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Yet Another Are We Martians?
Quite a lot of people have been submitting the Wired article about the "discovery" of two strains of bacteria that could be extra-terrestrial in origin. Carrying along with that beat, the Boston Globe has a report about where life on Earth came from, and whether it was Martian in origin. *Rant* The Wired article in particular makes me cross. Two strains in question, to my knowledge, have been known by biologists for at least a couple decades. The fact that they /might/ be able to survive extra-terrestrial conditions doesn't mean they are extra-terrestrial. In fact, the environments where bactera like this are often found, like deep sea vents, are in many ways just as "bad" as extra-terrestrial travel. Perhaps it's a pot-kettle situation with me, but bad science coverage irritates me greatly. */Rant*
My older Siblings have always told me I was from another planet! :D
In case of Emergency, Curl up in the Fetal position, and lick a Bible for comfort!
CNN has an article, too.
i bought a wooden whistle
but it wooden whistle
so i bought a steel whistle
but it steel wooden whistle
Hmnnn, well I have been feeling a little green lately.
Blender And Linux Fan
I agree Hemos. but then why did you post it? This whole life coming from mars thing is a sensationalist tactic to get people interested i think :/
While it does sound plausible...it's a really really long reach. There are just to many variables to the rock launching scenerio. I think I have to put this one in the "Umm Ok,Next theory" box. But I do love a good theory of origin
GIHM -The light at the end of the tunnel is only the oncoming train.
Seriously, just about anything "could" survive interstellar space, under the right conditions. (If you were to cryogenically preserve a human, and lob them out into interstellar space, they'd be just fine. Until they hit something, that is, at which point they'd fragment over the landscape and make a bit of a mess for the locals to clean up.)
There is one other point to consider. Just as it's dangerous to mix matter and anti-matter, it's dangerous to mix reality with journalism. Both have to be kept seperate, at all costs, by powerful magnetic fields.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There is some sci-fi spacey movie coming out this year (I can't rembember the name) and one of the premises of the movie is that life on Earth originated on Mars. I wouldn't doubt it too much if there is some stealth marketing going on here.
I think what we are talking about here is yet another example of circular reasoning. There are bacteria that could survive the trip so they must have made the trip. There is a serious logical disconnect there that is not easily rectified.
This type of sensationalism is the worst kind IMHO because it give the complete wrong impression of legitamate research. By setting up J.Q. Public to make the wrong assumptions you are in effect creating a truth.
There's only one thing that could give a solid (though not irrefutable) indication that Earth life originated on Mars: we go to Mars and we find a number of varieties of life, only one or two of which biochemically match the major categories found on Earth. Articles like the Wired piece are a waste of bits.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I remember reading that the things they thought were fossils actually weren't, according to other researchers, and the biochemical compounds they had found could also, according to yet another group, be formed by processes other than life. After all the smoke cleared, it seems like only the original group of people who claimed to have found these fossils still believed that they actually were fossils, and none of the other scientists in the field.
However, all of this Life Started on Mars stuff is mainly hype, because they don't have anything else exciting to post about scientific discoveries. The prospect of extraterrestrial life is sure more interesting to most people than most scientific discoveries that have a lot more backing.
This is just something a lot of media will be talking about right now, now that they don't have a Y2k bug to hype.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
It's a shame no one else has noticed the second article Wired posted a little while later...
They Published from Outer Space
AP
3:15 a.m. 13.Jan.2000 PST
The same astronomers who reported on Wednesday they had found a tough but peaceful pair of bacteria that might have been able to survive the arduous trip from Mars, back when the Red Planet could have supported life, have also discovered that a paper copy of Wired magazine is also capable of surviving the trip. From this they theorize that Wired is from Mars, or possibly Uranus.
Sargent
Basically, the idea was that the Earth got hit by another planet, at a fairly oblique angle. The show argued that this would explain why the Earth has an iron core (we got most of the iron from the other planet, in addition to the one we had already), and so on.
Since the impact was so cataclysmic, everything on the pre-impact Earth (Earth Mk I) got annihilated, and everything on the impacting planet gets killed too (since both planets get liquified).
My question is this: if we assume that the moon-creating impact happened, then WHEN did it happen, and how does that affect the possibility of life arriving on Earth from elsewhere in the solar system?
I mean, if everything on Earth (even bacteria) got killed only a couple billion years ago, it makes it somewhat unlikely that anything could have arrived from Mars post-impact, given the purported rates of Mars Rock Impacts mentioned in the article . . .
I dunno; it struck me as interesting.
I have no
Okay, so these two mild-mannered bacteria have what it takes to survive a trip from Mars. The real question is what else they could have survived. Without extrapolating too much, we can also guess that they have what it takes to survive trips from all kinds of other places! Populated planets on other solar systems! The future! Alternate dimensions! Middle Earth! If I don't see an item on CNN by this evening with a title something like "Slashdot reports bacteria from the future" I'm going to be very disappointed.
Whether going into a debate of whether some deity/deities (don't bother me with your beliefs and I won't bother you with logical reasoning :-) ) somehow magically produced this universe, I'll just say that the organic-material-exchange-scenario is possible and completely feasible. Comets for instance are known to contain organic molecules. There exists huge clouds of organic molecules in space composed of eg. ethanol.
Yes, the bacteria in question have been known, but so has copper and silicon! For some reason they just didn't make processors with it thousands of years ago. It's a matter of putting pieces of the puzzle together. And that's science.
Of course one can't say that the bacteria has stayed exactly unchanged during those millions of years, but the fact that there is some strain of bacteria which fits the requirements for some theory is a scientific finding. Suppose they hadn't found any such bacteria? It would have been an argument against the interplanetary-micro-organism-migration scenario. IMO this is a scientific finding, and to label it as "bad science" is only a sign of ignorance or stubbornness or both.
In open discussion, eveyone's opinion should be heard. Certainly, some posts are more relevant to the discussion topic than others. Yours is, unfortunately, irrelevant, and totally unhelpful in remedying the problem that you perceive. Suggestions, rather than profanity, would increase the information content of your message.
What's so FSCKing important? I just don't get it.
kwsNI
if you cryogenically preserved a human, they wouldnt be 'just fine'. when you freeze human tissue (like most other animal tissue) water in the cells cytoplasm freezes first and makes tiny dagger like ice crystals which punch through the cell membrane(destroying the cell). you may be 'preserved' but youre also quite dead.
This seems all a bit convoluted to me. Just because it's possible that life originated on Mars and then travelled to Earth doesn't mean it did, or that it really even matters.
Current thought on the matter leads us to believe that life will begin given the proper conditions. (i.e. hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, etc... with a little electricity too).
With this in mind, why couldn't life have originated on both planets, perhaps many times on each planet? If, given enough time, and the right conditions, life will start, then why do we insist on saying that life started with a single cell that then started all of life? There could have been many, many original cells.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
The real story is that the last 2 *publicised* missions to Mars were shot down, along with dozens of secret missions from several terrestrial nations that have missile technology.
Just because we were able to land a few objects into Martian wilderness without incident means nothing, they got their defenses up and now we can not visit until an interplanitary war is fought and won!
