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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.
after 346 billions years niggers!!
After all, when you're fighting a losing battle, even a hand up from science is a welcome blessing.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
fauxcells
Actually, I think that some GOP senators and congress people such as John McCain must qualify for the world's oldest fossils!
Australia has some really old rocks alright. My favourite is this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... Named after some hills in South Australia. Some weird animals there. (If they are even animals. Or plants. Both?).
If you avoid the truth, you will erroneously discover something else.
... future descendant might try and argue, by the same reasoning, that the "people" (as we currently call them) in this time were not really alive either... that all we actually are is a bunch of organic compounds arranged in a pattern that suspiciously behaves like what they consider to be life, but actually isn't.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Did they find any triangular, striated marks on these rocks, by any chance?
I swear some ancient civilization used Australia as a waste dump and testing grounds for some seriously bad sh** - the frigging Platypus is weird enough but folks forget the damned thing is *poisonous*, too - then add in the rest of the the things that are pretty much post-Apocalypse like the other floral and fauna that are incredibly lethal (e.g., the snakes) and it can make you wonder 'wtf happened here??'
Not the place.
Keep the whitehouse white, vote Trump & Palin 2020.
Does this mean we evolved from rocks?
The elongated filaments were instead created by minerals forming in hydrothermal systems, researchers report
Someone peed away their Foster's on a very hot day (by modern standards), and the outflow cooled over some rocks.
This happened a very long time ago.
You have an obvious unit error. Might want to evolve that part of your brain before you go ranting again.
Someone already pointed out how the creationists are already going to use this in their favor as evidence that fossils aren't the product or evolution or somesuch.
But it goes both ways. They often rant about how the scientific literature is biased against anything that goes against the evolution dogma. Although these non-life fossils don't really contradict any OTHER fossil evidence, nevertheless, here we have an example of a publication about exactly the sort of thing that the creationists say would never get published.
To me, at least, it doesn't sound like they had "nothing to do with" life - I wonder if it could be a precursor to life. If mineral formations were forming "cell-wall-like" structures made of nonmetals, that sounds like it might have been a naturally forming scaffold for the formation of the earliest cell walls. Natural small enclosures with attraction to carbon and nonmetals seems like they'd make a really good substrate for infinite separate runs of the natural experiment leading up to the first replicating molecules.
1. The Bible NEVER says the Earth is ANY age, and particularly DOES NOT SAY 6000 years. If you were both LITERATE and intellectually curious enough to READ it, you'd know that.
2. No central authority of the Baptist denomination of protestant Christianity exists (unlike, for example, the Pope for Catholics) so there IS NOT an official Baptist position on the age of the Earth. There ARE various groups and orgs who name themselves "Baptist", but that does not mean that any particular group or Church that is named "Baptist" is in any way affiliated with another one.
3. I'm sure there are some individual borderline-Christian types out there who swirl a little numerology into their religious beliefs and then run around announcing that they have figured out the age of the Earth by studying the Bible with a magic decoder ring, but that just means they are as nutty as the people with science degrees who believe in ESP, or waste their time at SETI after plugging guessed numbers into the Drake equation, or all the non-Christians who thought a Mayan calendar was telling them when the world would end
There are people with fringe/whacky beliefs and poor reasoning in EVERY group, but it's generally poor form to presume everybody in those groups believes what the nuts believe. To claim that all Christians or all Baptists believe the Earth is 6K years old is like claiming all doctors believe in doing medical experiments on twins, or that all homosexuals like to abuse little boys.
"3.46-Billion-Year-Old 'Fossils' Were Not Created By Life Forms"
That would make them... rocks. Not fossils.
Stuff like this you mean right?