In "Team finds Earth's 'oldest rocks'" (BBC News, September 26, 2008) James Morgan reports:

Writing in Science journal, a team reports finding that a sample of Nuvvuagittuq greenstone is 250 million years older than any rocks known. It may even hold evidence of activity by ancient life forms.

Geologist Don Francis and graduate student Jonathan O'Neil of McGill University in Montreal have found an ancient greenstone ("faux amphibolite") which may be the oldest rock known. The rock was dated to between 3.8 and 4.28 billion years ago.

"4.28 billion is the figure I favour," says Francis. It is not surprising that he favours the latter date, since it would make his find about 250 million years older than the second oldest one, the Acasta Gneiss in Canada's Northwest Territories, dated at 4.03 billion years old.

But now what's this about life?

Well, honestly, right now, it's mostly imagination. The greenstone shows a banded iron formation of magnetite and quartz also found in rock around deep sea hydrothermal vents. Many think that these vents hosted early life on earth.

"These ribbons could imply that 4.3 billion years ago, Earth had an ocean, with hydrothermal circulation," said Francis. "Now, some people believe that to make precipitation work, you also need bacteria. "If that were true, then this would be the oldest evidence of life. "But if I were to say that, people would yell and scream and say that there is no hard evidence."

O'Neil adds,

We know that probably the right environment was there for life to be on the Earth -- so liquid water and all it takes to have life. Now was there life? This is a big question mark"

Actually, the geologists are probably safe. People are pretty open to speculation around the origin of life.

But let us say that their wildest dreams come true an they do find hard evidence of life in these rocks. In that case, life started on Earth almost immediately after the planet cooled (in geological terms, that is). If so, then life clearly did not originate via a long slow random swish of chemicals, as we have been encouraged to believe.

Francis and O'Neil had been looking for clues on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec about the Earth's mantle from 3.8 billion years ago when they found the outcrop of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt. It was dated at the Carnegie Institution of Washington by measuring the isotopes of neodymium and samarium, rare elements that decay at a known rate.

Here are some other "oldest rocks" stories, and some photos put up by Professor Francis.

See also Origin of life: Positive evidence of intelligent design?

Origin of life: But is being greedy enough?

Origin of life: Ah, that "just so happens" intermediate series of chemical steps

Why should the search for Darwin's "warm little puddle" be publicly funded?

 Also just up at Colliding Universes, my blog about competing theories of our universe:

Galactic habitable zone not unique, computer sim suggests

Hail, ceaseless complexity! Or maybe FAIL, ceaseless complexity.

How much can complexity really do for us without design or purpose?

Time is the only true mystery?

Like clouds in our coffee ... all these other universes ...

Mathematics: 46th Mersenne prime number found

Apparently so. A recent study from Baylor University suggests that the answer is yes. In "Look Who's Irrational Now" (Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2008), Mollie Ziegler Hemingway notes,

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

Now, that in itself should not be a surprising finding. For one thing, traditional religious groups tend to oppose occult practices, so the regular attender is likely to be aware of the group's negative view.

Also just up at Mindful Hack:

Near death experiences: Respectful interview with near death researcher in Time Magazine

The Spiritual Brain: A "great primer" on the mind-body debate, says reviewer (= how does the mind control the body when the mind is immaterial and the body is material)

Neuroscience: Getting beyond the mind-body problem

Neuroscience: Where materialism misleads us

Evolutionary psychology: Misunderstanding superstition

Okay with some qualifications, that is. Philosopher Thomas Nagel of New York University is probably best known for his 1974 essay, "What is it like to be a bat?" (He was writing against reductionism in thinking about animal minds.) Now, in "Public Education and Intelligent Design" in Philosophy & Public Affairs (pp. 187-2005), Nagel, an atheist, stirs the pot again:

The political urge to defend science education against the threats of religious orthodoxy, understandable though it is, has resulted in a counterorthodoxy, supported by bad arguments, and a tendency to overstate the legitimate scientific claims of evolutionary theory.

You'd think Nagel was referring to the Michael Reiss affair, but he can't be because the essay came out before Brit Reiss was forced to resign.

It would be unfortunate if the Establishment Clause made it unconstitutional to allude to these questions in a public school biology class, for that would mean that evolutionary theory cannot be taught in an intellectually responsible way.

Actually, if the Reiss affair in Britain or similar incidents in North America are any guide, teaching evolutionary theory" in an intellectually responsible way" is not in fact an education establishment goal. He reflects on the odd situation that arguments against design are considered quite legitimate but not arguments for it. Why is that?:

The contention seems to be that, although science can demonstrate the falsehood of the design hypothesis, no evidence against that demonstration can be regarded as scientific support for the hypothesis. Only the falsehood, and not the truth, of ID can count as a scientific claim.