Is everybody forgetting that all of those aircraft shot down in the Nantuckett Triangle happened when the flight plans were filed in time for the Martians to target the triangle and fire an intense energy weapon to destroy the aircraft?
These events are not the work of bacteria!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I read a good book on the subject which I think should be recommended reading to all conspiracy/"aliens on earth"/"unproven scientific hypothesis" buffs out there : Carl Sagan, "The Demon Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark". Although there's plenty in there to disagree with, he makes some excellent logical points of how incredible science already is without having to invent hypotheses based upon almost negligable circumstancial evidence, with no scientific rigor, and convincing ourselves it's true.
In this case, we go from "bacteria can survive acceleration and radiation" to "therefore life may have originated on Mars", (Ok, and the circumstances make it possible). The ability to survive such extreme conditions is probably why it survived on Earth in the first place. They choose to focus on the most fantastic possibilities, how are we to maintain our scientific objectivity when those who are our "proxies" and report the science to us focus on the aspects of the discoveries that are the closest to our fantasies and fail to report any other possible explantions for their discoveries before they have even begun the task of elimination.
Ok, perhaps I'm being a bit extreme here, but I just think we should rule out the probable and the likely before we start believing in the highly improbable, even if the fantasy stories sell so well.
Salocin.com
Given how much interesting real stuff is going on in science all of the time, you'd think that Wired would have no trouble finding stories to write. Instead, they seem to have consciously decided to focus on "fringe" stuff (cold fusion, anti-gravity, etc.), publishing long, credulous pieces that parrot various crackpot's claims that they are being "oppressed by the scientific establishment".
Now this article is nowhere near as bad as some of the stuff they've put out in the past, but it seems like further evidence of something I've long suspected: they are using science writers who both don't know and don't like science. Clearly it takes some goofy X-files type stuff to get their attention.
The irony is that the demographic reading Wired is probably much more interested in science, and in a much better position to understand and appreciate non-stupid science coverage, than your average readers.
C'mon anyone who has a bit of a scientific mind
knows this article is a big load of crap.
Just try to imagine it. You are Bart the
Bacteria, you live on Mars. One day while
you're walkin' around, a big meteor hits (It
had to be quite a big one, or a very fast one...
it was to launch pieces of debris into space.)
It hits next to where you're standing, but you're
lucky you can deal with the heat and the impact,
and while you cling hard to the rock on wich you
stand you are hurled into space.
Now in space it gets real tough. Luckily you need
no air and radiation can't hurt you...
Clinging to the rock you notice you are lucky,
you're apparently heading toward that little blue
planet over there.
When entering earths atmosphere you thank father
nature (remember you're from Mars, mother nature
is from earth) that he's blessed you with this
heat shield that saved you life once and is now
saving it again. You als thank him that not only
you are equiped to survive in near vacuum, but you
can also survive the highly corrosive oxygen (you,
also being known as smart Bart, know that this is
not so common as one might think, because most
life forms need "oxygen (XOR) nooxygen" in order
to survive. ) that surrounds your new home planet.
Now the landing was easy... You're a tough guy
and the G-forces from the impact mean nothing to
you. (if you land on solid ground) If you were
to land in water your rusty and trusty heat-shield
is going to protect you from the hot steam...
"Well", you think, "here I am, the toughest living
being ever. I will do good for this planet..."
If anyone interested how this story ends,
just let me know... i'll gladly tell you the end.
(Just to get you pondering it envolves some
stupid "scientific reporters" and some people
having a brain the size of a dried grape...)
Still can't believe any sane person can believe
this crap...
J.
Some psylocybe mushroom spores can survive in space as well. You don't hear these over-dramatic public science writers claiming that we're descended from trippy alien 'shrooms do you.
Whats popular science tripe like this doing in wored anyway? I thought it was a tech mag?
As far as I know these kinds of theories have been around for a long time. But lets examine one quote.
>"They don't cause any disease, they are very >peaceful."
Have you ever known a malicious bacteria? I can just see it, walking down a back alley going home and getting mugged by that damned bacteria.
Just something funny that crossed my mind.
If you truely love the memory, you must set it free().
Even if the parent cell(s) were to have come from Mars, who really cares? Natural selection would have had distinctly different results on two separate planets. Our planet had a totally different environment, resulting in an extremely diverse ecosystem. The selection of life that has originated on this planet is completely unique to it - regardless of where the parent cell came from, we (and all the other life forms here) are most certainly a product of this planet.
-Price
Funny, but a /. editor calling for fact verification strikes me as sorta...pot/kettle With the huge number of unverified stories cascading from /. for hemos to get on a soap box about someone else's journalistic style, or lack therof is well damned funny......
Everyone knows that God created the world and the heavens, night and day... Well, I guess every good Christian knows that.
Earth is of course the Greatest Computer of All Space and Time, destined to compute the Question to Answer of Life, The Universe, and Everything. It was designed by the hyperdimensional computer Deep Thought after giving the answer "42" to the lab mice. It was designed by the famous custom planet construction service of Magrathea featuring the Award-winning fjords of Scandinavia designed by Slartibartfast.
I don't know what all this talk of "microbes" and "asteroids" is.
Thank you Douglas Adams.
A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
"They" always talk about the beginning of life on earth, how just the right chemicals were present, and then there was a lightning flash and presto! life was formed. My question is, did this only happan once? Why not many times, even thousands or millions? And why does it not happen today?
I could've travelled here from USA. Therefore, I was born their. Cool, now I can claim US Citizenship.
There's a less sensational article on the BBC's website.
In any event, I suspect that most every planet has taken a few really big hits at one time or another.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Am I the only one who remembers Scarface?
CNN is owned by TimeWarner.
TimeWarner is merging with AOL.
AOL is populated by martians. Surely we won't admit they're regular Merkins like the rest of us, right? Ok, maybe they're merkins, but surely not Americans? C'mon people, back me up on this....
I'm guessing they're trying to get some nostalgia clicks from martian AOLers pining for the motherland.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
There is a cogent aspect of this research and a silly aspect.
The *cogent aspect* is the recognition of how tenacious prokaryotic life is. If you've ever cultured bacteria, you know how they can grow on just about anything. And they are everywhere. If you just lift the cover off your culture plate for several seconds, and put it back, something will eventually grow. There's an organism for almost any condition. Deep sea vent bacteria grow on carbon dioxide and use hydrogen as an energy source. Dienococcus Radiodurans grows in glowing hot radioactive waste.
*Silly Aspect*: We have been exchanging rocks with Mars forever and the chances that we have not *cross contaminated* each other thousands of times are almost zero. The answer to where life started is buried back so far in time, that only planetary geology will give is our best clues to where life began. For all we know, life could have started on Europa, which is probably covered with water as well.
---->obqt
I'll just say that the organic-material-exchange-scenario is possible and completely feasible.
Fine. But is it scientific? What would occam's razor say? Yeah, it's reasonable that life originated on another planet (it seems really premature to suggest Mars), but isn't it more reasonable to suggest that it originated on Earth? Or that it has originated several times, on several planets, and occasionally been transported from one to another?
