The name Ken Ham suites him, because he is a sham and a con-artist.
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New discoveries of 'missing links.'
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The name Ken Ham suites him, because he is a sham and a con-artist.
gnostic
The Lost One
Yes, he is.
Which is why I am very happy that he is no longer living Australia.
I don’t want Australian taxpayers footing the bill for his ridiculous museums, theme parks and replica Ark.
Good utube description of how chirality occurred naturally in abiogenesis.
One of the frequent challenges of abiogenesis by ID advocates and other fundamentalist creationists is the problem of the necessity of Chirality in life. The simple answer is yes, Chirality is necessary and did develop with the abiogenesis and the origins of life. The challenge by the IDers is that Chirality is Extremely unlikely, Arguing from ignorance is the achille's heal many ID arguments, because science often determines with research is possible and even likely.
The following is a very plausible process of how Chirality can come about naturally.
Source: The Chiral Puzzle of Life: Cosmic Rays May Have Left Indelible Imprint on Early Life
The Chiral Puzzle of Life: Cosmic Rays May Have Left Indelible Imprint on Early Life
TOPICS:AstrobiologyAstrophysicsStanford University
By TAYLOR KUBOTA, STANFORD UNIVERSITY MAY 20, 2020
Physicists propose that the influence of cosmic rays on early life may explain nature’s preference for a uniform “handedness” among biology’s critical molecules.
Before there were animals, bacteria or even DNA on Earth, self-replicating molecules were slowly evolving their way from simple matter to life beneath a constant shower of energetic particles from space.
In a new paper, a Stanford professor and a former post-doctoral scholar speculate that this interaction between ancient proto-organisms and cosmic rays may be responsible for a crucial structural preference, called chirality, in biological molecules. If their idea is correct, it suggests that all life throughout the universe could share the same chiral preference.
Chirality, also known as handedness, is the existence of mirror-image versions of molecules. Like the left and right hand, two chiral forms of a single molecule reflect each other in shape but don’t line up if stacked. In every major biomolecule – amino acids, DNA, RNA – life only uses one form of molecular handedness. If the mirror version of a molecule is substituted for the regular version within a biological system, the system will often malfunction or stop functioning entirely. In the case of DNA, a single wrong handed sugar would disrupt the stable helical structure of the molecule.
Louis Pasteur first discovered this biological homochirality in 1848. Since then, scientists have debated whether the handedness of life was driven by random chance or some unknown deterministic influence. Pasteur hypothesized that, if life is asymmetric, then it may be due to an asymmetry in the fundamental interactions of physics that exist throughout the cosmos.
“We propose that the biological handedness we witness now on Earth is due to evolution amidst magnetically polarized radiation, where a tiny difference in the mutation rate may have promoted the evolution of DNA-based life, rather than its mirror image,” said Noémie Globus lead author of the paper and a former Koret Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC).
In their paper, published today (May 20, 2020) in Astrophysical Journal Letters, the researchers detail their argument in favor of cosmic rays as the origin of homochirality. They also discuss potential experiments to test their hypothesis.
Magnetic polarization from space
Cosmic rays are an abundant form of high-energy radiation that originates from various sources throughout the universe, including stars and distant galaxies. After hitting the Earth’s atmosphere, cosmic rays eventually degrade into fundamental particles. At ground level, most of the cosmic rays exist only as particles known as muons.
Muons are unstable particles, existing for a mere 2 millionths of a second, but because they travel near the speed of light, they have been detected more than 700 meters below Earth’s surface. They are also magnetically polarized, meaning, on average, muons all share the same magnetic orientation. When muons finally decay, they produce electrons with the same magnetic polarization. The researchers believe that the muon’s penetrative ability allows it and its daughter electrons to potentially affect chiral molecules on Earth and everywhere else in the universe.
