An Idea

[Profpat]

Thats ok Austin maybe we should leave life alone for now.

[Profpat]

However your time frame is completely wrong Austin. OUR universe is 13.7 billion years old, remember, even if it is cyclic everything starts anew.

2nd Our Earth is only ~ 4.5 billion years old and life on Earth is ~ 4 billion years old. That gives nature 500,000 years to create life quite a deed seeing it took nature 300,000 years to form light. And again the MOST complex thing nature ever formed is a proton.

But whatever thought gives you comfort is OK with me Austin.

BTW I have this bridge in Brooklyn for sale maybe you would be interested in buying it.

Best,

Pat

[austintorn@aol.com]

So, the long odds and the all-at-once 747 assembly dont' apply at all, not even close, for evolution was not all-at-once but over a whole lot of years in which death was the only decider, sifting the best from the rest. ID's know this, but they so wish for what they what that they say silly things in lieu of it. This is called 'neglect', a common practice.

We can trace our ancestry al the way back to microbes, the bacteria who even took over a billion years to discard enough oxygen to make a breathable atmosphere. For who, though? No one, for it was a poison to all, but the organisms of the future came to love it.

I don't look for comfort, only what is.

OK, life is solved, for me, or not wished to be further addressed by others. What next?

[austintorn@aol.com]

> NS 2568: Meet your ancestor--the fish that crawled
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/...t-crawled.html
> 6.9.9 by Bob Holmes
>
> At first, Ted Daeschler thought the fossil was just a fragment of a
> lungfish snout--interesting, but not earth-shaking. He and his
> colleagues were after bigger quarry. They had come to Ellesmere
> Island, high in the Canadian Arctic, in search of the fish that
> first dragged itself out of water nearly 400 million years ago, the
> evolutionary forebear to all land vertebrates--and, as such, our
> own very distant ancestor.
>
> Daeschler carefully packed up the fragment and set it aside to study
> another day. It sat for months in a drawer at the Academy of Natural
> Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, until one day a graduate
> student, Matt Friedman, happened to look at it and notice some
> unusual features. He showed it to Daeschler. "It was like light
> bulbs going off," Daeschler recalls. "This is what we're looking
> for. Of course it is!"
> It was like light bulbs going off. This is what we're looking for.
> Of course it is!
>
> That unassuming fragment of bone helped lead Daeschler and his
> colleagues, Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and Farish
> Jenkins of Harvard University, to one of the most important fossil
> finds of the decade: several specimens of an almost perfect
> intermediate between fish and land vertebrates, or tetrapods. All
> are so beautifully preserved that the researchers could see almost
> every detail of their skeleton. The new creature, which they named
> Tiktaalik--from the Inuit name for a large, shallow-water fish -
> gives us a rare and vivid glimpse of how, and why, vertebrates took
> their first tentative steps toward land.
>
> Other experts are ranking Tiktaalik roseae with some august company.
> "Everybody points to Archaeopteryx as a link between reptiles and
> birds," says Jennifer Clack, a palaeontologist at the University of
> Cambridge, referring to the iconic fossil found in all the
> textbooks. "This creature does the same thing for the origin of
> tetrapods, in that it's got a combination of fish-like features with
> some clearly tetrapod-like features. It's one of those things you
> can point to and say, I told you this would exist--and there it
> is."
> It is one of those things you can point to and say, I told you this
> would exist and there it is
>
> The evolutionary path from fish to tetrapods was fairly clear even
> before Tiktaalik. First came lungs. Some early bony fishes evolved
> an air-breathing system, probably to cope with water low in oxygen.
> One group, the lobe-finned fish, also had fleshy fins with internal
> bones, unlike most fish today. Yet only later, about 385 million
> years ago towards the end of the Devonian period, did the first
> signs of adaptation to life in the shallows appear. Several fossil
> fish with amphibian-like features have been found, including one
> called Panderichthys. Roughly a metre long, this was a vaguely
> crocodilian fish, with eyes atop a flattened head, front fin bones
> that are more arm-like in their shape and mobility, and changes in
> the bones that eventually formed the middle ear of tetrapods.
>
> Panderichthys's opposite number--the most fish-like tetrapod for
> which we have good fossils--is a thick-bodied animal called
> Acanthostega, one of the most significant of a profusion of new
> fossils uncovered in the past two decades (New Scientist, 19 August
> 2000, p 2. Acanthostega had limbs and fingers--albeit eight on
> each limb--but by modern standards the limbs were stiff and
> inflexible, more suited to swimming or dragging the animal along
> than any sort of walk. With prominent gills and a broad tail,
> Acanthostega clearly spent most of its time in water, though it may
> have made short forays onto land.
>
> Even with all this information, many questions about how fish
> evolved into land animals still remained. "We take a pretty big jump
> from Panderichthys to Acanthostega," says Daeschler. The fish's fins
> became the amphibian's rudimentary legs. The head, bound rigidly to
> the body by bony plates in Panderichthys, turned into a mobile neck.
> The shape of the skull, and the role played by some of its bones,
> changed dramatically. Like a thriller in which you know the identity
> of the bad guy, the suspense was not in the who or what, but in the
> how. Which traits changed first? How fast did they evolve? The hope
> was that the answers to these questions might give some hints to why
> our ancestors moved from estuaries or rivers onto land around 375
> million years ago.
>
> In 1998, Daeschler and Shubin decided to hunt for new fossils to
> fill the gap between Panderichthys and Acanthostega. They knew
> exactly where they wanted to look: sedimentary rocks dating from the
> early Frasnian age of the late Devonian period, about 375 million
> years ago. A quick glance at an introductory geology text pointed
> them to the Canadian Arctic, and after a bit of trial and error they
> focused on a fjord along the south-eastern coast of one of the most
> northerly land masses on Earth, Ellesmere Island.
>
> After being dropped off at their base camp by helicopter, Daeschler,
> Shubin and their team spent their days wandering the barren
> hillsides looking for fossils. It is hard, cold work, with
> temperatures barely rising above freezing even in July. Good boots
> and a sharp eye are essential. "This kind of palaeontological
> exploration is a skill game," says Daeschler. "But you're not going
> to walk out on the first day and find that great thing. A lot of
> energy goes into it."
>
> That first, portentous snout--the one that caused so much belated
> excitement in Daeschler's lab--turned up in 2002. Two years later,
> finally aware of what they had, the team returned to the site and
> immediately started excavating the area where they had found the
> snout. "Tiktaalik everywhere!" Daeschler recalls. "Why didn't we
> find it the first year? If that one fragment hadn't been found, we
> wouldn't have gone back, and three inches under the surface was all
> this stuff." Using a gasoline-powered jackhammer, and hand tools for
> the delicate bits, the team carefully extracted the fossils, still
> enclosed in rock, wrapped them in protective plaster jackets, and
> brought them back home.
>
> Later that autumn, as Daeschler's fossil preparator, Fred Mullison,
> painstakingly chipped bits of rock away from the bone, and other
> workers exposed a second specimen in Shubin's lab in Chicago, the
> researchers began to realise just what they had found. These were no
> minor fragments--both fish had heads, shoulders and fins that were
> nearly complete. "We said, 'Look at that! Look at how short the
> skull is!' Then, 'Holy Moly, look at the shoulder girdles! Look at
> the scales!' I was sending images to Harvard and Chicago. Ten
> minutes after we exposed something, it was on Neil's desk. I was
> showing everybody who walked by, 'Look at this!'" says Daeschler.
> "We would have been ecstatic to find any one of these bones. But
> here we have all of the bones, in articulation. It's an
> embarrassment of riches, really, to have such amazingly preserved
> material."
>
> Half fish, half amphibian
>
> What emerged from the rock was an animal almost perfectly
> intermediate between fish and amphibian. "We describe this as a
> fishopod--part fish, part tetrapod," says Shubin, only half in
> jest. The team published their findings earlier this year in Nature
> (vol 440, p 757 and p 764).