It's too early to rule out any of these scenarios (IMHO). Sensational headlines like "Scientists say life originated on Mars!!!" are more suited to publications like the Weekly World News than to scientific journals or even Wired, but that's where the tabloids get their material. Their writers skim the journals, find some poor sucker of a scientist, take his/her words out of context, and print an attention-grabbing headline and article. The underlying science may be good, but the spin that the tabloids (and sometimes the mainstream press) puts on it is far from scientific. Magazines get sold, and scientists get laughed at by their colleagues. If they're lucky they might save their careers. Oh well...
This may be "Informative" but it's also only half true.
Although this does happen during a slow freeze (say in a home freezer), this does not happen when a body is frozen more or less immediately (such as being placed in liquid nitrogen). The ice crystals thing is not really relevant to cryogenics.
Here's a rough breakdown:
Except for the last part, I fully support tricking the public into paying higher taxes to fund NASA projects. I would support spy satellites, if they were "open-sourced", into the public domain! Sites, like Microsoft Terra-Server would provide realtime views of my city.
I say go with the story, no matter how misleading it is... We've got to get more people to believe space exploration is worth the money they're putting into it!
Io is covered with ice. Below the ice there is theorized to be water. If organism on earth can survive under such extremes of heat, cold and lack of oxygen, then it is possible that some form of life could live or be living on Io somewhere.
/started/ under those conditions. We know life can survive under those conditions once it has adapted...but can it start there?
However, the question is whether life could have
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
...will always be a subject ripe for the media. The theories that come forth will always be more interesting than the actual answers themselves. And hey, don't we need some type of bug/virus to capture the public's imaginations now that the millenium bug has come and gone? What better than a Mars virus...
What if the bacteria came here to run for the N.Y. Senate seat?? They're trying to take over the Earth from the inside out. Mulder was right. And what's worse, Linux is too little too late.
Next week on Letterman, Dave interviews a Martian bacterium!!
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I'm happy that space agencies and researchers in general understood the importance of funding to make serious investigation.
The humanity, (that people out there who don't care a sh*t about investigation) don't like governments spending money in space investigation. That's why whe are almost in the 21st century and we went as far as 40 years ago...Voyager, Mariner, Apollo...what the hell have we done to understand our universe?
Lifting a telescope? Yes, I know, it's good and I like it, Hubble gives us a lot of information and nice backgrounds to our desktops, but...Whe are far from making "real" travels across our solar system...I mean, with people actually going somewhere.
BUT if researchers use the magic word ("Martian") cash flows into research.
I guess the humanity (in a whole) is like a bunch of idiots still waiting to know if there are little green people in mars.
So if it's that what people want...keep looking for Martians (bacteria, green people or whatever).
Poor Carl Sagan...He wouldn't see something interesting even if he would live 100 more years...
Well, it's a little premature to apply Occam's razor.
Occam's razor says to not to multiply entities unnecessarily. This isn't the same as saying that we should always pursue the simplest sounding explanation. And it certainly doesn't apply to the very early stages of the game where you don't have much hard data.
At this point, I don't think we really know what constitutes necessary. Current thought is, indeed, that life will happen, but there are about a million holes our view of exactly how the familiar kinds of life arose from the primordial stew. Decades ago we showed we can take inorganic molecules and create organic ones with a little electricity, but this is a far cry from creating even the simplest organism from scratch, and we haven't got much past that point.
Keep in mind that in the past few years we've been finding life all kinds of places we would never have thought it could be,such as in hot springs. To me,the most amazing thing are bacteria that are found inside solid granite miles below the earth's surface, ekeing out an existence from chemical energy at super-slow rates. It may turn out that when you factor in the viability of life in extreme conditions, and the astronomical conditions that prevailed in the early solar system, that it is extremely likely that life existed on Mars first, and furthermore it may turn out to be probable that at least some viable life forms were transported to the Earth around the time that life formed here, possibly independently.
It seems to me that this would be a very interesting and potentially fruitful line of investigation. If it turns out to be true, then it would matter quite a bit to our understanding of the processes of life, as well as being comparable to the Copernican revolution in changing our view of ourselves in the cosmos.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
what do you mean the ice crystals thing is not really relevent to cryogenics? it is just about the only thing relevent when talking about the preservation/biology of an organism in context of cryogenic temperatures(cryonics). if youre talking about cryogenics in terms of physics low temperature experiments, then yes, ice crystals in cells dosent have much meaning, but otherwise..? please explain. also you stated "this does not happen when a body is frozen more or less immediately (such as being placed in liquid nitrogen)." actually it does happen even when you freeze quickly with LN2. you can EASILY loose a finger to frostbite caused by freezing your finger with liquid nitrogen. and frostbite is caused by what? yes, damage to cells because of dehydration/ice -freezing.
later, loser.
Eventually the radiation would be "fatal". The organic molecules would have to be exposed long enough for "too many" of them to be damaged. The living astronauts don't get destroyed as soon as they enter space.
I appreciate your sarcasm! But there is even more at stake here than just flakey reporting and cluelessness
This is part of a reaction against the idea that life could have evolved here. It a displacing of the location of the improbable event in order to attempt to make it more palatable. It's the same sort of argument that Bertrand Russell attacked when he queried the "First Cause" arguments for God. If there is an improbable event and we keep on putting off it's cause, further and further back down a chain of events then that leads to infinite regress - we may as well bite the bullet and accept that it may have happened here on earth. To be fair, many of the early life theorists seem to feel that extra-terran origin would buy extra time for life to evolve, but I think that many in the evolution community would feel that there was enough time for it to happen on earth. The idea of life originating off earth and drifting around in space waiting to seed earth came, I think originally from Arrhenius in the 1920's and then was taken up by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe who called it Panspermia.
just about anything "could" survive interstellar space, under the right conditions
Sure, given the right conditions! But the fact remains that the right conditions for most organic life are not likely to be there! The problem for most of these things is ionizing radiation, which is why they are proposing that it would be carried within a meteorite. Once one makes that suppostion then the maximum radius that the life could have come from is limited by the maximum speed of travel of matter. Hence one is restricted to "potentially life bearing" planets near us. A more recent development of this idea has been that DNA or RNA coated in dust would be light enough to be blown on the solar wind over great distances. The dust would protect the particles. A paper in Science seemed to prove that this would mean that the particles would be able to disperse from a much greater radius to earth. I'll check the reference on that now if anyone is interested.
You say that this is not bad science [...] just good marketing , well I feel that there is a problem with that: it makes the public at first excited and gullible and then disillusioned and skeptical of all science. They are muddying the waters, not clarifying them. That's bad science. I don't blame them for wanting fame, funding but I think that it is short-sighted. Probably they are already being flamed by their more sober colleagues!
All this stuff fails the Occam's Razor test. Why postulate that life began elsewhere, when Earth itself is so well-suited to life? You might as well assume that a car sitting next to an auto factory was assembled accidentally by pieces falling individually out of the sky, rather than having been built in the factory.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
If we're going to go with this silly bacteria-space-roaming theory, who is to say that life didn't originate on Venus?
Here, I'll propose a (semi-)plausible (alien conspiracy) theory with almost no evidence--tell me what you think.
