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Did Sea Life Arise Twice?
eldavojohn writes "Dr. Adam Maloof has found fossils of sea sponges in Australia from 650 million years ago. You might think this is no big deal unless you consider that sea sponges were thought to have arisen 520 million years ago. These fossils predate the oldest hard bodied fossils we have by a hundred million years. Dr. Maloof is now wondering if life might have arisen twice after the first attempt was quashed 635 million years ago: 'Since animals probably did not evolve twice, we are suddenly confronted with the question of how some relative of these reef-dwelling animals survived the Snowball Earth.' So how is it that life survived the Marinoan glaciation? The BBC has a video on the topic and Wikipedia has a time line of the Proterozoic Eon into the Paleozoic Era."
You know how they say evolution would be falsified by a bunny in the pre-cambrian.
Well, it's not a bunny, but it's not in the stratum it's supposed to be.
Time to stop teaching the discredited theory of evolution.
"Thought to have" and then "were wrong" has never happened before? Is this proof that sea life rose twice or proof of God? !!! (My money is on an oversight or mistake)
Whale
...because this is Slashdot this story will arise twice for sure. ;)
Life creates itself to fit a niche, through a trial-and-error process called natural selection.
1. Does this mean life could arise twice, in similar form? Yes, and in fact there's evidence for parallel evolution:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100225214757.htm
2. Does this mean that life on other planets arises identically or near-identically to our own, or that the origin of life on earth comes from elsewhere? Possibly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
Basically, life adapting to similar conditions in different areas would have a similar "blueprint" although possibly different DNA reflecting a different route to that end.
Futurist Traditionalism
More likely, this is evidence that there never was a Snowball Earth. We've never been sure whether the entire Earth froze up or just large areas of it. If creatures lived through the glaciation, that's a good indication that unfrozen regions still existed.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Most dating methods that are used routinely are accurate; that is why they are used. Carbon 14 is typically NOT used for objects older than 45,000 years, when it becomes useless. For older objects, other methods are used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating
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Eat bad sea life and it will arise more then twice. Badoom tishhhhh!
Thank you, thank you.
it's probably just darwin testing the scientists faith in science.
It will never cross his mind, or many of your minds, that maybe the whole geological time scale is fraudulent. It was erected in 1830 and radiometric dating wasn't established until 1940. Not to mention radiometric dating is based on 3 assumptions, any one of which would dramatically destroy the dating method, and at least two of which are actually proven to be wrong.
For that matter, maybe life has and continues to spontaneously emerge on our warm, wet, densely living planet in different nooks and crannies but hasn't found the right conditions to start sprouting in other places at all... as far as we can tell... yet. With the "chemicals for life" and every imaginable condition spread across the universe, the suggestion that life spontaneously emerged on the Earth implies that the universe has sprouted life millions or billions of other times; in other words, that the universe itself "is alive."
"Timeline of evolution" at 03:43, 16 August 2010
Note to Slashdot Editors: When used as references, Wikipedia links should be to a specific version of the article.
When I discuss evolution-vs-creationism with some folks, the discussion sometimes steers toward the notion that the coming together of amino acids to form life is this *incredibly* improbable thing, and that it certainly needed the hand of a creator to ensure that it happened on a planet which could support it.
I then point out to them that *all* we know is that life has been created on this planet *at least* once. It may have happened a million times, for all we know. Out in that vast ocean, there are countless chances for it to happen every day and it very well *may* be happening. Who the hell knows? Any life that we may find out there in the oceans gets attributed to being descended from the *first* occurrence of life... but that might not really be the case.
So, this notion that life may have arisen twice? I don't find it shocking at all. Okay, I guess I'm a little piqued by the fact that researchers think that they hold *evidence* of it (since that's a little harder to do) but, like I said, I have a hunch this has happened millions of times since the "first time".
By law of parsimony, the most likely explanation is that sponges arose once, and survived. While it isn't impossible that two similar organisms evolved from the same organism to fill a niche, it is tough to show evidence that two identically structured organisms arose twice, at different times. Most often when this happens, it happens at relatively close time intervals in physically separated areas, with simple changes. Seeing evidence to the contrary would be amazing, but in molecular evolution and probabilistic modeling, the more assumptions you make, the less robust the results will be, and so far all we have is/are fossils with identical structures.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
First link is to a trash tabloid-ish site per the ads I saw. Not exactly peer reviewed science.
All the squealing is oriented around the assumption that the date they calculated is correct, and then wanders into wild speculation.
However, the cruddy first link carefully avoided any discussion of screwing up the dating.
Its very easy to improperly date a rock. For example, you can properly calculate the date of individual sand grains. But, its a really bad idea to assume the age of the sand grains equals the age of a sandstone later made out of that sand.
