3.46-Billion-Year-Old 'Fossils' Were Not Created By Life Forms 69
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.
Re:FIrst post for fossils (Score:5, Funny)
Baptists are already writing this week's sermon (Score:3)
Re:Baptists are already writing this week's sermon (Score:5, Funny)
More like the Church of Robotology now that there is conclusive evidence that machines were first and created all life
Suck it meatbags!
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Suck it ugly bags of mostly water!
FTFY [memory-alpha.org]
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I do believe you missed the entirely appropriate Futurama reference, good sir.
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Good news everyone! We're all idiots :)
I was making a Futurama reference to the episode where Professor Farnsworth abandons Earth because Creationists (particularly Dr Banjo) keep making additional demands for the next missing link, etc... The professor ends up on a planet where robotic life is evolving at an incredibly fast rate, and he has to tell them that he was in fact their creator. Of course Bender delights in this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
To be honest I have used the "Ugly bags of water" refe
Re:Baptists are already writing this week's sermon (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing has been overturned here. Just a question settled, perhaps.
Full disclosure: the lead author is Martin Brasier, who just happens to be the guy who discovered slightly younger 3.4 billion year old fossils just 20km away.
http://news.sciencemag.org/201... [sciencemag.org]
Re:Baptists are already writing this week's sermon (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Baptists are already writing this week's sermon (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Because a verb may only have one interpretation, mightn't it.
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Nothing has been overturned here. Just a question settled, perhaps.
And this is the difference between science and religion. Since its science, we say, "we were wrong - but its cool, now we can move on to find out the truth..
If this were religion, we'd be fighting tooth and nail, and there would be smear jobs about the scientists liberal tendencies, and stories going around on "How the lord said life was 3.46 billion years old, so it damn well WAS 3.46 million year old fossils.
Teach the controversy brothers!
Re:Baptists are already writing this week's sermon (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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From what I understand the 6000 figure comes from adding up the ages of the patriarchs in Genesis, and then tying the events in Genesis to a known historical event.
In order for person x to have existed during event y, Adam was created in year z.
I believe the x is normally Moses and the y is the reign of Ramses II of Egypt, but I could be mistaken.
One might call them... (Score:2, Funny)
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No, old does not imply stupid. Look all the stupid racists, classists and chauvinists running around today in various countries.
Old? Old. (Score:3)
Re:Old? Old. (Score:5, Informative)
Australia has lots of weird animals. Hell, they've got moths down there that are as big as cocker spaniels. Animals that look like Jim Henson rejects. They've got freakin' yowies down there that make Sasquatch look like Pee-Wee Herman. I didn't actually see a yowie, but after I saw something that looked like a three-way cross between a rat, a jackrabbit and Dwayne Johnson, I don't doubt for a second that they exist. I went there a few years ago and visited a huge national park and it was like Land of the Lost.
I mean, it's a nice place. Nice people. They find out you're from Chicago and you won't have to pay for another drink. Great looking women. Good food. If it wasn't for the annoying accents, you'd think you were somewhere on the West Coast. But the wildlife, man. Way too spooky for me.
Re:Old? Old. (Score:4, Funny)
So, apart from that, what did you think of Melbourne?
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He seemed like a nice enough guy, but after eight buckets of lager he wanted to fight everyone in the place. Fortunately the bartender kept a tranq gun behind the bar for these apparently frequent occasions.
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Just dab some vegemite behind your ears and they'll leave you be.
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Chicago? Why?
When I was in Ireland, I never bought another drink once people discovered I'd been to Boston. Which I though was odd, but it made a kind of sense given the large Irish population. It was like a kind of Irish promised land.
What's the Aussie connection to the Windy City?
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They think we're all connected to the Mafia, of course. You know, Al Capone and all that stuff. My Italian surname must have fired their imaginations, even though I assured them I hadn't tommygunned anyone in years.
I had (and this is 100% true) one guy ask me if I thought he could get "work" with the Chicago Mob if he came here. He was a big lad with neck muscles that started above his ears and three different women's names tattooed to his arms. I started t
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That is totally not the answer I was expecting. That's awesome. Thanks.
Waste Dump? (Score:2)
Re:Waste Dump? (Score:4, Funny)
OK, we confess. It was us.
Yours faithfully,
England.
It was all created by God (Score:1)
If you avoid the truth, you will erroneously discover something else.
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Do you think that some distant.... (Score:4, Funny)
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A self hosting replication system must have a certain degree of complexity in order for it to work
This is a tautology. Also, that level of complexity might be quite low.
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Plenty of humans deny that animals, insects, etc. are sentient (able to perceive or feel things), why would you assume more advanced organisms might not deny it of us?
Or perhaps you actually meant sapient (wise, or attempting to appear wise.), in which case would you say the great apes are sapient - they appear to have a relatively sophisticated understanding of the world, design and make tools, and can even be taught the basics of sign language (lacking the fine vocal control required for human speech)
The
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There are a few clear bright lines, just one of which is that no other species teaches/learns a skill solely through communication. For example, an adult chimp will show a young one how to fashion a reed into a tool used to retrieve yummy termites from a termite mound, but the perpetuation of this skill is not achieved by communication alone. This sort of thing has come up on /. numerous times - I'm surprised so many of the frequent posters aren't aware of it (or perhaps simply reject it).
- T
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That is simply a comment on the sophistication of their communication, not on the underlying consciousness. Apes typically have a fairly limited vocabulary in nature, maybe a few hundred "words" as I recall, though that's still being researched.
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Go ahead - try to teach someone how to build a decent termite-stick using a vocabulary of only a few hundred general-purpose words. I'd venture a guess that it can't be done. Hell, try to teach a fellow human a detailed skill using language alone - the results will be radically less than satisfactory - you'll never find a master swordsmith, painter, mechanic, knitter, etc,etc,etc that hasn't had extensive education by demonstration - words are just too imprecise with far too low an information density to
Re:Do you think that some distant.... (Score:4, Interesting)
maybe... just 1% from being the great apes
If you meant that humans are 1% different from other Great Apes you would be wrong. Humans are classified as Great Apes. If not you'd have some other Great Apes (bonobos and chimps) actually being closer to us than to the rest of the Great Apes. It was only ignorance or possibly human arrogance that in the past led to humans not being included with the other Great Apes.
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I seem to remember a complaint from Cuvier that he'd like to put humans in with other Great Apes, but thought he'd never hear the end of it from priests.
The evolution conspiracy (Score:2)
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 neve
Natural cell-wall precursor? (Score:2)
Fossils? (Score:2)
That would make them... rocks. Not fossils.