All life on Earth was engineered by hyper-intelligent beings on Venus. They realized that their planet was moving inhospitably close to the Sun, and they wanted something to survive them. However, they had polluted their planet (wars, manufacturing, whatever) to the point where it was inhospitable, and Earth still was, too, at the time. Now, we have evolved into sentient beings, and they are dead, as is all record of their civilization. (Venus looks pretty nasty right now)
There. So life began on Venus, and as *proof*, notice that nothing can survive on Venus anymore, but it could have in the past. Ooo!
Now you make up your story, and with the new rules of sensationalistic journalism, you too can turn Science Fiction into Science!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
A much more interesting article would be to discuss the use of bacteria in terraforming Mars.
Deleted
I sympathise deeply with your rant.
Which is it? Are the mass media in the USA getting more and more stupid, or are they cleverly writing down to the level of their (true?) perception of a beer-and-football audience?
I always knew that the good science was poorly reported, and so would look for the real story somewhere like "Science News."
Now everthing is poorly reported _except_ bad science.
AFAIC, the internet came along just in time, else how would intelligent people discuss what is _really_ happening?
(Actually, I fear that my USA bias is showing here; I have heard that citizens of the old Soviet Union were/are quite adept at seeing through the media and discussing the politically unmentionable.)
NASA finds a meteroite in Antarctica that is possibly from Mars. First assumption, we're going off of chemical compositions in a tiny little rock that happen to be similar to what we see in the atmosphere of Mars, thus the stone most likly is of Martian origin. Is it possible? Sure. When you start talking about liklihoods though I think things get stretched. To say that that it is very likely is just flat out pushing it because we simply don't have enough data to verfify that method of determining the origin of a stone is highly accurate. We believe it to be but nobody has ever taken the blindfolded identify these stones test and passed because we have stone from Earth and some from the moon and that is all. It's a possible explanation and it's one that is feasable but it's still a big assumption to just say the stone came from Mars, especially since millions of non-Martian stones crash into our planet every year and we don't analyze them all.
Second assumption, some formations in the stone look like they could have been made by primitive life. This is a huge stretch and is only a possible explanation. If you start attaching liklihoods again this explanation becomes insulting because it is the least likely with the information we have. A failed Viking experiment that was unrecreatable was the only suggestive evidence that there is life on Mars. There are alternative explanations for the rock formations also, Martian life is just the most sellable one to the masses. If you want to talk "science" then there is very little evidence for life on Mars, close to none. Not that we shouldn't go to Mars and find out, not that we shouldn't go to Mars for the hell of it. The "life card" is just an easy way to get money for it and who cares if it hurts the credibility of the science.
Then somehow this jump is made from these weak assumptions. Despite the complete lack of evidence that life ever existed on Mars it is theoretically possible that life started on Mars and then came to earth. Yes I agree, it is theoretically possible however it is extremely unlikely with the evidence we have, the probability is incomprehensably small. It is some how more likely that life began on Mars than on Earth in this theory and the theory is getting attention! It is completely and theoretically possible that what we call "physics" is a localized phenomena that only occurs in our solar system, it's entirely possible maybe CNN will pay some lip service to that theory. Seriously, if we're going to publish articles in the mainstream media on these typesof theories, we might as well start treating creationism as a scientific theory because there is about as much evidence.
This is pimping of science in the worst way. We're talking about chains of what-ifs linked together and then given credence. And I hope that there are fossils on Mars, I'd love that but we just don't have anything. I would think that the astonomer community would want to keep this stuff under wraps to protect the science. Of course, it's easier to get money to go to mars to look for life than it is to go to mars to look at the rocks. Let's just hope that the masses never hold us to any of these promises.
It's unfortunate that people care more about what they do in their career than the science their career is based upon. We will make it to Mars in due course, that will happen. These kinds of "theories" are just being pushed to make it happen quicker. Theoretically, there will Martians waiting for us when we get there and they will tell us the secret of cold fusion, the head line should read "Trip to mars might make cold fusion possible" shouldn't it?
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
It's Europa with the Ice crust and possibly an ocean underneath. Io is hot. It's the most volcanicaly active body in the solar system with constant eruptions, sulphur, fire, brimstone...well you get the picture.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Life here on earth doesn't tend to evolve something unless there's an evolutionary push for it to evolve so.
That gives us reason to think that if this bacteria evolved protection that would enable it to survive in space, there was likely a reason for it to do so, and one possible reason, it is theorized, is that the bacteria was forced to survive in extraterrestrial conditions.
Perhaps a large impact spewed it into space, killing all strains of bacteria except those that were able to survive the decreasing temperature and increasing radiation. Finally it makes its way to another (or **the same**) planetary body and is re-introduced as a new strain.
Or maybe, just maybe, it evolved this way for totally unrelated reasons, with something else about the mutation giving the bacteria an edge over other strains, and as a side effect, it also seems quite capable of surviving outside of our atmosphere.
It is logical to suggest that a bacteria evolved something because it was *forced* to evolve it, but that isn't necessarily the only explanation. Let the good scientists do their work, and take the media's coverage with a grain of salt and an eye for skepticism.
I'm always wary of science discoveries released to the press first before any independent review is done. Is anyone else bothered by the "it can survive long periods in space, therefore it must be from space" arguments?.
Sad...
It must sell newspapers...
Hey, where's JonKatz when we really need his careful media analysis?
..."
...?"
"Not since biblical times has such an important and critical media announcment come down the pike. We are martians. Yes, that's right. We. Are. Martians.
Now, we all know that the American constitution establishes free speech as an essential human freedom. But if we are martians what does this mean? Does it mean we are humans? Does it means we are martians? Does it, in fact, invalidate the American constitution?
I fielded several media calls about this major, earth shattering announcment: first from the New York Times, then from Chicago Tribune, and then from Vinny Bega in Trenton, a free-lancer who frequently consults with me in matters of national and global importance.
Vinny's first question naturally was this: "John, you're a media analyst and film critic. What's your take on the possibility that parts of our genetic make-up could be derived from martian genes?"
"Well, Vinny," I answered, "you know I shouldn't talk about this because I'm expecting a call from the president (who, by the way, felt that my review of 'Man In the Moon' was quite informative, and
"Wait, you mean Man on the Moon?"
"Man In The Moon, Vinny. Please. Listen to what I'm saying and don't correct me. Now, the announcment that --"
"Jon, is it true you're a college freshman?"
"Huh?"
"On Slashdot. I read that."
"A freshman?"
"Someone said what's a college freshman doing making movie reviews and fielding calls from major news agencies?"
"No, I'm older than that--"
"It's just a lie?"
"Vinny, you asked me a question."
"Yeah--"
"Then let me analyze."
"Biblical proportions," Vinny said, checking his notes. "Something about not since Moses parted the Red Sea did such --"
"Yes. Well, the question is this: free speech. I know the EFF is working on this one. But it's brings up the question of open source."
"Open source?"
"Yeah."
"What about the red sea?"
"Well not since then did a matter of this crucial, critical urgency arise."
"What about the AOL/Time Warner merger?"
"What about it?"
"You said the same about that."
"Yeah?"
"So not since the AOL/TimeWarner merger did such a critical, crucial event happen?"
