Scientists Decipher 3-Billion-Year-Old Genomic Fossils 217
hnkstrprnkstr writes "MIT scientists have created a sort of genomic fossil (abstract) that shows the collective genome of all life underwent an enormous expansion about 3 billion years ago, which they're calling the Archean Expansion. Many of the new genes appearing in the Archean Expansion are oxygen related, and could be the first biological evidence of the Great Oxidation Event, the period in Earth's history when oxygen became so plentiful that many anaerobic life forms may have become extinct."
Re:Creationism (Score:3, Informative)
The overwhelming majority of human progress has come from people who were or are highly religious.
That's because it took us 5,000 years of civilization to grow past our need to attribute everything we didn't understand to a mysterious power. Today we actually have the cognitive fortitude to admit our ignorance and lack of imagination. Those evolved among us do anyway.
Your "deeply-held belief", which is undoubtedly simply a circumstance of conceptive chance, rather than a profound understanding of theology and introspection, is not shared [lhup.edu] by a statistically significant number of modern scientists. So this silly claim you parroted (made up by far more intelligent religious hacks, good job crediting them by the way) proving religious belief has anything to do with scientific endeavor is plainly bullshit.
But go right ahead. Continue to take the coward's way out and claim that some deity is responsible for your mental failures if that helps you look in the mirror. Just do us a favor and quit trying to rewritite history as well.
Re:For the "but it's just a computer model!" troll (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, the first result [google.com] is very interesting, and mostly understandable, because the ideas read much like similar programming concepts. And it even contains a car analogy!
The character ’existence of engine’ is compatible with the tree of Figure 2.1 (a) as the
motor is invented once in the edge connecting the root and the common ancestor of car and
motorcycle. The same character is not compatible with the tree in Figure 2.1 (b) where the
engine is invented twice. The character ’number of wheels’ is compatible with both trees.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
"All current life was set in place nearly three billion years ago". Absolutely not - your view of the history of biology is very warped. Study more biology itself to realize what 'current life' actually looks like. Some important points:
1.7~2 Billion years ago: probable endosymbiosis of prokaryote into eurkaryotic cells, forming mitochonria. Much later than the 3 billion years you suggest, and an absolutely vital stage in the evolution of multicellular life. In fact, it is suggested that the emergence of mitrochondria is why we are here to day - without these powerhouses single-celled life did not have enough available energy to form multi-cellular organisms.
1~1.3 Billions years ago: complex multi-cellular life: While the diversity, resilience, and ubiquity of single-celled life is amazing, I find complex multi-celled life much more astonishing. That colonies of cells can cooperate, specialise and form complex life is a wonderful achievement of evolution. Of course, it took a mind-boggling amount of time. Still, a significant step the results of which are quite distinct from life of 3 billions years ago. So your assertion is again inadequate.
~600 million years: emergence of the first neuron.
~580 million years: nerves and muscles, working together; first eyes
~550 million years: brains
And so the list goes on. Perhaps a significant development every 10-20 million years.
~540 million years: hearts and circulatory systems
There is a giant change from single-celled life to cats, dogs, and humans. What you should be saying is that, as a programmer, you are amazed that all life on Earth has the same genetic code - that the 3 base-pair codon is almost universal in every cell and organism on the plant. I suppose I do like you perspective though, when you look at a yeast cell, an oak tree, and a human and realise they are all related, all cousins, all derived from an evolutionary chain billions of years in the making.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
I only read a page or two a day (first "Oxygen", and now "Power, Sex, Suicide" - and yes, that's all based on oxygen). But the revelation I had yesterday was that anaerobic bacteria essentially drown in oxygen, just as we would suffocate with too little oxygen
They don't "drown" in oxygen. Oxygen is a highly reactive substance, cut an apple and it browns fairly rapidly, expose iron to air and it will rust, those chemical hand warmers [wikipedia.org] take oxygen from the air in order to produce heat. Some organisms, called obligate anaerobes [wikipedia.org], can't tolerate an environment with high oxygen content because it poisons them by destroying enzymes and interfering with key biological pathways in those organisms.
When organisms came about that produced large amounts of oxygen (a byproduct of photosynthesis, as well as other reducing processes) they basically polluted the environment by producing so much oxygen. This oxygen "pollution" poisoned most of the organisms of the time until some evolved ways to break down and even use the oxygen. Once this happened there was an explosion of oxygen-using organisms. It turns out that since oxygen is so reactive it makes a great agent to "burn" (oxidize) other materials and produce energy.
However, there are many anaerobes [wikipedia.org] that can survive in an oxygen environment - some can even use a little of the oxygen when it's available. There's no hard and fast cutoff of how much oxygen is too much or too little. As levels rise there will be more wildfires and the less oxygen-tolerant organisms will struggle, as levels fall the more oxygen-reliant organisms will have problems. A partial pressure for oxygen of 0.15 kPa (15% at STP [wikipedia.org] - standard temperature & pressure) will certainly cause a lot of problems for many oxygen-reliant organisms.