“We are irradiated all the time by cosmic rays,” explained Globus, who is currently a post-doctoral researcher at New York University and the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute. “Their effects are small but constant in every place on the planet where life could evolve, and the magnetic polarization of the muons and electrons is always the same. And even on other planets, cosmic rays would have the same effects.”
The researchers’ hypothesis is that, at the beginning of life on Earth, this constant and consistent radiation affected the evolution of the two mirror life-forms in different ways, helping one ultimately prevail over the other. These tiny differences in mutation rate would have been most significant when life was beginning and the molecules involved were very simple and more fragile. Under these circumstances, the small but persistent chiral influence from cosmic rays could have, over billions of generations of evolution, produced the single biological handedness we see today.
“This is a little bit like a roulette wheel in Vegas, where you might engineer a slight preference for the red pockets, rather than the black pockets,” said Roger Blandford, the Luke Blossom Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford and an author on the paper. “Play a few games, you would never notice. But if you play with this roulette wheel for many years, those who bet habitually on red will make money and those who bet on black will lose and go away.”
Ready to be surprised
Globus and Blandford suggest experiments that could help prove or disprove their cosmic ray hypothesis. For example, they would like to test how bacteria respond to radiation with different magnetic polarization.
“Experiments like this have never been performed and I am excited to see what they teach us. Surprises inevitably come from further work on interdisciplinary topics,” said Globus.
The researchers also look forward to organic samples from comets, asteroids or Mars to see if they too exhibit a chiral bias.
“This idea connects fundamental physics and the origin of life,” said Blandford, who is also Stanford and SLAC professor of physics and particle physics and former director of KIPAC. “Regardless of whether or not it’s correct, bridging these very different fields is exciting and a successful experiment should be interesting.”
Reference: “The Chiral Puzzle of Life” by Noemie Globus and Roger D. Blandford, 20 May 2020, Astrophysical Journal Letters.
DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab8dc6
I posted this in another thread concerning the issues of time and how face evolution can take place, but I believe it is relevant here concerning this topic.
The issue of the rate of evolution over time is an interesting one, because it is variable in a considerable range over time. The evidence indicates it is environmentally driven. Some environments are not conducive to evolution, but lush tropical forests and warm abundant seas, are shown to have evidence of more rapid evolution that more sparse
The fossil discoveries at the Corral Bluffs near Colorado Springs is an example of environmentally driven rapid evolution. In a space of 1-2 million years after the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs there was a very rapid evolution of a diversity of plants and animals particularly mammals. After the catastrophic extinction event fossil evidence was rare, and only fossils of very small mammals and reptiles were found, about the size of a mouse. There is a long bluff up to a plateau that has consistent sedimentary deposition including river valleys. The climate became lush tropical, and within a million years of so there was a great variety of mammals cyclic and plant life, much of it never before seen in the fossil record. Different mammal species were found range in up to 100 pounders. There is a great NOVA episode on this
This is very similar to the great genetic diversity of life in today's rain forests where there are many related species, subspecies, and varieties of the plants and animals.
Corral Bluffs Discovery Reveals How Mammals Evolved After Dinosaurs
Groundbreaking DMNS Discovery Reveals What Happened to Mammals After Dinosaurs Went Extinct
New fossils discovered at Corral Bluffs near Colorado Springs offer insight into how the Earth recovered after a mass extinction, and why mammals became the dominant species.
BY JESSE KLEIN • OCTOBER 30, 2019
Thanks to a recent discovery at Corral Bluffs by the curators of Denver Museum of Nature & Science, we now have a fuller picture of how mammals evolved after the extinction of dinosaurs.
In addition to an October 24 paper published by Science magazine, a NOVA-produced documentary premiering Wednesday, October 30 explains how renowned archaeologist Tyler Lyson and his colleague Ian Miller discovered a trove of mammalian fossils at the Corral Bluffs near Colorado Springs in 2016. This discovery was groundbreaking, as knowledge of how mammals rebounded 66 million years ago after an asteroid killed the dinosaurs—and 75 percent of all species on Earth—was effectively zero before this research. The mammals that did survive the asteroid were so small (many no bigger than a rat) that finding fossils buried in the dirt was almost impossible.
