More "miscellany" PARTS ONE and TWO (General)

by David Turell @, Wednesday, February 01, 2023, 15:37 (422 days ago) @ dhw

Raup’s failure rate (again)

DAVID: For current failure problems see:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-metric-extinction-risk-speciesy:

QUOTE: “'Indigenous people, local communities, also other ethnic groups – they are good stewards of their biodiversity,” says Ina Vandebroek, an ethnobotanist at the University of the West Indies at Mona in Kingston, Jamaica, who was not involved in the work. “They have knowledge, deep knowledge, about their environments that we really cannot overlook.'”

DAVID: all of this article is around the truth of Raup's rule about survival. It is a constant.

dhw: Thank you for this rather moving article, which has nothing to do with your theory of God’s messy failures, or with Raup’s attribution of extinction to “bad luck” (which I regard as perfectly reasonable). The article emphasises the need for properly guided conservation, and it’s all too obvious that our western world, with its disrespect for other cultures, has caused much of the current damage to Nature. We have a lot to learn from indigenous people, but we insist that we must be their teachers.

Your liberal mind makes a valid point.


Finding first stars

dhw: So they were hardly in a position to affect the Milky Way. Failed experiments?

DAVID: Remember Denton's point, the pattern of gravity all throughout the universe affected the Earth and its position with gravitational influences.

dhw: Are you telling me that it takes 200 billion trillion stars (one estimate I have found) to produce the “pattern of gravity” needed for Planet Earth?

They affect us through gravity.


DAVID: What appears to be true is the initial conditions baked into the origin of the universe dictated lots of galaxies. Looks like design to me.

dhw: Billions and billions of stars that come and go, and they all look like design to you. So what do you reckon: another 99% failure rate?

dhw: I’ll change the question, then. Do you think the stars that died plus the 200 billion trillion that have survived were/are all necessary for us and our food?

Dying stars produce a supply of our needed elements, such as carbon, without which no humans!!!


Innate immunity

DAVID: Stop distorting the immune process!! The immune cells you are born with are the same physical cells for a lifetime. They consistently make antibodies without ever changing their initial cellular form. They can adapt to new requirements, without changing their basic function of producing antibodies.

dhw: Agreed, and perhaps my analogy only works on the level of the evolution of the immune system itself, with new cells performing new functions as it complexifies (I don’t think bacteria have B cells and T cells!). However, what I was trying to establish was that within the cell community there has to be an evolutionary process, because the “library” of new information plus new antibodies is constantly growing. I may need correcting, but I think the B cells are the “memory cells”, though they must cooperate with others during the campaign of defence. It is the build-up of the library within these cells, and the adaptation of the cell community to new requirements which in yesterday’s post I compared to evolution in general. Too far-fetched?

No, just a stretch.


An early worm

QUOTE: There are also at least 20,000 species and 80 families of Polychaete in the modern sea. However, their earliest geological records of fossils in Cambrian deposits, even in the well-known Konservat-Lagerstätten are quite rare.

"'Is this because the delicate worms didn't exist, or simply didn't preserve? Our research gives the first insightful answer: biodiversification of the segmented worms occurs much earlier than thought before.'"

DAVID: the Cambrian gap marches on with this new finding about this worm family. Sudden appearance of marked complexity. The gap never changes and is not explained by any natural series of events.

dhw: As always, the Cambrian gap remains a mystery, but the bolded question above also remains relevant – the problem of preservation – and the very fact that new fossils continue to be found suggests that we should not close the book on the possibility of even earlier fossils. “Not explained by any natural series of events” could be modified to “not yet”, which I think would balance out the assumption that the gap can only be explained by a supernatural series of events.


Changing the gap means finding precursors to fill it. The gap is only 410,000 years long per recent entry here, without the precursors you wish for.


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