More "miscellany" PART TWO (General)

by dhw, Thursday, November 24, 2022, 13:13 (490 days ago) @ David Turell

PART TWO

New Edicarean fossils; new ones with meal

DAVID: compared to the Cambrian this one had a gut, no eyes or legs, so the new finding enforces the phenotypic gap.

dhw:. Despite your belief that “a major find of fossils to fill the Cambrian gap is very unlikely at this late stage of fossil hunting”, here we have two new pre-Cambrian ones. I’d have thought mouth, gut and modern digestive system would count as a major link between pre-Cambrian life forms and the animals that exist today.

DAVID: we knew they had to eat and are early animals but not anywhere near as complex as Cambrian's.

That’s evolution for you – later animals build on the foundations laid by their ancestors. More support for the continuity of speciation, as opposed to speciation without predecessors.

A new fungal family

I’m afraid this repeats what was said on the evolution thread, but perhaps it will help to put an end to this “branch” of our discussion.

QUOTE: "'What is really fascinating is that despite these fungi looking so different, they have a lot in common at the level of their genomes," says Spribille.

DAVID: this is a major consideration in thinking about evolution. The relationships are at the genome, DNA, level, not at the outward appearance level. It puts to rest dhw's weirdly illogical worry about the Cambrian gap destroying my theory about how God evolved us from Archaea. WE have Archaea genes as previously noted.

I can hardly believe what I’m reading! ALL species are composed of cells and ALL species are descended from the first cells. The different combinations of cells led to all the different branches of life, one of which led to us, while others led to our food, and the rest led nowhere. The latter are the ones we call the dead ends. I insist on the continuity of the branches leading from Archaea to us and our food, but while you accept that we are descended from Archaea, you also insist that humans plus food are descended from Cambrian life forms which your God designed WITHOUT PREDECESSORS. In one breath you tell us the “gap” (which proves your God’s existence) means there are no predecessors, and in the next breath you agree with me that there must be a direct line from Archaea to us, which can only mean that there were pre-Cambrian predecessors! But you can't see that you are contradicting yourself.

Earth vs Venus

DAVID: seemingly twins at their start they ended up differently. One with plate tectonics, one without. The authors note other differences (my bolds) but my point is this dumb luck or God's guidance? This is another firm aspect of fine-tuning.

And of course it raises the question why your God bothered to design Venus in the first place if all he wanted was Planet Earth and humans.

A NEW DISCOVERY

QUOTE:"'It is nearly incomprehensible that the extremely critical process of loading neurotransmitters in containers is delegated to only one molecule per container. Especially when we find that 40% of the time these molecules are switched off…"

The article is too technical for me to fully understand its significance, but when I saw this, I couldn’t help wondering whether the switching off was all at the same time or staggered. Simply out of curiosity, I logged onto the site and found this passage:

QUOTE: "Does shutting down the energy source of the containers mean many of them are indeed empty of neurotransmitters? Would a large fraction of empty containers significantly impact the communication between neurons?

This suggests that the shutting down at any one time is only partial, and since neurons appear to be able to communicate all the time, the answer would seem to be that normally the fraction of empty containers doesn’t make any difference. One might compare the system with that of shift-working! I don't really understand why this discovery is so important, but I’ve probably misunderstood the whole thing and you can enlighten me.


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