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The Oldest Known Life Keeps Getting Older
Porfiry writes: "Remnants of organic matter in ancient soil more than 2.6 billion years old may be the earliest known evidence for terrestrial life, according to a team of Penn State astrobiologists. 'Our work shows that the organic matter in this soil very probably represents remnants of microbial mats that developed on the soil surface between 2.6 and 2.7 billion years ago,' says Dr. Hiroshi Ohmoto, professor of geochemistry and director of The Penn State Astrobiology Center. 'This places the development of terrestrial biomass more than 1.4 billion years earlier than previously reported.'"
Here in Europe we reasoned like that, oh, maybe a hundred years ago.
Why should thousands upon thousands of mainly christian scientists spend decades upon decades working hard on a gigantic conspiracy to overthrow creationism?
Many of them, in every scientific field you can think of, didn't like what they found. But the reality of things proved that the Bible was wrong in a bunch of things.
Now why is that so hard to believe? I find it much harder to believe that any of the of the ancient religious creation myths allover the world could be right. There is a creation myth for every village in africa that is just as "believable" as that in the Bible.
Grow up! If there was a chapter about Santa in the bible, I bet you would believe it too!
This is just terrestrial life, not life on earth. Life in the ocean is still much older than this.
What really happened is that life came out of the ocean 2.6 billion years ago, hit the snooze button, and then went back to the ocean for another 1.4 billion years. At least, that's what I would have done.
A new born baby has astounded the scientific world by not growing older. FBI agents on the scene deny rumours they are looking for Elvis, who is said to be leading a flotilla of UFOs projecting a stasis field.
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>> The Oldest Known Life Keeps Getting Older
> As opposed to all those things that don't get older everyday???
Well, right, but this time, this particular early date moved backwards by more than just one day.
Let's see you do that...
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Creationism, as it was written in Genesis, is revealed in very simple terms and anthropomorphizes God so the simpletons of many thousand years ago could comprehend it. Could you tell a shepard of 500 B.C. about how amino acid chains are formed?
The current vesion of the creation in Genesis is actually two stories badly edited together.
These events, as they are described in Genesis, are actually correct if we look at them in a simple way. The intent was to show a forward progression in that the earth was created then water then man. etc... The point here is to show a sequence and therefore set a foundation. The first day, second day, etc. was to show progression in a way simple people would understand. Millions or even billions of years would have made no sense to these people. The answer to creation that these early people received was not wrong, it was right for that day and age and it was all that people of that era could understand. Today however, the literal interpretation is wrong and misleading.
Assuming the original audience didn't recognise it as an analogy in the first place. They may not have been "scientists" but the are unlikely to have been stupid. A stupid shepherd isn't going to live long...
Well, if these 2.6 billion year old microbial mats do indeed form 'First Post', we can at least say with certainty that there is life far, far older. Look at any run of 'first post'ers.. Eight tries, and only one of them manages 50% of the time.
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I guess that this will once again become a matter of organized religious debate. Does this mean that carbon dating is "once again" wrong (laughing on the inside) or is Adam and Eve (if you Christian, which I am not) just that much older now?
My third grade teacher, Mrs. Williams, is the oldest form of life. Hmmm... come to think of it, she may have been inorganic.
strangely, in the next sediment layer below their sample, the geologists found the following rock formation:
oooooooooooooooo
oFFFFFooPPPPPo
oFoooooooPoooPo
oFFFFFooPPPPPo
oFoooooooPooooo
oFoooooooPooooo
ooooooooooooooo
..............
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
To me, one of the most interesting things associated with this find has to do with the evolution of an oxygen-rich atmosphere: if there were terrestrial microbial communities, there was almost certainly an ozone layer (to protect them from the otherwise-deadly UV radiation), and an ozone layer can only develop if there's a significant amount of free oxygen in the atmosphere.
The thinking used to be that oxygen really didn't start to accumulate in the atmosphere until about 2 billion years ago, and didn't reach life-protecting levels (i.e., formed a good ozone layer) until about 1.4 billion years ago (there was a lot of iron that had to be "rusted" out of the oceans first). This finding is part of a recent trend (sorry, no links) which have pushed this date back quite a bit (leaving some issues with the banded-iron deposits -- the relics of the "rusting" period, but WTF, one of the best characteristics of science is that it changes itself to fit the hard facts, when necessary...).
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
I suspect life was ready for the transition before the environment was. I have this funny vision of the ocean stuff keeping an eye on the land, saying "Okay, now, it's getting ripe -- get ready to go for it!"
As an interesting aside, last week's Science had a great paper (summary here) about new discoveries possibly related to early life: an RNA-analogue which uses much simpler tetrose backbone sugars, and is still able to not only form stable Watson-Crick helices with itself, but also with complementary RNA and DNA! The RNA backbone monomers (beta-nucleotides) are difficult to form under primordial conditions, while the tetrose sugars are almost trivially easy to form under prebiotic reducing conditions. This is the first of what's anticipated to be a whole family of plausible RNA precursors -- and that's a huge first!
Not to start a flame war, but it's a major chunk of hard scientific evidence (as opposed to speculation and theorizing) supporting a gradualist development of biotic chemistry -- and a very significant blow to those who argue for creationism based on the complexity of RNA and DNA chemistry. The gaps keep getting smaller...
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
I didn't realized petroleum migrated.
What do you mean? African or European petroleum?
"Does this mean that carbon dating is "once again" wrong (laughing on the inside) or is Adam and Eve (if you Christian, which I am not) just that much older now?"
