Count the Weasel Words, Discard the Count, Jump To Desired Outcome

Oldest fossil ever found on Earth dating back 4.2bn years shows alien life on Mars is likely
Ancient microbes were spewed from deep-sea hydrothermal vents, study claims

The discovery is the strongest evidence yet that similar organisms could also have evolved on Mars, which at the time still had oceans and an atmosphere, and was being bombarded by comets which probably brought the building blocks of life to Earth.

Except for three things: they don't have actual fossils; they don't actually know that they came from thermal vents; and they don't really know how old they are.

Here's what they have:

The organisms would have resembled small tubes, with a ball-like base which stuck to the ocean rocks, and a stalk suspended in the water to collect iron, on which they fed.

They are similar to iron-oxidising bacteria found near other hydrothermal vents today.

“We found the filaments and tubes inside centimetre-sized structures called concretions or nodules,” said Dr Dominic Papineau (UCL Earth Sciences and the London Centre for Nanotechnology).

“The fact we unearthed them from one of the oldest known rock formations, suggests we’ve found direct evidence of one of Earth’s oldest life forms.

“This discovery helps us piece together the history of our planet and the remarkable life on it, and will help to identify traces of life elsewhere in the universe.”

So what they have is some tubes which look like currently living creatures.

Even certain other scientists are skeptical:

Biology is indeed one possible explanation, says astrobiologist Abigail Allwood of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “But the evidence could equally be interpreted as non-biological.”

Each line of evidence, she points out, reflects processes that could have actually occurred at different times, layering potential clues in a way that looks biological, but really isn’t. “You can’t just wave your arms and say this all happened together,” she says.

Paleobiologist David Wacey of the University of Western Australia in Crawley agrees that “the individual lines of chemical evidence are not particularly strong.” But combined with the microstructures, he says, the authors come up with a “pretty convincing biological scenario

It's not even a credible scenario, considering all the actual unknowns. Yes, it could be non-life, or it could be an instance of relatively current life, or it could be a bazillion years old: which one should we choose?

Well, the least parsimonious is the one that fits the narrative, so of course, that one is the choice. Breathless extrapolations ensue, on schedule.

Conveniently, this gig overcomes last year's record holder for breathless bogus claims:

4.1-billion-year-old crystal may hold earliest signs of life

It's a zircon crystal with a 12Carbon globular inclusion: hence: life!!!

Proof of Evolution of Complexity

This doesn't even involve any spanking new dedicated-channel feedback systems or double-coded binary manufacturing instructions for enabling this dryer to create two new identical dryers by splitting in half. It's so simple, comparatively that it must be happening all the time - probably on many planets, even in infinite universes.

I haven't actually seen it myself, though, but that doesn't matter, because it's possible, ya know. Just think of all the dryers in the universe(es)... And when you add energy to a system, even a closed-door system, it can turn stuff like heat into folded clothes because: deep time and deep imaginary stories and all.

Evolution: IF it can be imagined THEN it happened so shut up.

HT: Steven Satak

Communication Systems in Bacteria

Since all cells contain communication feedback control systems, it's not surprising that bacteria also have such systems. What is surprising is that there is intercellular communication which is accomplished with molecular words in a similar fashion. There are two levels of intercellular communication which are introduced in this TED Talk video, which culminate in a surprising benefit. Science done right is a thing of beauty.

I will note that the accompanying transcript text was helpful - she spoke very rapidly, and the word "quorum" (one example) was not obvious as spoken in the video.



I do take issue with one point. The communications systems were said to have been developed by the cells in deep time in which single cells existed as the sole life. There is no evidence that the original single cell prokaryote did not have this capability from the start, even though it was not useful until after the first mitosis. The fundamental complexity necessary in the first cell already included such molecular communication systems that crossed membranes (e.g., ATP metabolic stabilization), so the invention was already complete, right there in First Life. Cross-membrane was not novel after First Life.

And if, as the speaker indicates, these systems actually are the necessary and sufficient precursors to multicellular life (a non-falsifiable claim), that goes only so far because there is no provision for the creation of the many interdependent organs, nor the morphological structures which accompany the creative blast of all the phyla at the time of the Cambrian Explosion.

But these are minor quibbles about a remarkable set of discoveries and subsequent inventions.

The Saga of the Minimal Cell Size Vs. Evolution

The Mystery of the Minimal Cell, Craig Venter’s New Synthetic Life Form

Is it all new? Or is it scissor-clipped from existing life, stitched together using existing life, and put into the membrane shell of existing life... before allowing it to try replicating (which it did successfully)?

Actually, it is hard to tell, even from the media release, which is not a full scientific paper:

"They went through three cycles of designing, building, and testing ensuring that the quasi-essential genes remained, which in the end resulted in a viable, self-replicating minimal synthetic cell that contained just 473 genes, 35 of which are RNA-coding. In addition, the cell contains a unique 16S gene sequence.

The team was able to assign biological function to the majority of the genes with 41% of them responsible for genome expression information, 18% related to cell membrane structure and function, 17% related to cytosolic metabolism, and 7% preservation of genome information. However, a surprising 149 genes could not be assigned a specific biological function despite intensive study."

The fact that they loaded in 149 genes, the function of which they have no idea, suggests that they were clipped from existing life, and stitched together. Which is fine, since they were looking for a minimal size cell which sustains life. But it hardly qualifies as actually "synthetic", as opposed to, say, reduced/rearranged.

Nonetheless, the finding demonstrates "incredible complexity" which is required to sustain life. That finding destroys evolution, according to Cornelius Hunter:

" Mycoplasma mycoides Just Destroyed Evolution
“We’re Showing How Complex Life Is”"

"As J. Craig Venter put it, “We're showing how complex life is, even in the simplest of organisms. These findings are very humbling.”

Yes, humbling, if you are an evolutionist. This is because this result shows how astronomically impossible evolution is in its hypothetical early stages. Simply put, there is no way such an organism is going to randomly evolve.

The origin of life problem can be divided into two broad categories: ground-up and top-down. In the ground-up approach, evolutionists try to figure out how the first life could have arisen spontaneously from an inorganic world. In spite of the evolutionist’s claims to the contrary, the century-long ground-up research program has utterly failed.

That leaves the top-down approach. Here, evolutionists work with simple, unicellular life forms, carefully removing parts one at a time in their search for smaller, simpler life forms. If evolution is true, they should be able to reduce life to a very simple, basic form which could conceivably arise by chance somehow.

This approach has been failing as well, as in recent years all the signs pointed to a minimal life form consisting of at least a few hundred genes—far beyond evolution’s meager resources of random change.

Now, this latest research has upped the ante. It is just getting worse. A minimal organism consisting of 473 genes is many orders of magnitude beyond evolution’s capabilities. Simply put, the science contradicts the theory. What the science is telling us is that evolution is impossible, by any reasonable definition of that term."

This presumes that evolution should include first life evolving from minerals. Many (most?) evolutionary believers reject first life as an issue, despite claiming the necessity of radical Materialism as a premise which is presupposed for evolution. The internal contradiction is not a problem for true believers, however, who accept many contradictions involved in evolution, and require no objective, empirical evidence to support their belief.