Slashdot Mirror

The scientists say these new findings support the theory that asteroids brought both water and organic compounds to the early Earth, helping lay the foundation for life on the planet.

Uhhh... I have a hard time necessarily accepting this. Another perfectly plausible hypothesis is that water and simple organic molecules are fairly common in the solar system (and perhaps beyond), and therefore it is not surprising for it to be everywhere. Earth formed in the right place and under the right conditions for a lot of it to condense into oceans, oceans that are hypothesized to have once covered the entire surface of the planet. These findings equally "support" this hypothesis, as do the findings of amino acids and water in some comets.

It seems to me that the best they can say is that these findings do not refute the hypothesis that asteroids brought water and organic compounds to Earth. There is plenty of geochemistry on Earth to make its own organic compounds and turn them into biochemistry. Citation provided.

look up toxoplasma gondii... actually here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma. People have tried to tie infestation with that parasite to increased car accidents, and even differences between cultures: Can the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, influence human culture?

"by any stretch of reality"...

perhaps not in this stretch: http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/07/28/rspa.2009.0080.full.pdf

only time will tell. The universe still has a great many secrets undiscovered.

free pdf of full text
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/07/02/rspb.2009.0807.full.pdf+html?sid=33180554-cb6e-4047-abd9-c3a16bc8667a

When I read papers about animals and language, I get the idea that the science is weak. Also, when I read Slashdot stories, I get the idea that the language skills of Slashdot editors are weak.

The Slashdot story quotes the Examiner, which in turn quotes this Discovery article: Monkeys Display Verbal Skills Quote: "... a response previously determined to indicate their acknowledgment that the familiar sound ordering pattern had been violated".

This BBC article is a better discussion: Monkeys recognise 'bad grammar'. Quote: ' "Simple temporal ordering is shared with non-human animals," he said. '. My impression is that the researchers are claiming something different than they actually have shown to be true. And, of course, the articles about their work are even more exaggerated.

The abstract in Biology Letters gives some useful information: Evidence of an evolutionary precursor to human language affixation in a non-human primate.

It seems likely given how soon life arose after the planet was cool enough to accept it.

The earth is 4.5-4.6Gyr. The first oceans finally condensed by about 4.4Gyr, and the earliest indicators of free living chemoautotrophic life are around 3.8Gyr. I wouldn't exactly call 600 million years "soon". (citation provided).

A good part of those 600 million years was geochemistry and basic biochemistry laying the groundwork of organic molecules to support life on a planetary scale. Unless you want to argue that the Earth did most of the work making the basics and then the planet was seeded like a petri dish, I would posit that it's rather unlikely that the Earth was seeded from an external source. (read the paper I just linked: it is one of the most comprehensive and logical summaries of the origin of life on Earth that I have ever read, providing well-founded explanations to a great many of the various problems of abiogenesis. While it doesn't refute the idea of outside seeding, it certainly refutes the necessity of it).

Two experimental tasks in psychology, the two-stage gambling game and the Prisoner's Dilemma game, show that people violate the sure thing principle of decision theory. These paradoxical findings have resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. A quantum probability model, based on a Hilbert space representation and Schrodinger's equation, provides a simple and elegant explanation for this behaviour. The quantum model is compared with an equivalent Markov model and it is shown that the latter is unable to account for violations of the sure thing principle. Accordingly, it is argued that quantum probability provides a better framework for modelling human decision-making.

The human brain is a complex organ. Unfortunately the kind people at the "Royal Society for Articles Only People with Money Can Read" would not allow me to review this research. I would have found this research much more compelling had they reported a much more thorough sample analysis. I'm going to predict that people from different walks of life would respond differently to the Prisoner's Dilemma game. For instance, if you did this on regular citizens with no history of jail time versus convicts serving sentences, I would expect you to have to adapt your model.

Because you encountered some percentage of "wishful thinking" does not necessarily make that a tried and true percentage unless it is true for human beings in different groups that may affect this decision making. If it truly is quantum mechanics at work, I would suspect that you would see the same percentage in convicts vs non-convicts, Russians vs Americans, women vs men, scientists vs priests, orphans vs parented children, etc. For you see, I'm going to make the assumption that people are deciding on wishful thinking based on their history of interacting with other humans.

