There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…
…than are dreamt of in your philosophy:
From a seam in one of these [ancient Australian] hills, a jumble of ancient, orange-Creamsicle rock spills forth: a deposit called the Apex Chert. Within this rock, viewable only through a microscope, there are tiny tubes. Some look like petroglyphs depicting a tornado; others resemble flattened worms…
Last month, researchers lobbed another salvo in the decades-long debate about the nature of these forms. They are indeed fossil life, and they date to 3.465 billion years ago, according to John Valley, a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin. If Valley and his team are right, the fossils imply that life diversified remarkably early in the planet’s tumultuous youth.
The fossils add to a wave of discoveries that point to a new story of ancient Earth. In the past year, separate teams of researchers have dug up, pulverized and laser-blasted pieces of rock that may contain life dating to 3.7, 3.95 and maybe even 4.28 billion years ago. All of these microfossils””or the chemical evidence associated with them””are hotly debated. But they all cast doubt on the traditional tale.
The entire article is well worth reading.
Our knowledge of the geologic and biologic past has been slowly built up by looking at the clues that are left. That knowledge is necessarily imperfect.
When I think of this sort of thing I often recall how little credence was given to the “continental drift” theory of Wegener in my youth. I even wrote about it for a science report while in junior high school. I liked the idea, but probably because it appealed to my esthetic science more than anything—my observations about the way the continental puzzle pieces seemed to fit together. I certainly was not the only one:
Abraham Ortelius (Ortelius 1596), Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1756), Alexander von Humboldt (1801 and 1845), Antonio Snider-Pellegrini (Snider-Pellegrini 1858), and others had noted earlier that the shapes of continents on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean (most notably, Africa and South America) seem to fit together…
…[T]he similarity of southern continent geological formations had led Roberto Mantovani to conjecture in 1889 and 1909 that all the continents had once been joined into a supercontinent; Wegener noted the similarity of Mantovani’s and his own maps of the former positions of the southern continents…
Alfred Wegener first presented his hypothesis to the German Geological Society on 6 January 1912.[13] His hypothesis was that the continents had once formed a single landmass, called Pangaea, before breaking apart and drifting to their present locations.
Wegener was the first to use the phrase “continental drift” (1912, 1915) (in German “die Verschiebung der Kontinente” ”“ translated into English in 1922) and formally publish the hypothesis that the continents had somehow “drifted” apart. Although he presented much evidence for continental drift, he was unable to provide a convincing explanation for the physical processes which might have caused this drift. His suggestion that the continents had been pulled apart by the centrifugal pseudoforce (Polflucht) of the Earth’s rotation or by a small component of astronomical precession was rejected, as calculations showed that the force was not sufficient.
He had the right idea, but the wrong mechanism. In the 50s and early 60s, when I was learning about this sort of thing, it was still thought to be silly. Sound familiar? [emphasis mine]:
The British geologist Arthur Holmes championed the theory of continental drift at a time when it was deeply unfashionable. He proposed in 1931 that the Earth’s mantle contained convection cells that dissipated radioactive heat and moved the crust at the surface. His Principles of Physical Geology, ending with a chapter on continental drift, was published in 1944.
David Attenborough, who attended university in the second half of the 1940s, recounted an incident illustrating its lack of acceptance then: “I once asked one of my lecturers why he was not talking to us about continental drift and I was told, sneeringly, that if I could prove there was a force that could move continents, then he might think about it. The idea was moonshine, I was informed.”
Things changed in 1968 with the publication of an article entitled “Seismology and the New Global Tectonics”, based on new seismological evidence.
The science on this sort of thing is never settled. That doesn’t mean scientists are charlatans. It just means that there’s always more to be learned and then integrated into present theories or requiring new theories that incorporate the new facts.
The most fascinating book I’ve read in recent years is “Rare Earth” by Ward & Brownlee, which will become increasingly dated by the fossil research Neo references.
