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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.
...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.
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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
.
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
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.
Abstract:
It was peer reviewed, so I would suspect that their methods weren't trash.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
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.
Sea Sponges "evolved" approx. 5000 years ago, along with the rest of the universe.
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.
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