Kashmir—these Kashmir beds also contained several types of trilobites. The review articles of Axelrod and Leclercq acknowledge these findings.”—Marvin L. Lubenow, “Significant Fossil Discoveries Since 1958,” in Creation Research Society Quarterly, December 1980, p. 154.”
My favorite:
http://exchangedlife.com/Creation/polystrate.shtml
http://exchangedlife.com/Creation/rebut/poly_rebut.shtml
Polystrate trees are trees that extend through millions or hundred of millions of years of sediment. Differing excuses are offered with the most plausible being that the tree petrified and then the layers are layed down.
Yup, a fully grown tree petrifies in place and then stays unbroken as a hundred million years passes. Of course, when did trees first show up on earth?? Now realize that trees, not giant ferns, only showed up about 360 million years ago.
http://www.bible.ca/tracks/rapid-formation-coal.htm
http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?
_adv_prop=image&fr=ie8&sz=all&va=polystrate+trees
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystrate_fossil
The Wikipedia link has the Gospel presented. It is a great bit of arm waving. Various explanations for how trees can end up upright and dead with the roots intact and at least partially buried. Unfortunately, as mentioned in the Creationist lit, they don’t explain how this trunk sticking out of rapid sedimentation can then become fossilized before rotting or being destroyed over the next few million years!!! Gee, I wish I could use flimsy excuses like that and get a PHD!!!
They close with examples of trees COMPLETELY covered in short time. Where are the MILLIONS of years of layering?? I assume they are implying that these trees will fossilize while covered and then could be uncovered for the long period sedimentation. Uh, how long does it take to fossilize again?? After that length of time wouldnt they be in sedimentary ROCK and not something that would wash away?? I also like the difference in length. They talk about lengths up to 12 feet and the trunks in the strata are up to 50 ft. HUGE difference. I think the petrified forest is a better example of what happens to trees petrified and exposed for millions of years. They get eroded and broken up just like the mountains!!
Basically the “science” of strata and fossil dating is a messed up hodge podge from way back that has never had a good house cleaning to find out what really might be worth keeping. The strata is out of order in many areas and missing in many areas. The fossils are not consistent per layer. The dating was established prior to carbon and radio dating and without the much more extensive work we have now and has never been systematically tested with blind experiments where the daters do their best on samples they know nothing about to give a baseline of possible dates. It has never been done any more than Climate Science has gone back and done the experiments to quantify empirically the actual efficacy of CO2 and other GHG’s in the environment.
Read that whole page and tell me what evidence there is for evolution in the
Physical record again??
Maybe we can argue about how long fossilization takes and under what conditions another day.
Now, to really put the nail in I would ask you, why do we think men and many hominids are so young or at least not as old as the dinosaurs and others?? The obvious answer is that because they aren’t found in the older strata or ANY strata with the “older” fossils. Even with the mess we see in the alledged science of strata you would think if the earth was young we would see man and other modern animals mixed in with “old” fossils. In the official records we do not.
The problem here is with confirmation bias. If human fossils are found there are three explanations. They were buried there later by human or natural forces. The strata is is identified. It is a hoax. There is NEVER any real investigation of claims like, oh, fossil footprints with dino footprints.
Human bones intermixed with “old” fossils. Human artifacts and bones in coal beds, detritus from drilling oil wells, water wells, mines… Simply put, no one is ALLOWED to introduce evidence that is contradictory to the established facts no matter how shabby those facts are and how interesting the new evidence. I have played that game with several people with reports on the net of finds from over 100 years ago to recently and they simply claim the reports are scams, fraud, etc. In their minds they CANNOT POSSIBLY BE REAL!! Yup, a LOT like Climate Science. It is how hard you BELIEVE that counts.
My last word:
http://www.greenpacks.org/2009/03/12/scientific-proof-that-humans-did-not-evolve-from-chimps/
@ kuhnkat (15 May 2012 at 7:49 am) –
Thoughts:
-Ref EM’s points – Ditto!
-Ref the Bible (Genesis, etc., Old and New Test.) – Remarkable isn’t it? But gee-wiz, is that “All there Is?”
And the Koran, the Life and sayings of The Last Prophet, gee-wiz, is that “All there Is?”
Came to a conclusion of sorts, sometime ago, we’re here to teach and learn. In the process of doing that we ‘Live a Life’, and we won’t know what we actually taught or really learned until we get to the other side and ‘watch the reruns’.
I’ll forego the 4 hour lecture and merely say: It doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong if there’s no way of knowing who’s who. It’s academic! You won’t get a BIGGER reward in the hereafter for insisting the Bible is right, OBL didn’t get a harem of a million virgins for his lopsided interpretation of Jihad and the life he led. Life’s a beach, enjoy what you can, endure what you must, teach and learn what you are able; don’t get too attached, it doesn’t last long; and, don’t take any of it too seriously, we’re all of us probably dead wrong about it all anyway.
I know that probably doesn’t help. But I “felt” I had to say it cause if I didn’t I’d fail to do something I came to do, and now that I’ve done it, I feel a whole lot better; like the way you felt when you said what you did, know what I mean? I’m telling you, this place is crazy! (Life! Talking about Life!;-)
PS: (While out recharging my lungs with the foulest of weeds…)
Pascvaks – NOT “Passive” but PA, SC, VA, KS or Himself, Herself, She, and He (where they were born;-)
Pascvaks,
where exactly have I referred to the Bible as a basis for anything I have stated?? I realize that there are few references in this area from people who are NOT associated with Religion, BUT, that is not necessary to look at their FACTS!!!
Address their FACTS NOT the assumptions, mythologies, misunderstandings…
Although modern science discredits that there was any human life during the time of dinosaurs there has been a good deal of evidence that could possibly suggest otherwise. Just thought I’d throw that out there.
When’s the last time you saw a show about Napoleon on the History Channel!!!?? Our choices are between Ancient Aliens (which has ancient right in the name, and still contains history, even if it is stirred in with a tablespoon of crazy), or American Pickers =P
@Larka; Kind of like the SiFi channel that runs World Wrestling. or the Weather Channel that spends much of its’ time on history. We have Direct, over 600 channels and nothing worth watching. I generally have Fox News or Business on just in case the world comes to an end. Don’t want to miss That! ;-) pg