Scientists unveil fossil of 47 million-year-old primate, Darwinius masillae

Interestingly, a team of scientists (including my nephew Guillaume Bourque) arrived at this common ancestor of humans, rats and mice by a genomic analysis method. I made for a cover story in Science Magazine four years ago: "Dynamics of mammalian chromosome evolution inferred from multispecies comparative maps."

Yup, my sister's son!

G. Pie wrote:

The article says this fossil was discovered in 1983.  Why the quarter-century delay?

The article explains, if you read the whole thing.

It's like, the earth has been around for 4.54 billion years, but some haven't woken up to the implications of that yet. Good things take time.

Jingles wrote:

All this proves is that more animals died in the Flood than we first thought.

Such as the unicorn, which was frolicking in the bushes when Noah called out "All aboard!" Tragic loss.

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How'm I doing?

More credible than most organized religions, so far - tell us more!

Remind / GP... that happens much more frequently than what you'd ever think throughout history.  We usually romantisize things in the present, like Columbus discovering America (while omitting he wasn't the first, did it accidentally, probably never saw the land himself, etc...).   Darwin is actually another one we do it too...there are quite a few more players in that story that probably deserve more credit than Darwin did, and the Galopagos probably didn't have the same effect it's attributed for.

The general process tends to be:

1. Ignore the find

2. Mistake the importance of the find

3. Credit the wrong person

Lifted that (sorta, not exact wording) from Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Everything', which does an excellent job of summing up scientific achievment from the 1700's on in an entertaining manner. 

Jingles wrote:

If the Unicorn was God's favorite animal ("Don't you forget my unicorn"), they why didn't he just miracle their asses onto the damn boat?

Or skip the flood, even.

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Of course, whales are their best evidence for evolution.

Actually, they are a good example. The bones in their fins are all analogues of the bones in our hands. There's even a vestigial hind leg, visible only when the whale is skeletonized.

God, in his infinite wisdom, knew the importance of giving the whale a leg it would never use and a replica of the human hand inside its fin.

Bat wings... same idea. Either God found some kind of enjoyment in self-plagiarizing, or He was seriously half assing it about halfway through the first Saturday, when He saw that He had left the birds and beasts to the last moment, or evolution is real.

I find evolution carries another bit of misleading info at times too...it's very often presented as a straight forward linear march of progress.  More often than not, a particular line of evolution dies off.  Although we can hold this up as a missing link, I think it's quite possible that this is fossil here belongs to one of those dead branches that didn't directly descend to us but instead was a cousin to something that did.  So a chimp evolved to this state, but this state died off and a different line of chimps altogether became us instead.

Really, the only consistant of evolution is extinction.

I willed it into existance.

Why do cells contain both your DNA and a second set of mitochondrial DNA? 

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So, where did DNA come from in the very beginning?

http://www.evolutionofdna.com/

Snert wrote:

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So, where did DNA come from in the very beginning?

 

 

http://www.evolutionofdna.com/

 

Panspermia

"The theories of panspermia (life everywhere) and exogensis (life from elsewhere) predict that life on Earth started from bacteria or other living cells that arrived on comets or in other forms from outside the Earth.

Neither theory solves the problem of where life originated in the first place, but at least they allow it to have happened at some other location that may have had conditions that were more favorable for biogenesis.

In the remainder of this book we'll stick with biochemistry on Earth rather than elsewhere. There's no way we'll ever be able to prove that life started here, but it makes a more interesting story if it happened in our backyard!"

So why did the chicken cross the road?

I kinda liked Phil Collins', Against All Odds.

Wasn't is a Gladio operation?

Snert - I was watching a discovery channel documentary on Saturn last night and I may have to revise my response to the asteroid question...one of the moons, Enchilideas (sp?), appears to be generating it's own heat (presumably due to an eliptical orbit around Saturn and the effect gravity would have).  They said it was too small to have an atmosphere, but found a localized one around the south pole.  Turns out the planet has geysers on it's south pole that frequently spews water vapor, nitrogen, and simple organic chemicals.  Due to the gravitational energy source, the surface of these geysers host temperatures warm enough to support liquid water.  The moons gravity is too weak to maintain much on the outside, but it's quite possible that these geysers are from internal caves that could possibly host life.