This, he says, creates a dilemma:

The denier that ID is science faces the following dilemma. Either he admits that the intervention of such a designer is possible, or he does not. If he does not, he must explain why that belief is more scientific than the belief that a designer is possible. If on the other hand he believes that a designer is possible, then he can argue that the evidence is overwhelmingly against the actions of such a designer, but he cannot say that someone who offers evidence on the other side is doing something of a fundamentally different kind. All he can say about that person is that he is scientifically mistaken.

and

Critics take issue with the claims made by defenders of ID about what standard evolutionary mechanisms can accomplish, and argue that they depend on faulty assumptions. Whatever the merits, however, that is clearly a scientific disagreement, not a disagreement between science and something else. ... It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the two sides are in symmetrical positions. If one scientist is a theist and another an atheist, this is either a scientific or a nonscientific disagreement between them. If it is scientific (supposing this is possible), then their disagreement is scientific all the way down. If it is not a scientific disagreement, and if this difference in their nonscientific beliefs about the antecedent possibilities affects their rational interpretation of the same empirical evidence, I do not see how we can say that one is engaged in science and the other is not. Either both conclusions are rendered nonscientific by the influence of their nonscientific assumptions, or both are scientific in spite of those assumptions. In the latter case, they have a scientific disagreement that cannot be settled by scientific reasoning alone. ...

So then with respect to discussing intelligent design in a classroom, he asks,

What would a biology course teach if it wanted to remain neutral on the question whether divine intervention in the process of life’s development was a possibility, while acknowledging that people disagree about whether it should be regarded as a possibility at all, or what probability should be assigned to it, and that there is at present no way to settle that disagreement scientifically? So far as I can see, the only way to make no assumptions of a religious nature would be to admit that the empirical evidence may suggest different conclusions depending on what religious belief one starts with, and that the evidence does not by itself settle which of those beliefs is correct, even though there are other religious beliefs, such as the literal truth of Genesis, that are easily refuted by the evidence. I do not see much hope that such an approach could be adopted, but it would combine intellectual responsibility with respect for the Establishment Clause.

This sounds a lot like "teach the controversy" to me. Nagel makes clear at various points* that he thinks that the Darwin fans have oversold their theory. Which they have. All around me, "icons of evolution" are tumbling (another one just came down the other day) .... Basically, in order to keep serious discussion of evidence for design from surfacing, the fans must imply to the public that vastly more evidence exists for the standard Darwinian view of the history of life than actually does exist - and all discussion of the quality of evidence must be suppressed. And for the very good reason that once we get rid of the bad or questionable evidence, there is only a little good evidence. Not enough to justify Expelling scientists who doubt. *For example, he writes,

My own situation is that of an atheist who, in spite of being an avid consumer of popular science, has for a long time been skeptical of the claims of traditional evolutionary theory to be the whole story about the history of life. ... Sophisticated members of the contemporary culture have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they easily lose sight of the fact that evolutionary reductionism defies common sense. A theory that defies common sense can be true, but doubts about its truth should be suppressed only in the face of exceptionally strong evidence.

Here is the article behind a paywall, but you may be able to read it through a library subscription. Here is lawyer Ed Sisson's view.

We learn from ScienceDaily (Sep. 11, 2008) that female spiders do not necessarily eat their mates. Now, before we move on, let us pause to think of all the just-so Darwinian sexual selection stories we have heard that explain why they do. (They add to their energy stores, they prevent the male from mating again, they ... ) Researchers Shawn Wilder and Ann Rypstra from Miami University in Ohio found that, in general,

Males are more likely to be eaten if they are much smaller than females, which likely affects how easy they are to catch. In one species of spider, Hogna helluo, large males were never consumed while small males were consumed 80% of the time. This result was also confirmed when Wilder and Rypstra examined published data from a wide range of spider species. Males are more likely to be eaten in species where males are small relative to females. Much research on sexual cannibalism has focused on a few extreme cases involving sexual selection and sperm competition. However, by looking at data on a wide range of spiders, Wilder and Rypstra discovered that the size of the male relative to the female (often referred to as sexual size dimorphism) determines how often sexual cannibalism occurs in a species.

