Slashdot Mirror
3.46-Billion-Year-Old 'Fossils' Were Not Created By Life Forms
sciencehabit writes: What are the oldest fossils on Earth? For a long time, a 3.46-billion-year-old rock from Western Australia seemed to hold the record. A 1993 Science paper (abstract) suggested that the Apex chert contained tiny, wormy structures that could have been fossilized cell walls of some of the world's first cyanobacteria. But now there is more evidence that these structures have nothing to do with life. The elongated filaments were instead created by minerals forming in hydrothermal systems, researchers report (abstract). After the minerals were formed, carbon glommed on to the edges, leaving behind an organic signature that looked suspiciously like cell walls.
Ah, so no possibility of any confirmation bias there, of course.
I really hate it when headlines declare something like this as a fact, when clearly everyone involved is just promoting competing theories. The headline should really read 3.46-Billion-Year-Old 'Fossils' May Not Have Been Created By Life Forms. Just because someone published a paper disputing one theory and promoting another doesn't mean we can automatically assume it to be factual.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Just like most systems, there is a complexity barrier at which certain features can manifest beyond. A self hosting replication system must have a certain degree of complexity in order for it to work, thus we exist in a universe and at a scale and temperature where the chaos is low enough to allow persistence of information and change of energy levels, but not too high to prevent structure. Even though we are trillions of replicating systems with error correction features with internal colonies of single cells that aid in everything from digestion to fighting wars against even smaller viruses, we don't look at something that is not a self hosting replicator (a virus) and wonder if it is a self hosting replicator.
Sentience is like that too. It emerges at a complexity level at which the systems is capable of internal representation of not only its reproduction information, but immediate external stimulus, histories of events, predictive powers based on said experience, internalized models of hypothetical events (including theories of how one came into such a being), and self reflection upon the same (the cybernetic loop must be closed in order for fractal complexity magnification).
No truly sentient life form, no matter how much more amazingly complex, will look down upon a sentient life form and deem them non sentient. It's not a relative thing, the features expressed exist or they don't. When one gains this understanding it become a lot easier to study science, do business, influence culture, and utilize bureaucracy because one can see how these cybernetic systems are like other forms of life -- DNA has been hypothesizing with experimental mutations and preserving the beneficial information for its eons of science; Businesses have been competing as organic entities since they were first formed; Cultures have been aware of themselves and gained introspection since the first behavioral consensus; And, Bureaucracy has been sensing deciding and acting long before the terms "scientific method" or "cybernetics" were coined.
True, a higher intelligence could understand vastly more of the universe, but do not ignore the fractal nature of knowledge, they will know the parts more intimately. It's folly to think that what would be cosmic gods compared to us wouldn't be able to classify us as having the features we do. We may not grasp some far more grand understanding, but that doesn't mean we wouldn't be sentient compared to them -- simply because our brain waves weren't powerful enough to spawn matter with a thought, for instance, wouldn't mean we didn't have brain waves.
The headline should really read 3.46-Billion-Year-Old 'Fossils' May Not Have Been Created By Life Forms.
And then apply the rule that "may" and "may not" have exactly the same literal meaning. Any headline that contains anything like "may" or "may not" is screaming sensationalism. "Scientists dispute oldest fossils" is informative, "Fossils may not have been created by life" is identical to "Fossils may have been created by life", and is therefore meaningless.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
You take it as gospel or you are shown the door, and any scientist worth his salt will tell you to quit pretending that's science because it's not.
Never actually worked with actual scientists have ya? These guys and gals argue about everything, and constantly try to disprove their theories and make fun of each other's hypothese'.
Lot's of stuff is proven wrong all the time. you accept it, and move on. Meanwhile the fundies are busy trying to insist that enough rain fell to cover the entire earth up to and over the tops of the highest mountains, and then mysteriously vanished.
It's why science schoolbooks from 25 years ago are obsolete, but Grandpa's King James version of the bible is just as up to date as it never was.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.