This is very dualistic thinking. This is Aristotolian logic gone mad. Our western society is based on this and our language and mindset forces us to catagorize and separate into this or that. We see true or false, zero or one, black or white, all or none. The big bang vs. creationism argument goes back a long way. The question I ask science is: who made the big bang? I do believe in God but I also logically follow science and I've learned to take things from a historical perspective. Here is my perspective that I will now share with you.
Creationism, as it was written in Genesis, is revealed in very simple terms and anthropomorphizes God so the simpletons of many thousand years ago could comprehend it. Could you tell a shepard of 500 B.C. about how amino acid chains are formed? Could you explain to him time on a "geologic scale" and have him comprehend that kind of time span? Can you describe a non-physical being accurately with physical terms? No... The best that could be done was a very simple approach to give people the foundation or sequence of events that would eventually lead to man's creation.
These events, as they are described in Genesis, are actually correct if we look at them in a simple way. The intent was to show a forward progression in that the earth was created then water then man. etc... The point here is to show a sequence and therefore set a foundation. The first day, second day, etc. was to show progression in a way simple people would understand. Millions or even billions of years would have made no sense to these people. The answer to creation that these early people received was not wrong, it was right for that day and age and it was all that people of that era could understand. Today however, the literal interpretation is wrong and misleading. We have evolved spiritually, intellectually, and mentally.
Do you teach a child calculus in the first grade? NO... you give him the foundation. Calculus will later be understood by the high school senior. If a child asks what makes him grow bigger you'll probably give him a glass of milk and tell him to eat his greens. You wouldn't tell him the intricacies of cell mitosis - cyclin dependent kinase, adds phosphate to a protein, along with cyclins, which are control switches for the cell cycle to move from blah blah... The kid would get bored and this info would go right over his head. Hence, it is too early for him to absorb this level of knowledge just as it would have been to difficult to explain the creation in scientific terms to illiterate shepards of 2500 years ago.
So where am I going with this you ask? Maybe you've already figured it out. Today, we have an understanding of our physical universe that nobody in previous eras of history could have ever imagined. Do I now discount genesis? No... I simply realize that this very simple childlike description of creation was setting the foundation for science. Science is one of God's most important creations and allows us to understand our physical environment. Big bang, is but one idea describing the method which God 'may' have used to create our earth as we know it. We are still learning and we are still progressing. Creationism and Big Bang/science do not cancel each other out. One is an extension of the other. The mature college senior understands human reproduction while the immature first grader has a rudimentary understanding of how chickens make eggs. The chicken/egg textbook is setting the foundation for the human reproductive cycle as it will be understood in biology class much later in life. Again, Creation was good then, Science helps us understand they physical properties of how the earth may have come to be. I have no doubt that God is the mastermind behind all of this, however, to say that the Earth is 6,000 years old and God simply waved his hand and created us is a simply childish and ludicrous explanation that has no bearing in this day and age.
A thousand years from now, our understanding will be even greater. The future beings will look upon our rudimentary view of science and call it primitive at best. Perhaps, they will have figured out some of the mysteries and maybe they will laugh at the thought of a "Big Bang" theory as we know it. They will call us simple and childlike, lacking intellect, and understanding. History will repeat itself.
Something really is older than dirt!!
The part about Shakespeare comes from a parody of numerology in Scientific American years ago - Shakespeare had nothing to do with the King James translation.
In any case, this doesn't affect religious views on creation any more than existing knowledge did -- pushing fossils back another billion years doesn't make the case for a strict Biblical interpretation any more flimsy. Besides, this is evidence for early terrestrial life. There was life in the oceans well before that.
Carbon-14 isn't what's used for those kinds of timelines. It's longer-lived substances like Uranium. And the fact of the matter is your concerns would have some weight if it weren't for the fact that something like five separate methods, using separate radioactive isotopes, achive dating results that are in precise agreement with each other.
Also, if radioactive decay rates were greater in the past (by the extent required to explain the Creationist timeline) then the ambient radioactivity on the surface of the earth would have wiped it clean of life in Biblical times.
Also, If rates of radioactive decay varied even by a little bit such devices as atomic bombs and nuclear reactors would simply not work. Fission explosions require nanosecond timing in the machinery of the bomb.
Finally, you can postulate all you like about exterior conditions to radioactivity but you have not established causality. You have proposed no mechanism that could be used to explain variable radioactivity, let alone put forward a testable hypothesis. Just because you don't understand it does not mean that it's incomprehensible.
Creationists try to make this subject sound much more subjective than it is. Don't take my word for it. Read up on the subject, if you're as open minded as you claim. Nuclear physics is really not that hard to understand when you want to know the whys and wherefores of these kinds of issues. But don't appeal to your own ignorance. I already know how it works and am comfortable with it. So is anyone who bothers to understand what they're talking about. And if you're too lazy to, well I'm sorry. You'll get the same kind of RTFM responses that any other kind of clueless newbie would get.
Curiously, the shape of these organic mats seems almost to form the letters of two english words, "First post". Of course, no conclusions can be drawn from this, and it has been attributed to mere happenstance...
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The Oldest Known Life Keeps Getting Older
As opposed to all those things that don't get older everyday???
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Don't let the headline fool you. By no means does this push back the age of the oldest known life. The paper reports on new evidence of terrestrial life. But, as stated in the article, there is evidence that the oceans were teeming with life as far back as 3.8 billion years ago (just after Heavy Bombardment ended). And by teeming, I mean there are fossilized structures (stromatolites) that can be many meters high, which were created solely by ancient bacteria.
Don't get me wrong. Very old terrestrial life is a big deal. But 2.6-2.7 bya isn't all *that* long ago.
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