This sounds like a polite way of saying that previous researchers have focused on the few cases that would confirm Darwin's theory of sexual selection and its theoretical heirs, without looking at fundamental facts like, how does a usually unintelligent creature like a spider know when to attack and consume another life form and when not to. This calculation may well be made irrespective of mating, as Wilder and Rypstra's research suggests. Does a spider even know that it is having sex? Or that that matters? They go on to say,

"We were surprised to find that such a simple characteristic such as how small males are relative to females has such a large effect on the frequency of sexual cannibalism," states Shawn Wilder. In many cases, sexual cannibalism may not be a complex balancing act of costs and benefits for males and females but rather a case of a hungry female eating a male when he is small enough to catch. In an interesting twist, evolution does not appear to be driving this relationship. ...

No surprise there. "Evolution" need not drive the relationship. Once spiders have neural circuits (however, exactly, they acquired them) which determine whether a given life form is too big to attack, they probably don't need "evolution" to drive the subsequent relationship, whether or not it involves reproduction. Our local spiders pounce on insects that get trapped in their webs but flee humans that accidentally break them. So, in the absence of neuroscience studies on spiders, I will assume that the spider has a system for judging size. In that case, we might predict that neural circuits urging spiders to flee will override those urging them to attack - when the size of the possible object of attack exceeds certain boundaries. In that case, it would be more useful for researchers to study the spider's nervous system and find the relevant circuit than to speculate on how Darwinian sexual selection might explain why spiders attack or do not attack.

See also: O'Leary meets an intelligent spider

Peacocks and sexual selection (another situation in which famed Darwinian sexual selection does not work)

Also at The Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and popular culture: The Anglican Church's non-apology to Darwin

Intelligent design and popular culture: The ghost of Darwin rises - in a play

Journal reference: Wilder et al. Sexual Size Dimorphism Predicts the Frequency of Sexual Cannibalism Within and Among Species of Spiders.. The American Naturalist, 2008; 172 (3): 431 DOI: 10.1086/589518

In The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues, the pseudonymous Mike Gene comments,

The fact that DNA contains encoded information in the form of a one-dimensional linear string of symbols is very suggestive positive evidence for Intelligent Design behind the fabric of life. If we set aside life for the moment, then every other example of a sequence of characters representing convention is because of Intelligent Design. If a sequence of dots and dashes, or zeroes and ones, or scribbles, encodes something, we rationally infer an intelligent cause ultimately behind the existence of that sequence. In fact, this is often perceived as a working assumption behind SETI, the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence. To detect intelligence, SETI might eventually find a sequence of signals that appears to encode something, In striking contrast, geologists do not look for a sequence of characters that encode the formation of mountains or cause volcanoes to erupt. Nor do meteorologists look for a sequence of characters that encode the formation of rain or hurricanes. Nor do chemists look for a sequence of characters that encode the formation of crystals or gases. If every other example of encoded information points to Intelligent Design, and encoded information in science is specific to life, it is reasonable to follow this lead and make the same tentative inference for the ultimate origin of genetic information and life itself.

The alternative theory is that the genetic code is a "frozen accident" - it just happened and then it got stuck that way through self-replication because living things came to depend on it. It is remarkable to live in a time when many otherwise intelligent people are seriously willing to entertain such an idea.

Also, today at Colliding Universes

Big physics could end up putting physicists out of a job?

Will it be a disaster for physics if the Higgs boson is the ONLY thing the Large Hadron Collider finds?

Origin of life: Is it Positive evidence of intelligent design?

Mass: Is the Higgs boson the "stuff" of all that stuff we call matter?

Origin of life: The "billion billion" planets solution?

 In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel published a most interesting essay called "What is it like to be a bat", which reminded us that animals not only have different minds from humans, they - in some cases - have different senses. Their whole experience of life may be different: For example, he notes:

To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like. [ ... ] I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

Nagel's main purpose was not really to understand what it is like to be a bat, which he believes unlikely. Rather, he opposed reductionism - as in "the mind is nothing but ..." as a strategy for understanding the mind. His point is that reductionism is not even a good way of understanding animal minds, let alone human minds. As he says,

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction. [ ... ] Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern science. It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain. But philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different. This has led to the acceptance of implausible accounts of the mental largely because they would permit familiar kinds of reduction. I shall try to explain why the usual examples do not help us to understand the relation between mind and body—why, indeed, we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless. The most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena is very poorly understood. Most reductionist theories do not even try to explain it. And careful examination will show that no currently available concept of reduction is applicable to it. Perhaps a new theoretical form can be devised for the purpose, but such a solution, if it exists, lies in the distant intellectual future.