Another example, lets say I take a dump on the top of Rib Mountain, a quartzite xenolith in my area (sort of). Now its possible to figure out the "birthdate" of rib mountain, around one billion years, and the surrounding sedimentary rocks were worn away about half a billion years ago. Does my coprolite indicate human habitation one billion years ago, half a billion years ago, or last month? I suppose for a website with all the class of weekly world news, the story would be human habitation one billion years ago. But, although I have a low slashdot UID, I'm not that old (yet).
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The saddest part of this story? No, not the tabloid link that gets vast parts of the story wrong. No, the saddest part is, thanks to a new obsession of my kids, I can't read this story about prehistoric sea sponges without singing "Who lives in a pineapple under the sea!"
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Paper, Scissors, Meteor, you lose!
Table-ized A.I.
So we could already be up to Life 2.0 ? I thought it seemed shiny and bright but with some underlying feeling of pointlessness ! ;)
while (true != false) process_more_stupid_code();
retarded fish frogs!
Satan made those fossils look even older so that we would have even more reason to doubt the truth of Scripture.
Forgive my trolling, but Dr. Maloof is an idiot. There are things called hydrothermal vents that certain species of sponge live around. So unless he thinks "Snowball Earth" involved the complete freezing of the oceans and, indeed, all other bodies of water, a hypothesis can easily be constructed to answer his question.
The bible doesn't mention sea sponges so it didn't happen. Maybe they washed pet dinosaurs with the sponges? That would be biblically correct science.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
As a colleague of Adam Maloof's, I just want to point out the most impressive thing about this story. Adam isn't some old tweed-jacketed Princeton dude with a salt-and-pepper beard: he's just a few years out of grad school, and is in his early 30's.
Kinda puts your own life accomplishments in perspective, doesn't it?
The sponges came ashore, but Hasselhoff put 'em back.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jNTnBTKiQk
He's sorta like Chuck Norris, without the roundhouse kick.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
From TFS:
Doesn't sound like he's wondering to me - in fact, it sounds like he's pretty much ruled it out. WTF?
Sea Sponges "evolved" approx. 5000 years ago, along with the rest of the universe.
Taco writes:
Holy Crap.
For one thing, even the (misleading) headline doesn't claim that life may have arisen twice. It asks the question whether sea life (in context, meaning multi-cellular sea-life such as sponges). And the headline and summary are, in fact misleading: the guy they're interviewing specifically says it's really unlikely sea animals evolved twice. Finally: read this article. Among the interesting bits of data: based on genomic analysis, it's 10^2860 (not a typo) more likely that all extant life forms had a single ancestor than that there were multiple ancestors.
So: if life really did arise twice, be more shocked. 10^2860 is a really, really big number.
That does leave the possibility that life arose, died off, then started up again... but bear in mind, our single-celled ancestors showed up in the oceans almost as soon as the oceans condensed. There wasn't really a lot of time for another, completely independent system of life to start up and then die off. Nor is it very likely that independent life forms were created after "our" kind of life took off - particularly once the atmosphere and oceans became oxygenated, conditions became very unfavorable for the kinds of processes thought to be responsible for the earliest proto-life. O2 was damned deadly to EXISTING life - its appearance in the atmosphere is thought to have killed off a whole bunch of species that couldn't adapt.
Ok, it seems there are two possibilities here: it could be that being "confronted by the question of how they survived" is a rhetorical device leading up to just such a hypothesis, even if they didn't publish it in the article. Or maybe you're just a lot smarter than the "idiot" (who's a paleontology PhD) quoted here. Which do you think is more likely?
The scientific method requires a known control. For carbon dating, there is external evidence that you can use to judge the accuracy of it (historical records) but for other dating methods, where is the known control? Don't feed me circular logic crap about the state of gases in strata beside fossils of a "known" age because that is a feedback loop. I was not born yesterday.
Not only have some of these gas based dating methods been thrown into question by the realization that cosmic radiation can speed up the radioactive decay of those gases but we do not have any way to verify the decay rate unaffected by cosmic radiation using the classic scientific method. There is no control old enough. We also do not know what concentration of those gases were when they were trapped in the rock let alone what they were even a couple hundred years ago.
Even if the scale of the rate of decay was accurate, there is no way to know what the started state was when it was trapped, whether that gas was trapped long before that strata formed and whether cosmic radiation has sped up the decay since it was deposited in the strata.
In a nutshell, you do not know for certain if a particular strata is 3000 or 90 million years old.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
It's theorized that microbes living in hidy-holes deep in the crust of this rock survive in the worst terrestrial conditions. That's the short version.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
As many others in this thread have noted, the summary completely misrepresents the content of the article.
Regardless, there are many very interesting examples of parallel evolution. Startling to me was finding out that fruit bats and insectivorous bats are very much unrelated... meaning that true flight evolved at least twice in mammals. Pterosaurs and true birds, the same thing. What a wondrous universe we live in.
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
But the consensus of climate scientists is that Snowball Earth happened, therefore it's unscientific to question it. Are you a Global Cooling Denialist?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Imagine that the sponges that were here first filed for patent.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Mod article up.
There's far more things suggesting extra-terran life exist then not.
