Did Sea Life Arise Twice? 238
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."
Evolution finally refuted (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Don't know but... (Score:5, Funny)
...because this is Slashdot this story will arise twice for sure. ;)
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:5, Funny)
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.
*stares blankly for a moment*
I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:3, Funny)
My method of dating accurately is to have us both do a captcha that the other can see before we meet in person. Weeds out a lot of bots that way.
(Someone post the xkcd)
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:5, Funny)
"All well and good, but just exactly when is intelligent life due to evolve"?
- Kevin Gilmer, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne England, 18/8/2010 14:48
Click to rate Rating 5
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:4, Funny)
[looking around]
Speak for yourself. I think I'd rather date the bot!!
Saddest Part (Score:4, Funny)
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!"
Re:We're being tested (Score:2, Funny)
Paper, Scissors, Meteor, you lose!
Simple (Score:1, Funny)
Satan made those fossils look even older so that we would have even more reason to doubt the truth of Scripture.
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Not to mention that General Relativity and Quantum Relativity don't mix... obviously they are both wrong and we can quit teaching Newtonian physics in school too! I think we are really on to something. If we weed out all the nonsense being taught, we will have enough time in the day to bring back art class!
This is worse than Piltdown Man (Score:3, Funny)
Sea Sponges "evolved" approx. 5000 years ago, along with the rest of the universe.
Re:Saddest Part (Score:3, Funny)
Who died in an oil spill because of BP?
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:5, Funny)
Costs too much money (over $40/month)
Hate to continue this off topic thread here, but...
If you can't afford $40/month, you are not the kinda guy that the ladies on e-harmony are looking for.
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:1, Funny)
http://www.xkcd.com/632/
We all know about the scientific method. (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:3, Funny)
The ladies won't dig your math skills either...
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Funny)
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:2, Funny)
What?!?!?! Are you kidding? $40? That's cheap. K-Ar dating will run you $1000 easy, and U-Pb is up to a few thousand these days for a decent number of points for an isochron ($750 a pop + $200 for mineral separation [geochronlabs.com]). Even el-cheapo C-14 dating will cost you $300 for conventional [geochronlabs.com], and almost $600 for accelerator mass spectrometry C-14 dating ... heh, if you're into that kind of thing.
Sheesh. Maybe you think going out to a movie and a fancy restaurant is expensive, but you have no idea how expensive dating is for a geologist.
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:3, Funny)
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