Other "animal mind" stories from The Mindful Hack

"Animal minds: Monkeys understand money?"

"When pop science TV wants to hear only one side ...

" Animal minds: Art produced by animals: Is it art?

Also just up at The Mindful Hack:

Neuroscience: No, we really DON'T understand kids

Applied non-materialist neuroscience: Do not fire your boss before you listen to this ...

Psychology: What did you really see? You'd be surprised!

The God gene ... Warning! Restricted to people with a sense of humour!

Sending your brain back to school

A recent article in Nature by Katharine Sanderson suggests that "Greedy molecules could be behind the emergence of life" because an "Artificial system shows how a molecular soup could be exploited by a single self-replicating complex."

Douglas Philp, a chemist at the University of St Andrews, UK, has previously shown that a molecule made of two halves that recognise and bind to one another can then act as a template for its own replication1. Along with his colleague Jan Sadownik, he has now discovered that this template molecule can drive its own formation in a bigger pool of many more reactants, quickly taking over the processes in that pool and dominating the system so that almost no other products have a chance to form.

This kind of self-replicating system has been proposed as an explanation to how complex molecules such as DNA could have formed, ultimately triggering the emergence of life. Artificial versions of these systems, however, have remained elusive.

This, Philp says, "... shows that you can bring order from chaos."

Yes you can - but only over a limited range. And the fundamental problem we tend to run into is that further instances of order become astronomically less probable.

For example, if I dump the Scrabble letters, the ones face up can probably form some words. But if I must form a specific sentence - for example, "You better all move your cars because I can see the parking hornet from my window," my chances are very much lower. Origin of life is far more like that than it is like finding some letters that will form words.

Also just up at Colliding Universes, a blog about competing theories of our universe:

Large Hadron Collider: Experiments underway

Podcast: The argument from design in cosmology

The truth hurts ... and it can leave you seeing stars, too ...

The nothingness of nothing ... as seen by scientists, philosophers, and others

 In textbook folklore and pop science TV shows, yes. Otherwise,

University of Bristol (England) bacteriologist Alan H. Linton went looking for direct evidence of speciation and concluded in 2001: “None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of twenty to thirty minutes, and populations achieved after eighteen hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another. . . Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic [i.e., bacterial] to eukaryotic [i.e., plant and animal] cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms.”21 So evolution’s smoking gun is still missing. Darwinists claim that all species have descended from a common ancestor through variation and selection, but they can’t point to a single observed instance in which even one species has originated in this way. Never in the field of science have so many based so much on so little.

I wonder if that guy still has a job.

- From Jonathan Wells’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery, 2006), p. 59.

Intelligent design and popular culture: Secular humanists lead the way in offering open debate

Intelligent design and elite culture: Why evidence would not convince many top people that there is design in the universe

Intelligent design and popular culture: Why respect people?

Intelligent design and popular culture: Sherlock Holmes and design

Message to Canadian readers: Make intellectual freedom an election issue

Plants: The assured results of modern evolutionary science ...

In Why the Universe Is the Way It Is, astronomer Hugh Ross explains,

The solar system holds a special position in the Milky Way, close to (but not exactly at) the co-rotation distance - the one distance from the core where stars orbit the galaxy at the same rate as its spiral arm structure does. A star or planetary system located at the co-rotation distance and between two spiral arms would seemingly remain at that safe place. However, stars and planetary systems exactly at the co-rotation distance would experience a "mean motion resonance," repeated gravitational "kicks" exerted by the galactic arm structure. Such kicks would send the star and its possible planetary system flying out of the habitable zone.

Earth's solar system is located just inside the co-rotation distance. So it is safe from the mean motion resonance. Because the solar system revolves around the galactic center only slightly faster than the galactic arm structure, it crosses the spiral arms only one about every billion years. The last spiral arm crossing occurred 560 to 600 million years ago (just before the Cambrian explosion, when complex animals first came on the scene), so Earth currently resides in the safest possible position).

This protected location is truly exceptional. Not all spiral galaxies are like the Milky Way. In the vast majority, the co-rotation distance and the habitable zone fail to overlap. Not only is there a match for the Milky Way Galaxy, but also the best possible place for a newly forming planetary system to accumulate all the heavy elements and long-lived radioactive isotopes requires for advanced life happens to lie just inside the co-rotation distance." (pp. 68-70)

Other stories from Colliding Universes, a blog about competing theories of our universe:

Physics: No escape from philosophy through equations?

Extraterrestrials: Several million UFO reports later ... the state of the question

Today at Colliding Universes More demolition teams trying to