When I took a serious 2 semester biology course as a college freshman in the 70’s, the inverted “tree of life” started with animal and plant kingdoms at the top. I recall the textbook claimed that fungi didn’t really fit in the plant kingdom, but they pushed it in there anyway.
In Rare Earth, 2003, there are 3 domains above kingdoms; Archaea, Bacteria, Eucarya. Within the Eucarya domain we have the kingdoms of Animal, Plant, Protists, and Fungi.
Rare Earth is actually an early attempt at astrobiology, or what would life off planet earth look like? So naturally they study early and extreme forms of life that we know exist or believe existed on early earth, which connects up with Neo’s post. Microbes known as Archaeans are also called extremophiles.
Neo’s other point, that cutting edge theorists are often called lunatics before being proven correct, has happened over and over.
Scientists were sure light was a wave propagating in a medium called ether. Then it was proved that ether doesn’t exist, and Plank and Einstein showed that light waves also propagate as corpuscles called photons.
The premier astrophysicists were certain that gamma ray bursts detected on earth originated within our galaxy, then it was proven that the radiation had traveled across many galaxies.
It was once assumed that large meteorite impacts on earth almost never happened, and then Eugene Shoemaker proved that they were relatively common. That was a key step in understanding the extinction of the dinosaurs.
_______
The pros have been telling us that they are certain that global temps with increase 4 to 7 degrees Celsius. Just recently, there is group of the politically correct scientists who are saying they think the correct range is actually more like 2 to 3 degrees of warming. Not quite an Emily Litella “Never Mind” moment, but close.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xagYqj_gbBI
Some things are incorrect, due to personal interpretation by the speaker, but many things are supported by additional sources most people would’t know about.
Then it was proved that ether doesn’t exist
If you are referring to the experiments with light being shot into space, that experiment also proved the Earth was not moving. No aether, as they could understand it, and the Earth was not moving.
But aether as Nicholas Tesla described, only exists in a hyper volume, a toroid that was inaccessble to human technology or math until some time ago.
Neo’s other point, that cutting edge theorists are often called lunatics before being proven correct, has happened over and over.
Electrical engineers may recall who Ohms was. Ohms was considered a crackpot by universities and his better qualified “peers” in the scientific community of Massive Consensus.
and Plank and Einstein showed that light waves also propagate as corpuscles called photons.
The Double split experiment can be done with 30-10 dollars worth of equipment.
The premier astrophysicists were certain that gamma ray bursts detected on earth originated within our galaxy, then it was proven that the radiation had traveled across many galaxies.
The recent revelation is that the Cosmic Background radiation is centered around the Earth, not any other celestial body.
They are reaching conclusions based on inference from evidence that can neither be observed nor reproduced in a limited frame of reference (i.e. scientific logical domain). Also, assumptions, assertions, really, of uniform, invariant, and continuous evolution (i.e. chaos). I suppose that people have to believe in something, anything, as long as it’s “consistent with.”
Being a crank is not about what you believe, but why you believe it.
As far as plate tectonics goes, it was not taken very seriously until right up to when the mid-ocean ridges were discovered, and then the geology textbooks changed very quickly, within the span of a decade. What had been missing was a plausible mechanism, and the mid-ocean ridges and the ages of the rocks increasing as you move away from them supplied it.
It’s true that some people who were ahead of their time were dismissed as cranks. But it is also true that the vast majority of those dismissed as cranks have been in fact cranks. An example from geology would be some contemporaneous and competing theories to plate tectonics, the expanding and contracting Earth theories. And they are not accepted for the same reason continental drift was not, lack of a plausible mechanism, though there is a small following centered at the University of Tasmania. There was a time when perhaps these theories could have been held by non-cranks, but that time has passed, because now they have to explain away the evidence for plate tectonics, and that cannot be done at the moment except by special pleading or selective citation of evidence.