“Fossils that we found before were just fragments, broken turtle shells, the occasional crocodile tooth,” Lyson says. “If you’re super lucky, you might find a bit of a mammal jaw.”
But after looking through the museum’s archives, Lyson changed tact. Instead of painstakingly sifting through the dirt for loose fragments of bone, he started cracking open concretions—egg-shaped rocks that form around fossils. In one day, he and Miller found more completely intact fossils at the bluffs from the era after the Cretaceaus-Paleogene extinction than in his entire career, including four mammal skulls.
Photo courtesy of HHMI Tangled Bank Studios
But the fossils would only truly alter science if the researchers could place them in time. Lyson worked with geologists Will Clyde and Anthony Fuentes of the University of New Hampshire, experts in geological dating, to pinpoint the dates in history when the animals lived.
Now, how they did this gets complicated.
At certain points in history, the Earth’s magnetic field switches (I know, bear with me). Basically, South becomes North and North becomes South. Rocks can record this switch, and scientists know the exact dates these switches occurred. With some luck, Clyde and Fuentes were able to find a rock at the bottom of the Bluffs and a rock at the top of the Bluffs, where the polarity switched; two exact dates about a million years apart. By dating the top and bottom of the cliffs, Lyson and his team could create a timeline based on where each fossil was found. They realized that Corral Bluffs represents the first million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs, an essential and previously unknown part of history.
When dinosaurs dominated the landscape, they ate most of the food sources, leaving mammals to fight for scraps. To survive, they were small and ate anything they could find. When the Earth was plunged into a global winter as the sun was blocked by dust from the asteroid, a majority of the plants died and the dinosaurs starved. The dinosaurs were too big and relied heavily on a narrow food source. Only the animals who could subsist off opportunistic scavenging, like the smaller mammals, survived.
But the Earth rebounded quickly. Within 100,000 years, the forests had recovered and the mammals were taking advantage of the dinosaur-free food. “The mammal recovery was intensely intertwined with the plant recovery,” Lyson says.
As the food supply diversified, including the beginning of the protein-packed legume family, animals grew rapidly into 100-pound beasts.
Over the few next hundred thousand years, the mammal fossils found at the Bluffs show an increase in specialization, filling the empty niches left by the dinosaurs. For example, a skull found with only large flat teeth, the oldest herbivore, represents the changing of mammals from opportunistic omnivores to a genus with many different specialized species.
In the documentary, Lyson calls this skull the first major specialization in the mammal fossil record. But there is still much to uncover. “Why mammals diversified after the extinction is still kind of an open question,” Lyson says.
The Corral Bluffs are a paleontological trifecta; it combines animal fossils, historical climate indicators from plants, and precise dating. It represents the closest thing to a complete record of how the Earth recovered after the asteroid—the start of our modern world.
“Very, very rarely do we have the plant, the animal, and the ability to date the rock where the fossils are found,” Lyson says. “That’s what makes it so complete, and it’s all those things together that make this discovery so remarkable.”
Learn more: Watch the documentary Rise of the Mammals on Wednesday, October 30, at 9 p.m. ET on PBS or stream it online at pbs.org. See the collection of fossils in a new exhibit, After the Asteroid: Earth’s Comeback Story, at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature, 2001 Colorado Blvd.