Pause. "Wait, that was three days ago."
"Yeah..."
"Yeah, not since the AOL/Time Warner merger."
"You want me to write that, Jon?"
"That not since the merger? Or not since the red sea?"
"I dunno Jon, you tell me."
"Yeah."
"The Red Sea..."
"No..."
"The Time Warner..."
"Yeah."
"Okay, not since --"
"No skip it."
"What?"
"The merger. Don't write that."
"Don't write the Red Sea?"
"Or the Time Warner."
Pause. "Don't write any of it."
"Yeah."
"Okay."
Pause. "So that's it then? You got what you need Vinny?"
"Uh..."
"Remember this."
"This... what
"The martian story. Remember this. Write that."
"That we should remember this?"
"Yeah. Because it's big, Vinny. It's real big!"
"Big."
"Bigger than anything. It changes everything: free speech, open source, everything."
Vinny writing: "Changes everything."
"It's big."
"I got that."
"Real big, Vinny."
"This big?"
"No, bigger than that."
"Thiiiis big?"
"Yeah, about that."
"Wow."
"Wow is right."
"Okay thanks Jon."
"Anytime, Vinny."
We observe evolution working; what do you think pesticide resistance in insects comes from? Speciation has been observed a number of times in just the last century. You can deny it, but if you believe that God made the world denying evolution implicitly makes you a heretic. ;-)
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
All this talk about life orgiginating on Mars and comming to Earth. Hasn't anyone considered the alternative that live was blasted onto Mars by an Earth rock, only to die out a few million years latter because it couldn't addapt well enough (or mabee it's still there.)
I wonder if any bactrea as hardy as these two found there way onto Voyager. It would be interesting to see where it ended up and if it survived on another plannet. Would probably be the first human (accidental) colinization of a planet outside the solar system; depending on how fast it got there.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
...some science journalist decides "I'm gonna write a story about how life came from Mars". They then scour the universities of the world looking for crackpots who might have something to say on the issue. They then publish these guys comments prepended with the phrase "Scientists say that...". That's all there is to it. There is no peer reviewing of articles in Wired. Wired exists to make as much money as it can. So why are people surprised when they publish crap? Why do people even think it's of any interest?
-- SIGFPE
It's nothing like that. /. is so suspicious and so conspiraphilic...
The truth is much, much simpler.
The basic building blocks of life are sprinkled throughout our solar system. They didn't originate here though.
They are the leftovers of an interstellar cruise ship blowing it's toilet waste into space (against regulations I might add) as it passed (no pun int) through our uninhabited and totally uninteresting area. Our cruise ships do the same kind of stuff all the time.
The dumped waste trail froze, circled the sun for a few million years, and crash landed on several planets. Europa probably got the lion share of what didn't get sucked into Jupiter. But Earth, due to it's balmy temperatures, is the only place where the waste could thaw.
Sort of puts a whole new perspective on the origins of mankind, doesn't it? We're 5 billion year old alien crap.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
This gives the impression that the author thinks the original rocks from Mars, some billions of years old, are still sitting around somewhere waiting to be examined. HELLO! They've long since weathered into clay, been pressed into shale, and been hung as blackboards and roof tiles - in the Cretaceous Untrue, the ALH84001, (can't remember themeteorite that was found in the Antarctic in, I think, 1997 contained what were argued to be evidence of life by David McKay et al.. Among the supposed evidence was the presence of micro-fossils that may/may not have been bacteria. Associated with the bacteria was a deposit of ferrous material (Iron-sulfide?) normally only associated in such high concentrations with bacteria. Many other meteorites have been found also proposed to be of ancient origin, among them another "Martian" meteorite" Nakhla, described by McKay in March,1999. There is a lot of skpeticism about this - contamination is one of the main ones.
How can you say you you hate bad science reporting when that is all /. seems to post these days? Like most programmers with some technical training but no scientific training you are inclined waste your team refuting already refuted ideas instead of actually particpating in real scientific debate. When was the last time you pointed us to an interesting Science or Nature article. I read /. because I want to get the latest hacking news. You should stick to that.
I have no moderator points, and I must mark as funny
George
I didn't know that the dinosaurs and insects living the cretaceous built houses that needed roof tiles, or any kind of writting or drawing skills to go along with those black boards. Quik call Bob Bakker(sp?)
"Lend your ear while I call you a fool" Ian Anderson
Just in case some of you haven't realized it yet, the slashdot folks have started posting several "news" items to the Science section without cross-posting them to the main page.
Check them out, you can always get there by clicking on the science link in the left navbar.
Dammit! Io is practically one big active volcano. The icy worldlet to which you refer is Europa.
This person is misinformed (or at least mistaken), and nicely illustrates a problem I have with default Score:2. There are a nontrivial number of people with karma boosts who make inane and/or just incorrect posts which start out at score 2. This is annoying.
The important fact to take away is that some bacteria can survive a trip through space into our atmosphere. But apparently, that's not interesting enough for a magazine article. Instead, they've gotta draw the conclusion that because these two bacteria happened to show the qualities needed to survive through space, these must be the ones that seeded life so long ago. (And that somehow, they came from Mars instead of one of the other meteroites that strike the Earth.)
The best analogy I can draw would be if a murder was committed, and police tell us, "The murderer is a 6-foot tall male. And he's left-handed... ya know, like Bill Clinton." The next day, Wired magazine reports, "Bill Clinton wanted for murder!"
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
My question is that if life first came from Mars, where did life come from to get there? Was is Jupiter? Or Saturn? Just because something might have been possible does not mean that it happened - and until we have reason to believe that life did not begin here, we should continue to operate under the assumption that it did. I'd like to shoot the scientist conducting this research to Mars and see how they feel after the trip.
Ok, I am a microbiologist, I don't just play one on slashdot. Both these organisms have been known for decades and both map genetically well within terrestrial phylogenetic trees for eubacteria. For example, Bacillus subtilis is closely related to many other Bacillus species, such as B. cereus (great name), a common cause of food poisoning from contaminated rice. You might consider a possible extraterrestrial origin for an organism whose genes did _not_ map in any straightforward way into known families of organisms. Likewise, if living organisms were to be found deep in Martian soils, we would suspect that Terrestrial life may have come from Mars if all Earth life mapped to one branch of an even deeper Martian phylogenetic tree. These two organisms are interesting but hardly unique in their ability to from extremely tough spores. Another piece of evidence that would support an extraterrestrial source for Earth life would be if terrestrial phylogenetic trees predicted that the common ancestor of all Earth life was a spore-former. So far, there is no strong evidence for this but the massive bioinformatics efforts necessary to pin these questions down are still in early stages. It is very important to think these things through on biological terms (i.e. understand the evolutionary implications). Otherwise intelligent physical scientists making fools of themselves over biology have been a running headache for biologists at least since Darwin. The many illuminating examples of this phenomenon may be good fodder for another slashdot thread but here let me just put in another plug for the importance of teaching evolution in the schools.
