Posted on 09/26/2014 11:44:23 AM PDT by Red Badger
A Virginia Tech geobiologist with collaborators from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found evidence in the fossil record that complex multicellularity appeared in living things about 600 million years ago – nearly 60 million years before skeletal animals appeared during a huge growth spurt of new life on Earth known as the Cambrian Explosion.
The discovery published online Wednesday in the journal Nature contradicts several longstanding interpretations of multicellular fossils from at least 600 million years ago.
"This opens up a new door for us to shine some light on the timing and evolutionary steps that were taken by multicellular organisms that would eventually go on to dominate the Earth in a very visible way," said Shuhai Xiao, a professor of geobiology in the Virginia Tech College of Science. "Fossils similar to these have been interpreted as bacteria, single-cell eukaryotes, algae, and transitional forms related to modern animals such as sponges, sea anemones, or bilaterally symmetrical animals. This paper lets us put aside some of those interpretations."
In an effort to determine how, why, and when multicellularity arose from single-celled ancestors, Xiao and his collaborators looked at phosphorite rocks from the Doushantuo Formation in central Guizhou Province of South China, recovering three-dimensionally preserved multicellular fossils that showed signs of cell-to-cell adhesion, differentiation, and programmed cell death—qualities of complex multicellular eukaryotes such as animals and plants.
The discovery sheds light on how and when solo cells began to cooperate with other cells to make a single, cohesive life form. The complex multicellularity evident in the fossils is inconsistent with the simpler forms such as bacteria and single-celled life typically expected 600 million years ago.
While some hypotheses can now be discarded, several interpretations may still exist, including the multicellular fossils being transitional forms related to animals or multicellular algae. Xiao said future research will focus on a broader paleontological search to reconstruct the complete life cycle of the fossils.
More information: "Cell differentiation and germ–soma separation in Ediacaran animal embryo-like fossils" Lei Chen, Shuhai Xiao, Ke Pang, Chuanming Zhou & Xunlai Yuan Nature (2014) DOI: 10.1038/nature13766
Journal reference: Nature search and more info website
Provided by Virginia Tech
“So you’re saying these fossils don’t really exist and it’s all a conspiracy to promote satan?”
I cannot speak for Red Badger, but I will give you my answer to your ascerbic question:
No, I am saying that so called “scientists” are misinterpreting fossils. Their dating methods are flawed and based upon weak assumptions....and they delve in circular reasoning. These new “findings” are not important and don’t prove anything. They are being used to reinforce already existing false conclusions about origins.
If you reject nuclear physics and thus the radiometric dating of ancient rocks, reject geology and biology regardless of massive amounts of evidence, there are little grounds for discussion. I apologize for posting on an interesting article.
Sort of
Stay tuned
NO, not in the least!
God’s ways are not man’s ways!
A day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day to Him!
The more we discover in fossils, the more we can see that they are inherently designed by somebody and not an accident of evolution.
The fossils show that even 325 million years ago they were already fully functioning life forms and had a purpose.
We may not know the purpose, but He does!................
Don't apologize, geeze, just because someone nearly has an aneurism because she clicked on a thread which was certain to challenge a shaky faith is no need to apologize.
If anyone should apologize it should be SV for a lame attempt at being a sneaky ass with her comments.
Keep 'em coming Jim, I enjoy reading news like this.
I know, the idea gives me the chills.
Good reason for congress to make backward time travel illegal.
But there is no "faith" or "belief" involved with science, certainly not in a religious sense.
Science is simply the result of using certain assumptions (i.e., naturalism, uniformitarianism) and following certain rules (i.e., the scientific method).
And we don't "believe" those results, we simply accept (or don't) that a confirmed observation or theory is the best scientists can produce, for the moment, until somebody comes along with better data and/or ideas.
In this particular example the "better data" shows us complex life on earth 60 million years before previous data suggested.
That's not "belief", it's not "faith", it's just science, at work.
Sola Veritas: "I am saying that so called “scientists” are misinterpreting fossils.
Their dating methods are flawed and based upon weak assumptions....and they delve in circular reasoning.
These new “findings” are not important and don’t prove anything.
They are being used to reinforce already existing false conclusions about origins."
First of all, there's nothing "so called" about these scientists -- you FRiend are the "so called" passing judgment on real science based on your religious faith, while pretending there's something "scientific" in your way of thinking.
There's not, you are a poser.
Second, scientific dating methods, while subject to errors, are fundamentally sound, based on scientific assumptions of naturalism and uniformitarianism.
Of course you may argue that those assumptions are flawed, but those are the basic scientific assumptions -- they represent the foundation rock upon which all science is built.
In other words, ideas which are not based on those assumptions are simply not, by definition, "science", period.
So, if you argue that science is wrong about such things, then you are arguing in favor of some other branch of learning -- metaphysics perhaps, or a form of theology, but not science.
Third, of course these findings are "not important" to you, because you refuse to accept the basic premises of science, and therefore reject its findings.
But for anybody else, it's most interesting and noteworthy to see evidence of complex life 60 million years older than previously thought.
“Second, scientific dating methods, while subject to errors, are fundamentally sound, based on scientific assumptions of naturalism and uniformitarianism.”
Based upon “assumptions”.....says it all. It is still a matter of faith. You only lie to yourself when you deny it. You are a “religious” person, just don’t realize it.