I'm also noticing a disturbing trend in "quantum mechanics" being spewed whenever we don't understand something. I caution you that people in the future might look back on this and laugh that such crude research could in any way conclude that quantum mechanics is at work. It's almost as if we assume we understand other possible explanation so it must be the one we don't understand very well. We don't understand photosynthesis --> must be quantum mechanics! We don't understand the human mind --> must be quantum mechanics! etc. Am I saying quantum mechanics has nothing to do with these things? No. I'm just saying I have seen no conclusive proof.

Unfortunately, neither you nor I can assess what "203 decibels" means. That is because that is a meaningless phrase. Here is the information that the AFP left out:

• Where was the 203 dB measured? Was it measured at a reference range relative to the transducer, as is common practice, or was it measured at the dolphin? This implies to me that they produced a sound equivalent to 203 dB as heard at a 40 m range, but I am just guessing.

  The difference between the reference range measurement and the receiver measurement, assuming spherical spreading (which we're likely to see at a 40m range), is 20 log r, where R is the ratio of the reference range and the receiver range. If the dolphin is 100 m away from a source emitting 203 dB at a 1 yard reference range, it will be hit with acoustic energy at 163 dB (203 - 20 log 100).

• In what units are they working? Contrary to popular belief, decibels are not a unit, but rather a scale. Saying the dolphins were exposed to 203 dB is equivalent to saying they were exposed to 2 x 10^8. 2 x 10^8 whats? Watts? Micropascals? 20 Micropascals?

  By the way, the sound pressure levels you're accustomed to reading about as an land-lubber are probably dB//20 uPa -- i.e., measured in multiples of 20 micropascals. In underwater acoustics we almost always use dB//1 uPa -- i.e., measured in multiples of 1 micropascal. To convert from the in-air numbers to under-water numbers, add 26 dB. A 203 dB sound to an underwater physicist would be a 179 dB to an atmospheric physicist.

Unfortunately I cannot find this article on the Biology Letters web site to check the facts.

Here is a page for the weaknesses of evolution according to some people that want to play both sides. http://www.strengthsandweaknesses.org/Weaknesses/essential_weaknesses.htm

Hmmm... just looking at that page. I think they are a bit behind on the times. First, I will link to this paper:

On the Origins of Cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells by William Martin and Michael J Russell. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 29 January 2003 vol. 358 no. 1429 59-85 (PDF of the full textlink is on the right side of the page)

Now, to address the abiogenesis points from the page you linked to:

- The extreme improbability of obtaining any specific amino acid sequence needed for the proteins of life systems.

From the origin of the Earth as a solid surfaced planet covered with water to the first fossil evidence of biochemistry is a time span of a few hundred MILLION years, with an additional few hundred MILLION years to the first free living single celled organisms. After that, we have a couple BILLION years before we see more complex life forms. On those time scales, questions of probability seem moot, given the conditions on earth.

- The high probability of breakdown by hydrolysis of amino acid chains if they were to form in the first place.

Given the right conditions and enough time, this seems probable. The paper I just linked to has a very compelling hypothesis for how to keep new biomolecules in high enough concentrations for biochemistry to begin.

- No known way to achieve 100% left-handed amino acids in proteins or the 100% right-handed sugars in RNA and DNA - all of which are universal to life systems.

- All natural processes are known to produce a 50-50% mixture of left-handed and right-handed molecules.

Again, the paper I linked to has excellent, well-supported hypotheses about how the chiralities of biomolecules was selected.

- Photo dissociation of water vapor has been a source of oxygen since the Earth formed, and there is substantial geologic evidence that a significant amount of oxygen existed in the atmosphere prior to the advent of photosynthesis. Oxygen breaks down amino acids and sugars that are postulated to have formed!

The most likely origin of life is not at the surface, where Oxygen would be an issue, but at deep sea thermal vents. This hypothesis gives the best bet for a continuous energy source and influx of raw materials.

- There is no known natural source of the information that is present in all life systems. Random processes are never known to produce information.

No one argues that these processes are random. They are well within the laws of physics and chemistry, and, in being constrained by those laws of the natural universe, are not random.

Hmmm... I could keep going, but I don't have the time right now. Basically, a lot of those supposed weaknesses have been addressed and addressed very well by biochemists and molecular biologists studying the idea of abiogenesis and evolutionary biologists, ecologists, etc. studying other aspects of biology. The theory of Evolution is one of the best supported scientific theories mankind has come up with so far. The theory of abiogenesis is certainly gaining ground, and to date seems the most likely case (read the paper I linked for a lot of reasonable hypotheses as well as compelling evidence that supports them).