Biology comes from bio-chemistry, which in turn comes from
chemistry, which exists everywhere in the universe.
It's almost like saying, There's no life under that rock over there
because i havent checked!
it was a dupe
Life was already well established 635 million years ago. We have the stromatolites to prove it. The question should be, 'Did multi-cellular life arise twice?" Even if the Earth had been completely covered in ice, life would still have survived around volcanic vents in the oceans and in the deep rock.
I saw a mini-series called Miracle Planet and it described a still forming Earth being bombarded where not only is the ocean completely vaporized the Earth's crust was heated to sterilizing temperatures down to several kilometers and the only life that could survive that would have been deep in the crust.
There may have indeed been multiple origins of life on the early Earth. There may even be an undiscovered shadow biosphere.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
So far we have found life just about everywhere on this planet where long chain carbon molecules can be stable. We have found it using a variety of substrates to obtain energy, including oxygen and sulfur which are common in the universe. Even talking about "life" begs the question; the term includes organisms based on two different genetic storage means (DNA and RNA), and several different cell structures. Just on this planet, we observe that the phenomenon of life occurs under widely varying conditions. We observe that our sun is mainstream.
Based on our observations, the probability that life is common in the universe has to be very high, though we have no proof that it exists off our planet. So why would anyone even suggest that both outcomes are equally probable? I'm afraid the answer is religion and cultural conditioning, which seems to be confined more or less to the Third World and the US.
It's worth pointing out that this cultural conditioning is far from universal; although Giordano Bruno was burned by the Catholics for asserting the plurality of inhabited worlds, I think that most Europeans with a scientific education would take it pretty much for granted. Why so many loud people in the US have this obsession with our uniqueness I don't know, though I could make all kinds of pop psychological/sociological suggests. But I won't, because it would be unscientific.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
the author of the paper and his conclusions have already been called into question
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/australians-say-uss-oldest-fossil-claims-dont-hold-water/story-e6frg6nf-1225907040826
from TFA
Moreover, Dr Gehling said better, older fossils had been found three years ago by University of Melbourne geologist Malcolm Wallace and his team. Dr Gehling suggested that competitive pressure might have been the reason Dr Wallace's group has been unable to publish their results.
The Australian understands that one of the co-authors of the contentious paper is a reviewer for the journal Science, to which Dr Wallace's group has submitted a paper. It is not clear whether the reviewer has read the paper but Dr Wallace acknowledged that "we've had difficulties getting our results published". He preferred not to discuss Dr Gehling's suspicions. He did affirm that his group's finds were roughly 20 million years older than those reported by the Princeton team, headed by paleontologist Adam Maloof.
You shall know him by his Sig
Well we could do a scientific experiment. Go home and put your sponge in the freezer and let me know how it goes. Either that or come to the realization that spongebob is not only ancient, but he is one badass mofo.
Define intelligence first.
Then, define "before".
Tool use without hands; http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/crow/, not as hard as you might think.
Also, the following; http://www.jcrows.com/crow.html
"While tool use among birds is not unheard of, Hunt's New Caledonian crows, close kin to American crows, were observed employing two distinctly different kinds of tools to forage for invertebrates such as insects, centipedes, and larvae. Such specialization in tool manufacture has not heretofore been observed in nonhuman animals, according to Hunt.
Hunt observed both manufacture and use of a hooked tool made by plucking and stripping a barbed twig. He also observed the use, but not manufacture, of what he described as a "stepped cut tool" with serrated edges. He did, however, observe and photograph leaves from which crows had started to cut such stepped tools.
The findings add to the growing debate over cognition in nonhuman animals. While man, in Shakespeare's words, may be "the paragon of animals," Hunt's findings suggest that the capacity for thought exists on a continuum where man is not unique".
But I think I know what you mean, and my guess would be no, we haven't had intelligent life on earth before. All the answers to my basic questions (who/what, where, when, how) seem to lead me towards "highly unlikely", if not "does not compute"; ).
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I figure that ice ages are God's way of saying, "OK, you're done. NEXT!!" :D
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
This spam is the cancer that's killing Slashdot.
Good point with the crow example, you should also note the famous example of the Pica Pica (European Magpie), another corvid who is also able to use basic tools, and has a demonstrable concept of self (recognizing itself in a mirror and using it to try to remove a sticker on its body). Also I remember a somewhat recent study that demonstrated rudimentary math abilities in a bird as common as the chicken.
So yeah, "birdbrained" is not something I'd say to a dumb person.
And the mechanno and leggo era as well.
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Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
Multicellular life has evolved many times, even though most attempts did not result in large creatures. One need only consider that plants and animals existed as single-celled life long before multicellularity. Plants and animals must therefore have evolved multicellularity independently.
For a thorough overview, see:
http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/biog1101/outlines/Bonner%20-Origin%20of%20Multicellularity.pdf
These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms -- animal and vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aërial -- were the products of unguided evolution acting on life-cells made by the Old Ones, but escaping beyond their radius of attention.