400-Million-Year-Old Mystery

· Giant Tree-like Object in Epoch Before Trees Existed.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/02/fossil-mystery-giant-treelike-object-in-epoch-before-trees-existed.html

The giant fossil Prototaxites is a big 400-million year old mystery. The fossils resemble tree trunks, and yet they are from a time before trees existed. The stable carbon isotope values are similar to those of fungi, but the fossils do not display structures usually found in fungi. Hence, the enigma.
Prototaxites have sparked controversy for more than a century. Originally classified as a conifer, scientists later argued that it was instead a lichen, various types of algae or a fungus. Whatever it was, it stood in tree-like trunks more than 20 feet tall, making it the largest-known organism on land in its day.

"No matter what argument you put forth, people say, well, that’s crazy. That doesn’t make any sense. A 20-foot-tall fungus doesn’t make any sense. Neither does a 20-foot-tall algae make any sense, but here’s the fossil."
- C. Kevin Boyce, Assistant Professor, Geophysical Sciences, U. of Chicago.

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[Prototaxites Formed from Rolled Liverwort Mats]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/26993585

Should We Clone Neanderthals?

· The scientific, legal, and ethical obstacles.
http://www.archaeology.org/1003/etc/neanderthals.html

by Zach Zorich

If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone. Genetic sequences have given paleoanthropologists a new line of evidence for testing ideas about the biology of our closest extinct relative.
[...]
Newly developed techniques could make cloning Neanderthal cells or body parts a reality within a few years. The ability to use the genes of extinct hominins is going to force the field of paleoanthropology into some unfamiliar ethical territory. There are still technical obstacles, but soon it could be possible to use that long-extinct genome to safely create a healthy, living Neanderthal clone. Should it be done?
[...]

"If your experiment succeeds and you generate a Neanderthal who talks,
you have violated every ethical rule we have,
and if your experiment fails...well. It's a lose-lose."
—James Noonan

"This is a species-altering event,
it changes the way we are creating a new generation."
—Lori Andrews

"I'm convinced that if one were to raise a Neanderthal in a modern
human family he would function just like everybody else,
I have no reason to doubt he could speak and do all the things
that modern humans do."[...so much for evolution.]
-Trenton Holliday

Please, read more...

The Japanese Spider Crab

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/02/crabzilla-5-ft-biggest-known-crab-uk.php

The Japanese Spider Crab is the biggest arthropod on Earth--their legs are believed to grow up to 12 feet long. But since they live at such great depths (typically 1,000 feet down or so) a full grown spider crab has yet to be caught. So for now, we'll have to make due with the 5 foot long Crabzilla, one of the largest known crabs in the planet.
The crabs are commonly found in the Pacific in 1,000 ft (300m) deep waters but have been known to live deeper.

"It is rumoured these crabs can grow as big as four metres,
big enough to straddle a car."

With 10 legs, believed to live up to 100 years, and the biggest of them believed to be lurking at depths over 2,000 feet, few creatures retain as much mystique as the spider crab.

[Source: www.treehugger.com]

Royal Society meet to discuss if extra-terrestrials are here on Earth

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7000795.ece

Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University, will suggest tomorrow that the search for extra-terrestrial life should be focused right under our noses. His audience will include representatives from Nasa, the European Space Agency and the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, while Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society and Astronomer Royal, will also lead one of the sessions.
Addressing the meeting to mark the 50th anniversary of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme — a quest that has fallen far short of its objectives — Professor Davies will argue that demonstrating that life has appeared more than once on Earth would be the best evidence yet that it must exist elsewhere in the Universe.
[...]
According to Professor Davies, "weird" microbes that belong to a completely separate tree of life, dubbed the "shadow biosphere", could be present in isolated ecological niches in which ordinary life struggles to survive. Likely hiding places include deserts, scalding volcanic vents, the dry valleys of Antartica or salt-saturated lakes.
[...]
The conference will also address the social implications of the search for alien life. Albert Harrison, from the University of California, Davis, will discuss how human beings might respond to the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence.

"It is easy to imagine scenarios resulting in widespread psychological disintegration and social chaos, but historical prototypes, reactions to false alarms and survey results, suggest that the predominant response to the discovery of a microwave transmission from light years away is likely to be equanimity, perhaps even delight."

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[References...]
- Is there anybody out there?
- The eerie silence: are we alone in the universe?

New Glimpses of Life’s Puzzling Origins

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/science/16orig.html?hpw

[...]
The origins of life on Earth bristle with puzzle and paradox. Which came first, the proteins of living cells or the genetic information that makes them? How could the metabolism of living things get started without an enclosing membrane to keep all the necessary chemicals together? But if life started inside a cell membrane, how did the necessary nutrients get in?
The questions may seem moot, since life did start somehow. But for the small group of researchers who insist on learning exactly how it started, frustration has abounded. Many once-promising leads have led only to years of wasted effort. Scientists as eminent as Francis Crick, the chief theorist of molecular biology, have quietly suggested that life may have formed elsewhere before seeding the planet, so hard does it seem to find a plausible explanation for its emergence on Earth.

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'Scientism' infects Darwinian debates

An unflinching belief that science can explain everything about evolution becomes its own ideology.

http://www.vancouversun.com/Life/Scientism+infects+Darwinian+debates/1464023/story.html

There are two major obstacles to a rich public discussion on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and what it means to all of us.

The most obvious obstacle is religious literalism, which leads to Creationism. It's the belief the Bible or other ancient sacred texts offer the first and last word on how humans came into existence.

The second major barrier to a rewarding public conversation about the impact of evolution on the way we understand the world is not named nearly as much.

It is "scientism."

Scientism is the belief that the sciences have no boundaries and will, in the end, be able to explain everything in the universe. Scientism can, like religious literalism, become its own ideology.

The Encyclopedia of Science, Technology and Ethics defines scientism as "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of natural science to be applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences and the humanities)."

Those who unknowingly fall into the trap of scientism act as if hard science is the only way of knowing reality. If something can't be "proved" through the scientific method, through observable and measurable evidence, they say it's irrelevant.

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