And there is even yet a smaller set of people once dismissed as cranks, later hailed as ahead of their time, who on closer investigation actually turn out to have been cranks who were merely saying something that seems similar to something accepted today. I would put Mendeleev in this category–in your high school science class you learned he invented the periodic table. What you won’t learn there is that his table was one of at least eight contemporaneous competitors, that he predicted elements that could not exist in addition to those that he successfully predicted–including an element of ether–or that when a new element (argon) did not fit in his table, he insisted it must have a physically impossible structure so he could save the table.
What made him a crank, you see, is that he insisted on the table in the face of contrary evidence, no matter how strong that evidence was. The table was more important to him than what he had developed it to explain.
There are cranks, cranky folks, and crumudgeons. Not all the same. 🙂
Frederick Says:
January 29th, 2018 at 6:12 pm
“Being a crank is not about what you believe, but why you believe it. … What made him a crank, you see, is that he insisted on the table in the face of contrary evidence, no matter how strong that evidence was. The table was more important to him than what he had developed it to explain.”
Indeed.
Sounds suspiciously like climatistas, as TommyJay said above — and I doubt we are the only two making that connection.
Our natural science museum has an exhibit which walks you through the primeval oceans, beginnings of life, dinosaurs, ending in some great fossil mastodons etc. At each “stage” is a video of the planet showing where the landmasses were at that time — my favorite part is that you can move them forward and backward in time and watch the continents move apart.
PS Maybe Moses knew something we didn’t learn until much later….
Genesis 1:9 ” And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.”
If the waters are in one place, so is the land.
This next verse has always intrigued me as well, but the time-scale is wrong on too many counts; probably political rather than physical division.
Genesis 10:25 “And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided;”
TommyJay wrote: “The most fascinating book I’ve read in recent years is “Rare Earth” by Ward & Brownlee, which will become increasingly dated by the fossil research Neo references.”
The principal hypotheses of this book is that the conditions for life as we know it on Earth are extremely rare in the universe. So rare that the earth may be the only example. Some of the conditions are well known like being in a Goldilocks orbit around our sun so liquid water can form and less obvious things like having a large satellite (i.e. the moon) that stabilizes the rotation of the earth and having a super-giant planet like Jupiter in the solar system whose gravity sucks up asteroids thus reducing collisions that can kill off early forms of life.
Electrical engineers may recall who Ohms was.
Ymar Sakar: There was a significant physicist named Georg Simon Ohm, for whom the Ohm unit was named, but no Ohms.
Ohm’s Law (not Ohms’ Law) was a big deal. It’s worth getting his name right.
A trip to Australia to see the stromatolites — as far as we know, the oldest microbial life still extant, going back to 3.7 billion years ago — is on my bucket list of things to do before I die.
skeptic Says:
January 29th, 2018 at 9:01 pm
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One of the most exciting scientific advances of the present age, to me, is the actual discovery of planets around other stars, and that some might satisfy the conditions for life as well.
A great moment in the climate change debate was when one of the climate change folks [Richard Somerville] mentioned continental drift as a feisty challenge to orthodoxy which he felt validated the climate change position.
Michael Crichton, on the other side, sorted it out:
Before I begin I want to just say one brief thing about what Richard [Somerville] has just told you. He‘s, he‘s giving you the story of plate tectonics but it‘s fascinating. He‘s turned it upside down. He‘s turned it on its head. The story of plate tectonics actually is the story of one person who had the right idea — Alfred Wegener. He had it in 1912. And it is the story of major scientists at Harvard and elsewhere opposing him for decade after decade until finally it was proven to be incorrect what they were believing. So it is, in fact — when I was a kid I was told the continents didn‘t move. It is, in fact, perfectly possible for the consensus of scientists to be wrong and it is, in fact, perfectly possible for small numbers of people to be in opposition and they will be ultimately be proven true.
https://www.heartland.org/publications-resources/publications/transcript-intelligence-squared-global-warming-debate
Climate change lost that debate and, as far as I can tell, the serious scientists on that side have avoided open debate on the subject ever since … 2007 to be specific.
huxley:
http://www.australiascoralcoast.com/attractions-events/natural-wonders-of-the-coral-coast/stromatolites-of-hamelin-pool
Things you already know I’m sure.