What ana amazing discovery that would be...if life could form in underground caves on moons no where near close to the sun.  Kinda points to life being dime a dozen, sprouting up absolutely anywhere it can...puts a pretty abrupt end to the question on life outside of Earth and would quite likely point to Earth being capable of spawning it's own life forms (no asteriod needed, though not discounting life's ability to form on said asteriod too).  Of course intelligent life is a different matter.

I'm not sure if this is evidence that life on Earth came from a meterorite, or evidence life is so prolific it would spawn anywhere including on asteriods passing through gas clouds.

Heh, I got a laugh out of this...Like the fossil, this meterorite has been sitting on shelves for quite some time...nearly a decade now 

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Some of the organic substances detected during analyses of the Tagish Lake samples - including plasticizers that probably leached from the Ziploc bag that held the meteorite fragments - were obviously Earthly contaminants, Hilts said.

Or that human life can claim intelligence as we hurtle toward the brick wall of extreme pollution/overheating/financial armageddon.

Noise wrote:

of the organic substances detected during analyses of the Tagish Lake samples - including plasticizers that probably leached from the Ziploc bag that held the meteorite fragments - were obviously Earthly contaminants, Hilts said.

Yes, but then it goes on to say:

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But the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in the formic acid, a key precursor to the organic chemicals that make up cell membranes, indicates that that chemical had an extraterrestrial origin. The findings bolster the notion that many of the raw ingredients for life on Earth could have been delivered by extraterrestrial bodies, Hilts said

I think they accounted for the plastic baggy leaching. They are scientists afterall. Apparently having stored the samples in a freezer preserved certain volatile compounds of ET origin which would have evaporated away otherwise. Interesting

Evidence that comets could have seeded life on Earth

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A new experiment simulating conditions in deep space reveals that the complex building blocks of life could have been created on icy interplanetary dust and then carried to Earth, jump-starting life.

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John Carpenter's 'The Thing' VO Narration- "Who knows what has come from the galaxy? Who knows what lurks in the sky? Beyond God. Watch those around you. For who knows what today, tonight, or tomorrow will bring."

Apparently it might be us who came from the galaxy.

Well in Burnaby we used to have a Stargate just down the road that took people to other galaxies but it went out of business.

Slumberjack wrote:

Where else would we have come from if not from the galaxy we're currently in, and from what I can gather, have never left?

Previously it was thought that the chemical soup necessary for creating life could not survive harsh conditions of space between here and out there in any direction, and so we are pure earthlings whose DNA is a 110% home brew or something. Anyway, it appears as though the chemical building blocks for life are more robust and capable of surviving icy conditions and cosmic rays than previously thought.

And it leads to more interesting theories such as,  if chemical compounds for life arrived here from outer space, then life may well have proliferated on other planets as well.

There could be DNA or carbon based life out there somewhere. What would ET life look like? Are they friends or foes? Are they technologically advanced or extinct a long time?

I miss Scientific American. I had a subscription for 20+ years but it just got too difficult to read and follow everything. But it introduced me to a lot of new stuff over the years. I dropped my subscription to The Economist for much the same reasons. Just too much.

Fidel wrote:

Previously it was thought that the chemical soup necessary for creating life could not survive harsh conditions of space between here and out there in any direction, and so we are pure earthlings whose DNA is a 110% home brew or something. Anyway, it appears as though the chemical building blocks for life are more robust and capable of surviving icy conditions and cosmic rays than previously thought.

And it leads to more interesting theories such as,  if chemical compounds for life arrived here from outer space, then life may well have proliferated on other planets as well.

There could be DNA or carbon based life out there somewhere. What would ET life look like? Are they friends or foes? Are they technologically advanced or extinct a long time?

Just how far back do we have to go anyway beyond when we were digging ourselves out of a swamp, before we finally realize the obvious and turn out for good these sort of persistent illusions that you carry around?