This is obviously crap, as everyone here has already pointed out. I just wanted to add that B. subtilis is a poor choice for an argument of a common extraterrestrial ancestor. There are many bacteria that appear to be much older than this one. I guess I can't say anything about the other bug, but this one is really like saying that a human was the first thing on earth and that everything else evolved downward from it. Anyway...this only highlights the need for greater science education in this country.
Invicta{HOG}
If bacteria are found on Mars it is more likely that "billions and billions" of bacteria from Earth, carried by the solar wind, are being blown to Mars and all the other outlying planets, and continually innoculate those planets, than a small patch of Martian 'evolved' cells was carried by ejecta from a random meteor impact and was 'lucky' enough to impact the earth at the South Pole instead of flying into the Sun.
But any old story to fund NASA's quest to prove that God doesn't exist will do fine.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Olympus Mons is the largest known shield volcano, and hence is caused by very slow upwelling of magma beneath the Martian surface - just like Mount Fuji here on Earth. Shield volcanoes are of a classic and unmistakeable shape - radially symmetric flat cones with central calderas. The four largest volcanoes on Mars are all on the Tharsis Bulge, which seems to be an impact accretion that is now on the current equator of Mars for the same reason as a piece of gum stuck on a spinning globe will flip the spinning object to where the gum is on the new equator: it's a minimum energy configuration. But Olympus Mons is just a regular old shield volcano - spectacular only for its size. The biggest evidence for a big hit on Mars is the difference in mean height above data (the Martian equivalent of height above sealevel) between the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere - it looks like miles of material were blown off the Northern Hemisphere which is why it may be so much lower.
Hemos, your simply does not belong in the story summary. Your story summary looks more like an comment to the story. Please refrain from including future rants in the story summary. I happen to be accessing /. from a server machine that only goes 640x480. Your summary filled almost two full screens. This is ridiculous. Besides, it gives the impression that feel your *opinions* about stories are more important than other peoples' opinions. After all, we can't add our rants to the story summary. It's almost as if you posted a comment, then moderated it to +5 (how about +6, so that it appears above all our +5 comments?). In fact, it's worse, since your comments appear on the front page of /., as well.
--Be human.
First, a caveat. I'm no biologist.
A more substantial and well argued discussion on one of these "bugs", Deinococcus radiodurans, appeared in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago (sorry, no reference). The article reported on the full genetic sequencing of this rather amazing creature. The researchers were trying to find out how this bacteria could repair its chromosomes after they were blasted into hundreds of pieces by over 1.5 million rads of radiation
(500 rads is lethal for humans). Though it wasn't mentioned in the Times article, I remember joking to my wife about space-bugs. It's a pretty obvious speculation, and I doubt if the researchers mentioned in Wired were the first to present this thought. It's pretty strange: here are bacteria that seem perfectly evolved for space travel! Why would this ability have evolved on earth, when no environment here comes close to requiring this amount of radiation resistance? The researchers in the Times (my feeling is that this is probably the majority view among researchers) suggest that the same qualities required to survive extreme radiation would be useful to survive extreme dessication which would be useful in an earthly environment. The surprising radiation resistance is just a unintended consequence.
For the curious, I found a graphical view of the sequence of Deinoccocus Radiodurans.
If B. subtilis and D. radiodurans are Martian, then just about everything else on earth is Martian in origin as well. Yes, the two organisms have some incredible survival abilities--but biochemically they just aren't that different from terrestrial life.
You can get sequence info on the genome for D. radiodurans here, and B. subtilis here.
Basically, science knows a lot about these two organisms, and what we know suggests that they fit right into the phylogenetic tree. And even if they didn't, the fact that we can get a genome sequence *at all* would tell us they are probably related to terrestrial life.
It's called the red planet...
But the girls are ONE HUNDRED PERCENT MARBLE, baby.
Here's a poem:
I went to Mars
Just to touch the petrified girls on their asses
Oh how I love
Those petrified alien lasses
The Globe article states that "most scientists believe life started with a single cell similar to modern bacteria". That's nonsense. Cellular life is far too complicated to have arisen from nothing -- researchers studying the origin of life almost universally agree to the necessity of the existence of pre-cellular forms.
It's called the red planet...
But the girls are ONE HUNDRED PERCENT MARBLE, baby.
Here's a poem:
I went to Mars
Just to touch the petrified girls on their asses
Oh how I love
Those petrified alien lasses!
It's called the red planet...
But the girls are ONE HUNDRED PERCENT MARBLE, baby.
Here's a poem:
I went to Mars
Just to touch the petrified girls on their asses
Oh how I love
Those petrified alien lasses!!
So I guess it's *not* the flourescent lighting in my office turning me green.
--t
I don't dress this way to be scary. I dress like this because it's easier to sort my laundry. "...black...black...blac
I think you and I both know that your explanation isn't what really happened.
:)
It would be nice if the lines were so easy to follow, but they aren't. Fossils that are similar to one another have been found, but none that actually attest to one organism changing into another. Remember the whole neanderthol man? It was a hoax. There have been no fossils that show a link between two seperate species. Plenty of variation within a species, yes, but not between *seperate* species.
Oh, and as far as the bacteria getting pesticide resistance.. have they changed into anything else? Are there any single-cell bacteria that have converted themselves into multi-cell versions? nope. They've grown immune to the effects of a poison. woohoo. They aren't changing form are they? They've just changed the way they take toxins in and deal with them.
Westley grew immune to the effects of iocaine powder, but he and buttercup didn't have mutants.
I think the important, or at least REALLY COOL, thing is that these questions are being taken seriously. Whether some bacteria came from a geothermal vent or are ancestors of the aliens that ganked Mars Lander, there's an expansion of our definitions for and expectations of how and where "Life" can exist that can only be exciting for a child of the science fiction mythos such as myself.
I have friends who study astrobiology in school, in a rigorous academic way. The name has been changed from "exobiology" exactly because many terrestrial beasties and environments are so relevant to discussion of where and how else life might exist. So I don't see some ambiguity about the source of these baceria as at all reducing their importance.
It seems to me that Apollo 12 had brought back pieces (including the lens) of the Surveyor III lunar lander and found some microorganisms on it. If memory serves me correctly, it was fungus that had appeared to live for a short while after the Surveryor craft was lauched/landed on the moon. I can't find the article though... http://cass.jsc.nasa.gov/expmoon/Apollo12/Apollo12 .html Is the Apollo 12 mission overview from Nasa.
.. moderated this as "funny"? is God funny, is that it? if anything, it should be moderated as "insightful", or another category that slashdot is lacking .. "the truth". of course, I realize that the truth is something that most slashdot readers just don't want to hear.
Modern forms didn't exist in lower (and certainly older) fossil strata, but other things did
Actually fossil coelocanths existed that look the same as the "modern" living ones, also sharks show little change in their fossil record and certainly no clear patterns. Other problems include the molluscs (which tend to leave only shell morphology behind). The fossil record is spotty and stimulated the thinking that you describe (which I believe to be roughly true), but it is highly problematic and is not proof on its own.
We observe evolution working; what do you think pesticide resistance in insects comes from? Speciation has been observed a number of times in just the last century.