The interesting question IMO is how did life get started on earth so fast?
If you buy the idea that life began way, way early in Earth’s history, 4 billion years or so plus or minus, you have to wonder how did that happen so fast?
Earth’s life was mostly different sorts of slime until 500 million years ago, give or take.
I’m a big fan of panspermia — the theory life didn’t originate on earth but was seeded from elsewhere, somehow, then evolved on our planet.
om: Lovely link!
I had an odd moment in my life back in 1996 when I cashed out my hi-tech stock options for a minor bundle, then wondered…What now?
Well, I still wonder about that. But back then when one of my solutions was to read a lot of evolution and earth’s history to get oriented in the Big Picture.
“..more things to be learned..” YEP.
Genesis 10:25 “And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided;”
Might be referring to the Division under the 70 Watcher class elohim Aesop, the princes that were given the principalities of rulership and thrones.
This would be during Nimrod and Babel era. Which surprisingly, Abraham was also there.
huxley Says:
January 29th, 2018 at 10:08 pm
I was going off memory alone. Did you have to look his name up Huxley?
You should be able to tell us more, such as who ostracized him, when, where, and why.
It’s true that some people who were ahead of their time were dismissed as cranks. But it is also true that the vast majority of those dismissed as cranks have been in fact cranks.
Statistically, the majority of humanity cannot be in the top 3%. If 68% of humanity were leading the Race in tech and progress, the rest of us would not be so behind. The top 3% can never be thus part of the “vast majority”.
The reason why the scientific cult of peer review consensus gets rid of people is due to cutting down on the competition. It is not merely because of academic respectability or flaws in the scientific methodology. Humans being humans, that is merely the excuse for why departments shut down archaeological research into human origins and evolution: the fundamental reason is that the results do not support the overwhelming consensus majority view of science. Scientists sometimes admit that they cannot accept data or experimental proof, because their emotions and attachment to their pet theories prevent them from believing in other contradictory theories. That is a religion, not scientific methodology.
This would apply to scientists getting rid of any competitor, legitimate or not. Due to human statistics, the majority of which would have to be inferior to the top 3%. In some ways, people know this, but they do not care. Their social ladder status and bank account matters more to them than academic respect. Respecting another person’s data and theory, even when it contradicts one’s own, is nearly non existent in scientific fields across the earth. This becomes a bigger problem when corporations, scientists, and the State combine together. Then it becomes a theological totalitarian issue rather than purely an academic one about research.
I’m a big fan of panspermia – the theory life didn’t originate on earth but was seeded from elsewhere, somehow, then evolved on our planet.
So are the people researching life on Mars. The theory of macro and micro evolution, with Darwin’s theory being primarily focused on micro evolution, is being destroyed ever so progressively as time goes on. This creates a scientific religious and political problem as the narrative has been upheld as correct, not incorrect, for evolutionary processes.
Even pro evolution 100% atheists like Dawkins has to eventually settle for “aliens did it” sooner or later. They don’t have the missing links. As Darwin mentioned, if there are no species in mid transformation found, then his theory was wrong. If the speed of light is not a constant, then Einstein’s math was wrong too.
Doesn’t mean the panspermia or exo planet researchers are correct on their conclusions. They don’t have enough qubits and super computers to process exo planet data (light frequency fluctuations from the star), so they farm it out to the public, as they did with proteins and cells. Eve Online, an mmo company from Iceland, is now processing exo planets. It might be a reason why they are finding more and more now. Humans with high IQ have become the computers and processors.
Brings up the question of who is going to be whose slave come the Singularity, humans or AI.
Frederick’s Law: As an online discussion on the history or philosophy of science grows longer, the probability that the next comment endorses creationism approaches 1.
There’s an episode about this, if not the entire series. The last episode talks about continental drift. The theme of the series is how scientific theories replace others and change our perception of the universe.