The issue of the rate of evolution over time is an interesting one, because it is variable in a considerable range over time. The evidence indicates it is environmentally driven. Some environments are not conducive to evolution, but lush tropical forests and warm abundant seas, are shown to have evidence of more rapid evolution that more sparse
The fossil discoveries at the Corral Bluffs near Colorado Springs is an example of environmentally driven rapid evolution. In a space of 1-2 million years after the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs there was a very rapid evolution of a diversity of plants and animals particularly mammals. After the catastrophic extinction event fossil evidence was rare, and only fossils of very small mammals and reptiles were found, about the size of a mouse. There is a long bluff up to a plateau that has consistent sedimentary deposition including river valleys. The climate became lush tropical, and within a million years of so there was a great variety of mammals cyclic and plant life, much of it never before seen in the fossil record. Different mammal species were found range in up to 100 pounders. There is a great NOVA episode on this
This is very similar to the great genetic diversity of life in today's rain forests where there are many related species, subspecies, and varieties of the plants and animals.
Corral Bluffs Discovery Reveals How Mammals Evolved After Dinosaurs
Groundbreaking DMNS Discovery Reveals What Happened to Mammals After Dinosaurs Went Extinct
New fossils discovered at Corral Bluffs near Colorado Springs offer insight into how the Earth recovered after a mass extinction, and why mammals became the dominant species.
BY JESSE KLEIN • OCTOBER 30, 2019
Thanks to a recent discovery at Corral Bluffs by the curators of Denver Museum of Nature & Science, we now have a fuller picture of how mammals evolved after the extinction of dinosaurs.
In addition to an October 24 paper published by Science magazine, a NOVA-produced documentary premiering Wednesday, October 30 explains how renowned archaeologist Tyler Lyson and his colleague Ian Miller discovered a trove of mammalian fossils at the Corral Bluffs near Colorado Springs in 2016. This discovery was groundbreaking, as knowledge of how mammals rebounded 66 million years ago after an asteroid killed the dinosaurs—and 75 percent of all species on Earth—was effectively zero before this research. The mammals that did survive the asteroid were so small (many no bigger than a rat) that finding fossils buried in the dirt was almost impossible.
“Fossils that we found before were just fragments, broken turtle shells, the occasional crocodile tooth,” Lyson says. “If you’re super lucky, you might find a bit of a mammal jaw.”
But after looking through the museum’s archives, Lyson changed tact. Instead of painstakingly sifting through the dirt for loose fragments of bone, he started cracking open concretions—egg-shaped rocks that form around fossils. In one day, he and Miller found more completely intact fossils at the bluffs from the era after the Cretaceaus-Paleogene extinction than in his entire career, including four mammal skulls.
Photo courtesy of HHMI Tangled Bank Studios
But the fossils would only truly alter science if the researchers could place them in time. Lyson worked with geologists Will Clyde and Anthony Fuentes of the University of New Hampshire, experts in geological dating, to pinpoint the dates in history when the animals lived.
Now, how they did this gets complicated.
At certain points in history, the Earth’s magnetic field switches (I know, bear with me). Basically, South becomes North and North becomes South. Rocks can record this switch, and scientists know the exact dates these switches occurred. With some luck, Clyde and Fuentes were able to find a rock at the bottom of the Bluffs and a rock at the top of the Bluffs, where the polarity switched; two exact dates about a million years apart. By dating the top and bottom of the cliffs, Lyson and his team could create a timeline based on where each fossil was found. They realized that Corral Bluffs represents the first million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs, an essential and previously unknown part of history.
When dinosaurs dominated the landscape, they ate most of the food sources, leaving mammals to fight for scraps. To survive, they were small and ate anything they could find. When the Earth was plunged into a global winter as the sun was blocked by dust from the asteroid, a majority of the plants died and the dinosaurs starved. The dinosaurs were too big and relied heavily on a narrow food source. Only the animals who could subsist off opportunistic scavenging, like the smaller mammals, survived.
But the Earth rebounded quickly. Within 100,000 years, the forests had recovered and the mammals were taking advantage of the dinosaur-free food. “The mammal recovery was intensely intertwined with the plant recovery,” Lyson says.
As the food supply diversified, including the beginning of the protein-packed legume family, animals grew rapidly into 100-pound beasts.