“I apologize for posting on an interesting article.”
It is not interesting. They are not saying anything new, just more propaganda.
Uniformitarianism is the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe.
Naturalism is the assumption that you first look for natural explanations for observed natural phenomom.
Let’s be clear about exactly what you are rejecting.
But life is not a predicate.
“the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the universe in the past”
Except for anything which is outside the time period beginning with the Big Bang.
I’ll acknowledge that your post doesn’t necessarily assume naturalism to be true.
But if a person wants to take naturalism seriously, just remember it requires the denial of things like thought, intentionality and self. None of these can exist if naturalism is true.
All of science -- every jot and tittle of it -- is based on those assumptions.
Your religion is based on a different set of assumptions.
The physical evidence supporting scientific assumptions is overwhelming, as is the evidence supporting your religious beliefs -- but that is a different kind of evidence, let us call it "spiritual evidence".
My point here is: you are totally entitled to whatever assumptions you chose, so long as you don't call your religious beliefs "science" or pretend that science is just another religion.
Yes, science is based on assumptions, but there's nothing "spiritual" about them.
But if a person wants to take naturalism seriously, just remember it requires the denial of things like thought, intentionality and self. None of these can exist if naturalism is true.
No, all naturalism says is that you first look at natural causes when trying to explain an observation. That is not a new idea. St. Augustine saw Genesis as being an allegory as did John Calvin and St. Francis. They all acknowledged natural causes for observations. A volcano erupted in Japan yesterday, are you going to look for supernatural causes? Did the Japanese hikers somehow bring on the wrath of the volcano spirit because of their lack of reverence?
No, the word "naturalism" simply defines the realm of today's "natural sciences".
All it means is: natural explanations for natural processes.
In other words: if we can find a natural explanation for a natural process, then that explanation can be considered as "scientific".
But if an explanation is not "natural" (i.e.: God did it) or if a processes itself is not natural (i.e.: a miracle) then such explanations are not, by definition, "scientific".
That doesn't mean science is right or religion wrong, only that science itself cannot deal with religious questions and is therefore in no-way, shape or form a type of religion.
Science is the opposite of religion, not because scientists are necessarily atheists -- many are not atheists -- but rather because science itself only deals in the natural, not the spiritual, realm.
“Based on certain assumptions” = faith.
You can’t see that?
Most people don’t realize they have assumptions that color their conclusions.
Oddly enough, or maybe not, most of these people with the blindspot regarding their assumptions are the anti-theists.
On the Derivation of Ulysses from Don Quixote
I IMAGINE THIS story being told to me by Jorge Luis Borges one evening in a Buenos Aires cafe.
His voice dry and infinitely ironic, the aging, nearly blind literary master observes that “the Ulysses,” mistakenly attributed to the Irishman James Joyce, is in fact derived from “the Quixote.”
I raise my eyebrows.
Borges pauses to sip discreetly at the bitter coffee our waiter has placed in front of him, guiding his hands to the saucer.
“The details of the remarkable series of events in question may be found at the University of Leiden,” he says. “They were conveyed to me by the Freemason Alejandro Ferri in Montevideo.”
Borges wipes his thin lips with a linen handkerchief that he has withdrawn from his breast pocket.
“As you know,” he continues, “the original handwritten text of the Quixote was given to an order of French Cistercians in the autumn of 1576.”
I hold up my hand to signify to our waiter that no further service is needed.
“Curiously enough, for none of the brothers could read Spanish, the Order was charged by the Papal Nuncio, Hoyo dos Monterrey (a man of great refinement and implacable will), with the responsibility for copying the Quixote, the printing press having then gained no currency in the wilderness of what is now known as the department of Auvergne. Unable to speak or read Spanish, a language they not unreasonably detested, the brothers copied the Quixote over and over again, re-creating the text but, of course, compromising it as well, and so inadvertently discovering the true nature of authorship. Thus they created Fernando Lor’s Los Hombres d’Estado in 1585 by means of a singular series of copying errors, and then in 1654 Juan Luis Samorza’s remarkable epistolary novel Por Favor by the same means, and then in 1685, the errors having accumulated sufficiently to change Spanish into French, Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, their copying continuous and indefatigable, the work handed down from generation to generation as a sacred but secret trust, so that in time the brothers of the monastery, known only to members of the Bourbon house and, rumor has it, the Englishman and psychic Conan Doyle, copied into creation Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and then as a result of a particularly significant series of errors, in which French changed into Russian, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. Late in the last decade of the 19th century there suddenly emerged, in English, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and then the brothers, their numbers reduced by an infectious disease of mysterious origin, finally copied the Ulysses into creation in 1902, the manuscript lying neglected for almost thirteen years and then mysteriously making its way to Paris in 1915, just months before the British attack on the Somme, a circumstance whose significance remains to be determined.”
I sit there, amazed at what Borges has recounted. “Is it your understanding, then,” I ask, “that every novel in the West was created in this way?”
“Of course,” replies Borges imperturbably. Then he adds: “Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.”
- David Berlinski
So, another discovery is made that challenges the theory. Another day, another hundred million years added for the theory to remain plausible. Que sera sera say the old folk.
Or, maybe the theory is flawed and constantly expanding the time horizon is an error.
There, fixed it for ya.
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