BBC The Day The Universe Changed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QgNpYg0IOU&list=PLvAm3sdlm2QFxKz4LJ5QrqsCLsqworF_x&index=1
As a bonus, at the end, he predicts the public internet, in 1976 (except for all the cat videos.)
Science is the philosophy of the near domain, where accuracy is inversely proportional to the product of time and space offsets from an established frame of reference. Evolution is chaotic, which precludes progressive (i.e. monotonic, past and future) knowledge, and, in fact, anything outside of a limited frame of reference. Creationism is a relative article of faith common to theists, agnostics, and atheists. They want to believe… in myth, nothing, and something, respectively.
@n.n.: where accuracy is inversely proportional to the product of time and space offsets from an established frame of reference.
I am interested to know how you measured this.
Frederick:
Simple, n.n just wrapped his/her/they/them/zer…. mind around it.
Kevin Says:
January 30th, 2018 at 4:00 pm
BBC The Day The Universe Changed
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This and Burke’s first series, Connections, are my all-time favorite TV-science/history shows.
Frederick Says:
January 30th, 2018 at 11:47 am
Frederick’s Law: As an online discussion on the history or philosophy of science grows longer, the probability that the next comment endorses creationism approaches 1.
* * *
..because the discussion is always evolving…
huxley Says:
January 29th, 2018 at 10:12 pm
A trip to Australia to see the stromatolites – as far as we know, the oldest microbial life still extant, going back to 3.7 billion years ago – is on my bucket list of things to do before I die.
* * *
Should we call you the Pied Piper of Hamelin now? 😉
And thanks for the transcript
“Climate change lost that debate and, as far as I can tell, the serious scientists on that side have avoided open debate on the subject ever since … 2007 to be specific.”
The dinosaur-killing meteorite was another slap upside the heads of the orthodox when it was first hatched. And, come to think of it, my earliest memories are of the Big Bang theory and the Steady-State theory being considered equally reputable.
is always evolving
i.e. chaotic or a process that is incompletely or insufficiently characterized and unwieldy
I am interested to know how you measured this.
It’s not a matter of measurement, but rather logic. Consider what you know, don’t know, and can’t possibly know. For example, the signals we receive from outside the solar system (the boundary of near observation) are known to be influenced by interstitial matter that alters frequency and causes other transformations. As we approach a source, the probability of mischaracterization approaches zero (not impossible, but improbable). Note that this doesn’t imply our observations are wrong, but rather that they are pending. With respect to time, inference from limited, circumstantial evidence is inconclusive. Our “scientific” beliefs are often based on assumptions of linearity, invariance, and uniformity. While these may be valid assumptions, there is no means to confirm the veracity of our conclusions. Science has evolved as a “consistent with” model, which is often credible, but not always, and may constrain or expand — both unqualified — our understanding.
n.n
Thanks for the lucid comment about deep subject; what and how we know and some of the assumptions underlie our knowing.
om:
I’ll add that I recognize four logical domains: science (near space and time), philosophy (possible), fantasy (improbable), and faith (trust). Each of these logical domains intersect, and it is possible to cross from one to the other with sufficient knowledge and skill. For example, the scientific method begins with a hypothesis in the philosophy logical domain, and with observation and reproduction will either transition to the science logical domain, or be shunted to another logical domain.
NN’s first comment was concise, perhaps too concise for the average IQ level.
When something is written and spoken that requires too high of a verbal IQ for the audience to understand, data is lost in transmission.
I could understand the first comment, generally, but it requires some thought. Which means for some people, it might have required 24 hours of thought…
The problems with scientific methodology are numerous, although like a republic (not a democracy like most USA drones think) it is the best system for ruling over humans, by humans. The observer effect from quantum mechanics and the applications of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle really puts a crank shaft in the gears of science. A disciple that prizes itself on observing data reliably, is in quite a difficult quandary when the very data “shifts” according to observer effects. Although the more relevant phenomenon is ‘interference’, rather than the quantum wave form “collapse” made popular by the Copenhagen INterpretation.