Over the few next hundred thousand years, the mammal fossils found at the Bluffs show an increase in specialization, filling the empty niches left by the dinosaurs. For example, a skull found with only large flat teeth, the oldest herbivore, represents the changing of mammals from opportunistic omnivores to a genus with many different specialized species.
In the documentary, Lyson calls this skull the first major specialization in the mammal fossil record. But there is still much to uncover. “Why mammals diversified after the extinction is still kind of an open question,” Lyson says.
The Corral Bluffs are a paleontological trifecta; it combines animal fossils, historical climate indicators from plants, and precise dating. It represents the closest thing to a complete record of how the Earth recovered after the asteroid—the start of our modern world.
“Very, very rarely do we have the plant, the animal, and the ability to date the rock where the fossils are found,” Lyson says. “That’s what makes it so complete, and it’s all those things together that make this discovery so remarkable.”
Learn more: Watch the documentary Rise of the Mammals on Wednesday, October 30, at 9 p.m. ET on PBS or stream it online at pbs.org. See the collection of fossils in a new exhibit, After the Asteroid: Earth’s Comeback Story, at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature, 2001 Colorado Blvd.
firedragon
Veteran Member
Exactly. The reason for the question.
Evolution does not provide evidence for chemistry evolving into biology. There is no explanation needed for that.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
Not evidence per se, but of the untold numbers of chemical reactions that can and have taken place over 5 billion years, who knows all the outcomes that could have emerged.
First it is not a matter 5 billion years taken place over 5 billion years as per abiogenesis. It is only the time span abiogenesis took place and life formed when the environment was right between about 3.7 to 4;2 billions of years ago. Beyond this evolution took place, and the fossil and genetic evidence for evolution takes over..
This is not true from a scientific perspective of the limits organic chemistry and the known possible reactions and environments. There are most definitely limited alternatives as to how abiogenesis can possibly take place. The vast amount of research so far many aspects of the possible organic chemistry for abiogenesis is known. Yes, the evidence is not complete, but it is not the case that 'who knows all the outcomes that could have emerged.' The nature of organic life forming only has limited options.
As far as evolution goes once life formed and evolve there are limited ways the geometry of organic life, environment can evolve. Of course, naturally not all the possibilities result in the evolution of life we see happened, but there are not a lot of possible alternatives.
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How much education have you had to understand the environment, and organic chemistry behind life do you have?
There is a vast amount of research and discoveries related to the development of the hypothesis of abiogenesis. How much have you read concerning these scientific articles to understand abiogenesis?
. . . or are you just making assertions based on a religious agenda?
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
I was just using the rough age of the Earth as a starting point to include non-organic evolution.
All it would hypothetically take is just 1 time, and the potential of the evolution/merging of amino acids to form basic protein is seemingly at the least possible.
BTW, I did cover this in my Intro to Anthro course, but I also included the possibility of Divine creation.
firedragon
Veteran Member
Thanks for caring about my education. But its irrelevant, and is not at all necessary to make an irrelevant strawman you are trying to construct with such a basic episode.
firedragon
Veteran Member
Yep. "Who knows" as you said!
Incomplete response to justify your agenda. The possible outcomes are still limited by natural laws and the environment. 'It is not anything goes.'
Very, very relevant. Your making statements and assertions not supported by scientific evidence is directly relevant to the argument, and not a Straw man. Look up the definition. The lack of education on your part, and the lack of scientific references leaves you with only a religious agenda to justify your assertions.
firedragon
Veteran Member
Whats the "statements and assertions not supported by scientific evidence" that I made? Please explain.
firedragon
Veteran Member
Who said "anything goes"?
Anything outside the narrow limits of natural outcomes.
firedragon
Veteran Member
Who said that?
firedragon
Veteran Member
"Evolution does not provide evidence for chemistry evolving into biology. There is no explanation needed for that."
Can you objectively refute that statement? How is that as you said "not supported by scientific evidence"?