[polarmedium]

What next is the dream state, or should I say life that will be.
Lucid dreaming. Key.
Lucid life. Hole.
Its painful.

I imagine (wrongly I assume) the digital media of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, will be free for viewing, but of little interest. (AssHats)

Entertained to death. Another bad line. Shall we walk alone, or as one?

Hint:The only matter that matters is time. The rest is space passing by.

Hint Hint: Try sleeping with headphones (the in ear-work best) and your favorite music.

[Profpat]

Hoyle by far the brightest of the three actually changed his mind about being an atheist once he considered the facts, and Darwin believed in a God. But these like Einstein and Newton were very intelligent people and scientists, who studied the facts and came up with some very LOGICAL conclusions. But hey Austin you still have Dawkins and Sagan, popularist with very limited intuitition, insight, imagination and intelligence, compared with the preceding four who actually came up with something new scientifically.

From Wiki:

Hoyle, an atheist until that time, said that this suggestion of a guiding hand left him "greatly shaken." Consequently, he began to believe in a god

[austintorn@aol.com]

My dreams are the greatest adventures, many wonderfully lucid, as in life, too. A long time ago I trained my mind to become lucid during night dreams, which took less than a month. It's a great source of creativity, as well. Last night I was in Russia with some fun people.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Hoyle by far the brightest of the three actually changed his mind about being an atheist once he considered the facts

We already see that he confused the 747 facts.

Should we talk to the next God, the one of Irreducible Complexity, who turns out to be just that Himself?

[austintorn@aol.com]

Well, that was a short one;
I'm off to talk to the God of the Gaps.

[Graybeard]

Dawkins and Sagan, popularist with very limited intuitition, insight, imagination and intelligence

No way to know the all man's heart can find,
Can knowledge ever .. accompany the blind.


sigh ... greg