It is necessary to realize that there is a distinction between speciation (there are several definitions of this, but I'll assume you mean the Biological Species Definition=inability to interbreed), and evolution. The former depends on the latter as a mechanism, but the latter can happen without the former, and in fact for the case of pesiticide resistance this gives hope. We may be able to re-populate the gene-pool of resistant pests with susceptible genes at the same time as removing the selection conditions (pesticides) and then be able to use pesticides again at a later date.
The fossil record on its own proves nothing, Creationists are very adept at explaining it away. I'm interested in your "many observations of speciation" in the last century. COuld you list them? I should once again issue a disclaimer that I believe that evolution happens, it's just not so simple as you imply, there are lots of ingenious creationists out there.
Damn right. I did cryogenics research and `i can tell you one thing: all we did, using antifreeze agents and special freezing schedules, was to prevent formation of icecrystals and to induce supercooling instead. As to the bugs: both are well known to science and have been around for a long time. D. Radiodurans genome was recently optically mapped (Science in November sometime i believe). Very earthly bugs, the most interestin feature of radiodurans being its huge number of DNA-repair related genes (of course) Maurice
1. There are many qualified sources of biological information on the net. Contrary to what you probably expect(*), wired is *not* one of them, as opposed to Nature science update, for example.
2. Although spores of B. subtilis are quite resistant to many external factors, it is a highly evolved gram negative bacterium - and it's ancestors, as much we can tell, do not share its peculiar capabilities. I could think about several higher organisms which could survived a direct impact deep inside a meteorite, but they could not give rise to the diversity of life as we know, not to mention that it would not fit into any theory explaining the mechanisms of observed evolution, because those insects - as well as B. subtilis - are quite specialized and, genetically speaking, very complicated life forms.
3. It is a well known fact that one could imagine a very primitive ancestor of all life forms as we know it capable of hitch-hiking through our solar system. Unfortunately, this is not sufficient for a sound scientific theory. This is why nobody takes the panspermia theory seriously, even though some great scientists are promoting it. Nobody but the media, but media take seriously even Microsoft publicity, right?
Regards,
January
(*) Whenever I read something like this /. news I feel the urge to reply quoting two polish humourists, J. Tuwim and A. Slonimski: "Dear madam; either someone did not inform you precisely enough, either - what the editors consider more probable - you didn't understand something. The man is not a descendant of Darwin."
Yet
Another
Yet
Another
Are
We
Martians
Story.
err. That didn't come out well.
After reading Hemos' introduction to this article, I was reminded of the ever-present FIRST POSTS!!! on Slashdot. I would like to propose an addition to Slashdot etiquette, specifically that the introductions to news stories remain factual. To compensate for that, and to allow the posters to get their rants in, they should get the right to make the first post on the topic. With this story for example, Hemos would have posted a factual summary of the article as an introduction, and rant all he wishes as the first post for the story. My humble opinion, Anonymous Coward
... across media outlets? See the cover story for the last National Geographic. NG's website isn't updated for the current issue, so you'll have to find the dead trees. It actually goes into some detail on the elements of exobiology and environments that would normally be thought of as hostile to life, so perhaps it is less pulpy. =)
I have an idea that the human race a long time ago when our ancestors were still apes, got genitically altered so that we became smarter and started using tools, there are two things that could of altered us and that is and alien race or some kind of mutation from radiation or maybe a virus. In short all the human race is, is E.T.'s science project. Puck-3D
From the same Universe we live in. With an highly strong terrestrial taste. Sincerly I think there is much hype going on about making a new sub-scientific mythology. A very weird "where are we from"? And sincerly making Mars a point to it is making things realtively stupid.
:)
Let me note one thing. Some specialized books on meteorites have, already in the 80's, put into a serious question some points on the origins of the so-called "martian" rocks. And the reasoning is quite serious. Many people may not know but some of these "martian" rocks do have some relationships with more "meteoritic" rocks and suggest an origin of a "third" planet. A planet with dimensions much like Io but with a nature more near to Ganymede.
However it should be noted that this does not deny absolutely the Martian hypotesis. And we have to count that Mars had a few serious crashes in its past. Sincerly there are a few scares that suggest three or four huge impacts or even more. And Hellas is probably second in the row. These impacts were enough to turn Mars into a geological, astronomical and physical mess. If we consider here the biological hypotesis, some ideas/theories/myths about aliens and our won experience with it, then the thing is a huge mega-mess.
Are we Martians? Well hard to believe. Anyway I think that we should not ignore other important doors. Frankly, academicists tend to ignore one fact. No matter how "isolated" we are, every piece of our solar system has somehow an "outside" origin. Could there be a chance that nearly 4 billion years ago we got a "galactic spaceship" made of rock and ice, with a "crew" of a few hundred "visitors", falling into Earth? And that we are the grand^10000000000 sons of these "little green beings"? Also not very probable but it is an idea no less crazy than Martian origins.
Anyway there is a serious problem to all this. We in fact are too Earthly. And even if Mars, Phaeton, X or Y would look much like Earth there would be chances that an "alien" would die upon arrival, even if it survived landing. Physical conditions can be very substantial for biological systems and a slight environmental change can be enough to start Armageddon all over. Well there could be chances but they are a Hell of a chance.
We probably are 99% earthlings. and there is nothing strange in this. Note that every system, upon certain conditions, has a tendency to create organisation. And some, like Earth, tend to create a very complex organisation. And note that this happens everywhere. And this does not go against the controversial Second "Law" of Thermodynamics (in fact an undemonstrated Principle). The Second "Law" is just a small water mirror of very complex processes. And it can only act if somewhere nearby there is something getting more organised. Earth is one of the places where a lottery of many many factors gave a chance to have slashdotters in its surface
There are a lot more of such worlds around. Soemwhere, at this moment, planets come and go, living beings born and dies. In a minute one civilization comes up and one goes into oblivion. Earthlings are still too Earthlings to note this moment. In fact their main origin is so embedded in their livings that they ignore 99,9999999999999999999999% of this Universe. And sometimes remember it to speak a few silly words about the worst tomb in the Solar System. There seems that Humans had always a salty taste for dark origins...
The bacteria under Bacillus are Gram-positive rods. Clostridium is another genus of endospore-forming bacteria. I wonder why they picked one over the other. I think Desulfomaculum is the only other genera of endospore-forming bactera. They, unlike the previous two I mentioned, are Gram-negative.
Deinococcus is an amazing genus. Its members can endure several orders of magnitude more radiation than humans and just about every other organism. They can live in radioactive coolant from nuclear reactors.Their secret resistance to mutation is not resistant DNA; it is DNA repair. They have multiple copies of genes and DNA polymerases that can patch and repair damaged sequences. A recent article I read (here?) proposed studying them in the hopes of using their DNA repair enzymes for medical purposes.
. I'm interested in your "many observations of speciation" in the last century. COuld you list them?
I tried to post a list, but I guess it was to long, I don't know if it got posted or not, slashdot gave me no conformation
Anyway, get your list at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/f aq-speciation.html
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
You are a stupid fuck and everyone hates you
BTW, you cannot copyright consepts such as YAF.....S but only uniqe content. fuckhead
Are there any single-cell bacteria that have converted themselves into multi-cell versions?
