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."
For the "but it's just a computer model!" trolls (Score:4, Insightful)
Go here. [google.com] Follow, read, and understand the links on the first, say, three or four pages of search results. Then, maybe, you'll know enough to have a meaningful opinion on the subject.
Re:Creationism (Score:0, Insightful)
free to be wrong is FUNDAMENTAL to being free.
Re:Creationism (Score:5, Insightful)
If they continue to argue, hit them with a crowbar.
Re:Creationism (Score:5, Insightful)
The overwhelming majority of human progress has come from people who were or are highly religious.
Or claimed to be in order to escape the current Inquisition.
Re:Creationism (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, many murderers, mass murderers even, are/were "highly religious" and of course, in the middle of those two extremes, there are many many many many many many many other people who have made no impact on society whatsoever, doomed to be excluded from the annals of history by their mediocrity who are (or were) "highly religious". You can't just hold up an example of a great scientist who was also religious and say:
"Look! That proves it!!! Human progress is impossible without Religion!!"
I think if you replaced Newton's headstone with a magnet and wrapped his coffin in wire, you'd produce a measurable current every time you did say that.
The "overwhelming majority of human progress" is in the past, due to the fact that the present is still happening and we can't see into the future. Society is becoming more secular. Many countries still have blasphemy laws. Some countries will stone you to death if you criticise a man who's supposedly an emissary of a prophet of a god. How many people were hanged/stoned/shot to death because of their godlessness who might have come up with calculus, or the "law of gravity" or the bagless vacuum cleaner or any one of a number of Really Great Things? How many were excluded from schools/universities because of accidents of birth, or because of their religious beliefs (which is pretty much the same thing).
How many scientists paid lip service to God and religion because it was an established social convention. How many scientists paid lip service to God because the church was giving them money? If you were studying at one of the earliest 12th-14th century(I think) church-run universities would you come out with a heretical theory that suggested that God might not exist? No. No you wouldn't.
Re:Creationism (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice logic! Got another one for ya: The overwhelming majority of murders and rapes were committed by people who were or are highly religious. Guess that proves that theists are inherently immoral, eh?
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing has evolved, it has only specialized.
The bigger question is how this complex machinery of life developed in the first billion years of Earth amidst massive meteor impacts. People can call it what they want, but knowing that all life that has ever existed has existed essentially unchanged from three billion years ago defies explanation of "evolving" in first one to two billion years to the amazing complexity of how cells work and then staying pat for almost three billion years and only losing capabilities, not gaining new and more complex capabilities as one assumes from casual science study and reading.
Why would you expect the "gaining of new and more complex capabilities"? Evolution is not oriented towards perfection. It's oriented towards "good enough". So it's quite possible that all those 3 billion year old mechanisms have been "good enough" to meet all conditions encountered since then, in which case unless the "new and more complex capability" provided a substantial survival advantage, it won't have become commonplace. And since "more complex" generally means "more expensive in terms of energy consumption", any mutations in that direction could quite likely have been a survival *disadvantage*.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
The bigger question is how this complex machinery of life developed in the first billion years of Earth amidst massive meteor impacts. People can call it what they want, but knowing that all life that has ever existed has existed essentially unchanged from three billion years ago defies explanation of "evolving" in first one to two billion years to the amazing complexity of how cells work and then staying pat for almost three billion years and only losing capabilities, not gaining new and more complex capabilities as one assumes from casual science study and reading.
a) How long should we have expected that first billion years of evolution to take?
b) You should rephrase "not gaining new and more complex capabilities" to say "at the cellular level". At higher levels, progress has been phenomenal. (How much smarter are you than a single-cell organism?)
The origin of cellular machinery is indeed impressive, but unfortunately "I can't believe it could happen by natural causes in a billion years" tells us a little about the speaker's beliefs, and nothing at all about what actually happened.
As to why not much new has been added to that machinery since, maybe we have more basis for speculation. Competition from all-new "designs" is probably impossible, because the necessary building blocks would probably be oxidized, or digested by current organisms, before it could bootstrap itself into a new cell type. For variants on what we have, evolution is not a reversible process, so we can't expect cells to undo part of their history and try something else, any more than birds would evolve back into dinosaurs and go then forward again down a different path.
So we're probably stuck with consideration of add-ons to the current machinery. But there's no guarantee that something nifty would happen in that regard within any bounded period of time. Evolution doesn't provide organisms with things just because they are needed or would be useful. Possibly cellular evolution has reached a "local maximum" on the fitness landscape, from which there is no easy jump to something better.
And who knows... some of the past jumps may not have been particularly easy either, but merely fortuitous one-time events.
And evolution of macroscopic organisms has certainly gotten a lot of mileage out of the existing cellular machinery. Maybe it's good enough?
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except the original Hebrew word didn't mean a day, and was often used in other writings to mean an indeterminate period. If you're asking how you can trust a poor translation job, you may be on to something, but the original text didn't use the English word 'day' at all, let alone redefine it.
Alternately, some people claim the account in Genesis is metaphorical. Now I'm not arguing that it definitely is or isn't, but your argument seems to be that if it is metaphorical, it's untrustworthy in some absolute sense. I.e. "Carl Sagan used a metaphor of the Milky Way as the Backbone of Night in Cosmos, so how can we trust anything else in Cosmos?" Or maybe you're going as far as "The discoverer of the Benzine ring used a metaphor of a snake devouring its tail to describe it, so how can we trust anything in organic chemistry?".
Re:Let's get rid of that oxygen (Score:4, Insightful)