Origin of Life
gregladen | March 15, 2017The earliest life must have been something like a small single celled organism, like a bacterium. Or at least, the earliest life that we can usefully conceive of, and potentially connect with living life. It has been suggested that life could have initially evolved at the site of submarine hydrothermal vents, which is a place these days teeming with life. So, it make sense to look for fossils of these early life forms in rocks formed at hydrothermal vents, but a long time ago.
The Nuvvuagittuq belt in Quebec is a geological formation that includes such rock.
There are two basic ways to…
gregladen | November 25, 2015Over the last several months, a lot of great books on fossils and evolution (as in paleontology) have come out. I've selected the best for your consideration. These are great gifts for your favorite science-loving nephew, life science teaching cousin, or local school library. Actually, you might like some of these yourself.
Let's start off with a kid's book: Grandmother Fish: a child's first book of Evolution by Jonathan Tweet.
From the blurb:
Grandmother Fish is the first book to teach evolution to preschoolers. While listening to the story, the child mimics the motions and sounds of our…
milhayser | October 20, 2014"Death is the only wise adviser that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, 'I haven't touched you yet'." -Carlos Castaneda
"When a man starts to learn, he is never clear about his objectives. His purpose is faulty; his intent is vague. He hopes for rewards that will never materialize for he knows nothing of the hardships of learning. And his thoughts soon clash.…
gregladen | March 14, 2013You know about the Atheists Nightmare, right? Also known as the Evolutionists Nightmare. No? It goes like this:
That's pretty darn convincing. Until someone opens up some closed thing and there is some new species in there, then EVOLUTION IS MADE UP!!!1!!!
Well, it turns out, Evolution is True. Some guy on the internet opened up an Oreo Cookie and inside was a new organism that could only be there IF IT EVOVED IN SIDE THE COOKIE!!1!! Look here's a picture:
PROOF THAT EVOLUTION IS TRUE: This spider evolved inside this Oreo Cookie!
A fake you say? A falsehood you say? Sorry, but Snopes…
gregladen | January 11, 2012Imagine a "primordial soup" on some planet somewhere from which there occasionally emerges a thing that could locomote, and as it locomoted around it would scrape up some of the dust that lay around on the planet, and occasionally eat other things that had come out of the "primordial soup" and it would thus grow. Eventually it would wear out as its molecules, put together by some chemical process of abiogenecis in the aforementioned soup, and thusly worn out, molecules broken down by ultraviolet rays from the nearby star, it would eventually stop moving and remain exposed to the elements…
heathero | August 12, 2011Dear Readers,
I have been more absent than usual from this blog, which is something I regret. However, the time constraints of preparing for my upcoming qualifying exam necessitate this. I decided to break my strict "no distractions" policy to bring you this bit of info that was emailed to me by a lab mate.
Scientists have discovered DNA components in a meteorite, and they seem to be fairly certain it was made there! You can read the actual NASA press release here, and check out a cool video of one of the scientists explaining the discovery here. The cliff notes version is that, while…
gregladen | June 28, 2011I heard it said recently that "Evolution" and "Origin of life" are two separate issues. I know that this is a falsehood, and I'll discuss in a moment how and why it is not true. But first, I checked around with a few people that I know and love, and found out that some of them assumed this was true. I think it is something that has been said enough times that if you are not personally engaged in the research or just don't think about it enough, you can easily assume that this is what the experts say. But they don't.
It is possible that there is a nefarious force working here. And I'm…
gregladen | March 29, 2011Some years ago, I was asked by a friend to accompany him on a visit to a site in Saratoga Springs, New York, where we were to witness the activities of a gen-u-wine geomancer. I had never heard of a geomancer before. If you don't know what one is, be happy. If you do, you have my sympathies. The thing is, this geomancer wanted to geomance (I just verbed his noun) with these rocks in or near a place called Lester Park. Now, if you've heard of Lester Park you may be thinking you know which rocks this guy wanted to commune with, but you are probably wrong. Lester park has some of the most…
gregladen | December 2, 2010In his highly readable book, One Long Argument, Ernst Mayr breaks down the body of thought often referred to as "Darwin's Theory" into five separate and distinct theories, the second of which being "common descent." Darwin's second evolutionary theory (second by Mayr's count, not Darwin's) is really a hypothesis that could be worded this way:
All life on earth descended from a single, original, primordial form that arose eons ago.
The evidence in favor of this hypothesis is strong, but the test of the hypothesis ... the means of disproving it, which is, after all, the point of stating it to…
cevans | November 16, 2008
Science, as a discipline, is driven by the desire to understand everything. The immensity of such a project necessitates that science be undertaken not by one group of men and women in one time, but all men and women for all time. However, the final goal always eludes us: to understand this, we must first understand this, but to understand that, we must understand this, ad infinitum. In fact, the very notion of there being a final point in science has become so abstract as to be almost irrelevant; the more we know, the more we know that we do not know, and the end of the game is nowhere to…
esiegel | February 26, 2008I was thinking about the timeline that brought us here, today, from the origin of the Universe up through the present day. I realized that the most uncertain thing that we know of, the step that we have the least information about, is the origin of life on Earth. All hypotheses about how life on Earth originated fall into three categories:
Abiogenesis, or the idea that life came from non-life, somehow, on Earth.
Life originated elsewhere in the Universe, and was brought to Earth, where it now thrives (e.g., panspermia, or exogenesis).
Life was created or designed by an outside force/being…