>Depends if you count slime-molds or not; they go back and forth! Your question makes no sense in scientific terms; according to evolution, multi-cellularity only has to arise once, and from there it is "variations on a theme".
slime-molds are not bacteria. They are myxomycota fungi - eukaryotes! they're our close relatives!. For a picture click here
and for more information about taxonomy click here
and scroll to the bottom of the page. The latter is a cool page. You should also be aware that there is considerable controversy about the classifaction of any of these things and that these ones rely upon the use of 18S large-subunit rRNA.
My general point is that nothing in evolution and its study is as certain and as solid as you are making out, and further, that most of the support for evolution comes from molecular genetics, not from the fossil record which can be interpreted in all sorts of ways.
You are being too dogmatic - especially with regard to your horse example. This was one of the most embarrasing examples of "evolution", it was always presented as a succession of smaller to larger through intermediate forms. This linear pattern was seized on by creationists and debunked. Embarrassing and uneccessary, there is no need for regular "trends" in evolution to obtain.
There is controversy here and you are doing rationality and science no favours by trivializing and ignoring objections. Regards, Crush
..to your link, is attached to the bottom of your link. I think you fail to appreciate that the fossil record is not good proof. Sure, it's suggestive and contributes factually to the support of the theory, but it has been badly mis-handled on both sides. There has been extremely naive extrapolationism practiced by fossil record "evolutionists" who are every bit as uncritical and dogmatic as creationists.
It would have to be better than Hillary Clinton on Letterman... can you say "scripted"?
Make Seven
Username taken, please choose another one.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Modern forms didn't exist in lower (and certainly older) fossil strata, but other things did. They further observed that the forms in between (in depth and age) more closely resembled the ones closer than those farther away; there was a progression in features over time. As some forms disappeared from the record, others branched off from forms existing before that.
A progression of features over time - forsooth!
molecular biology came along and backed up the tree of descent almost 100% Well, which tree of descent would that be? Do you realize that since the RNA sequencing revolution of the '70s the whole basis of taxonomy has shifted from 5 Kingdoms to 3 Domains? (Whittaker to Woese). Molecular biology has rocked our world dude!
There are two main things that I question in your postings:
1. You claim that the poster (paRcat, I think), that likened the claims being made in the article as being analogous in their illogicality to a claim that because evolution could have happened it must have happened, is wrong in this assertion. I see the two forms as being definitely analogous. They are assumptions that possibility is equivalent to probability. What is interesting is to examine the relative probabilities of theories. Evolution is the most probable on the evidence.
2. You claim that the fossil record is strong proof of evolution. It's not, look at the claims made by comparative morphologist prior to molecular biology and then look at the drastic revisions made as a result of phylogeny - molec.biol. has truly changed our picture. The fossil record on it's own is as I said, suggestive and contributes, but it has also been misleading. The claim that you make that the overall broad picture has not been in doubt for a century is meaningless, sure everyone is talking about evolution - but then so was Lamarck, so was Geoffroi de Ste.Hilaire - "evolution" in the debased sense that you use it just means change. The rest of your post is just an appeal to authority. You're fighting a straw man of the ignorant creationist that doesn't believe in evolution. Things are a lot more complicated than that and it doesn't help to have supposed advocates of evolution insisting that it is rock-solid. It is merely reasonably probable to a reasonable person that has examined the evidence. Science ain't about certainty.
Oh, and by the way Punc.Eq. is considered to be a "crackpot" theory by many and Gould has a good story about how he and other grad students booed down an early exponent of plate tectonics.
Evolution (as a scientific theory) started along with modern geology when it became glaringly obvious that other historical explanations of the origin and history of the Earth (the Bible's literal account of Genesis among them) were inadequate at best. In the process of pursuing the truth, the researchers have come to a few conclusions, well-supported by evidence and stringent peer review, which just happen to make a few people uncomfortable. So be it. If anything the Biblical literalists of the fundamentalist churches have defined themselves in opposition to science, not the reverse.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The *Rant* is right... B. subtilis is probably the most widely studied species of bacteria after E. coli.
The Wired article makes it sound like some new species has been discovered. Way off the mark!
this is a very informative link. If I had any moderation points you'd be getting them.
If anything the Biblical literalists of the fundamentalist churches have defined themselves in opposition to science, not the reverse.
If A is in opposition to B, does that not imply that B is in opposition to A?
W.r.t. it being "The" visible opposition I take your correction - there are of course the various political movements. However, I'm willing to bet as a reasonable person, that you, as a reasonable person, would upon a free-association test link creation/evolution pretty quickly. No?
It would appear that evolution makes more than a few people uncomfortable, there are whole states that dislike it. There are a shockingly high number of people that believe in creation. Part of the reason for this is that "evolutionists", whoever they are, have _not_ been careful in the examples that they used to try and convince people that "evolution is a fact". Another part of the reason is that there is socio-cultural opposition to the idea of scientific materialism. See R.Lewontin in the NYRB for an excellent essay
Aside from any of these points I admit that you're correct ;-)
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Note, I said "defined themselves".
Indeed, that was my point. You said it, not me. Note that I said:
"[evolutionists] are the visible opposition"
I didn't say that they had defined themselves.
Science isn't going around opposing anything as such, just uncovering facts
Science, as such doesn't do anything. The practicioners of Science do things. Among them they discover facts and ... create theories. Debate centers around (1)what exactly the facts are and (2) how they cohere with differing theories.
You're thinking too much like a sports fan and not enough like a scientist.
There are also the brine shrimp _artemia_ and microscopic animals called tardigrades. Artemia can survive for many years in a freeze dried state. Tardigrades can also, and these creatures can survive total vacuum and pressures on the order of 10atm.
That bacteria can survive in the cold black depths of space is not amazing, given that much larger, multicelluar creatures can, too.
There is no doubt about the terrestrial origins of these two species, and there is nothing in the fossil record to indicate that they or anything else came from outer space. Until we can uncover equivalent life on Mars (or its fossils), the theory dies by Popper's Razor: untestable at present.
The ones who spout this kind of pseudoscience may be correct (i.e., life on earth originated from life transplanted from Mars). It's still hack science until we have hard evidence of life on Mars, and the possibility of transfer between the two planets.
Methinks that these reports are aimed more at generating publicity and ramping up NASA's budget.
Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative
by Christian de Duve, Nobel Laureate for biology/medicine 1974
An excellent starting point into the origins of life on Earth (considers possible seeding from extra-terrestrial sources as one of many other possible theories) for interested parties who did not major in science in school (or even for those who did). Easy to read with full explanations and lots of interesting bits.
I have more of an engineering background but am interested in science as a hobby. I thought I was pretty well versed in the origins of life issue. This book filled in a lot of gaps I did not even know were there.
I am not going to make an excerpt from the book because to start I would not be able to finish until I had reproduced the book here in its entirety. I picked up a hardback copy from Barnes and Noble for six bucks. You can get it through an inter-library loan if your local library does not have a copy.
I highly recommend tracking this book down and reading it. It will provide a framework of knowledge that will allow you to glance at the headline of the article at Wired and not give it a second thought i.e. you will recognize it as merely another example of bad science reporting.
I think, therefore ken_i_m