From the UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER:
Are humans unique and alone in the vast universe? This question– summed up in the famous Drake equation — has for a half-century been one of the most intractable and uncertain in science.
But a new paper shows that the recent discoveries of exoplanets combined with a broader approach to the question makes it possible to assign a new empirically valid probability to whether any other advanced technological civilizations have ever existed.
And it shows that unless the odds of advanced life evolving on a habitable planet are astonishingly low, then human kind is not the universe’s first technological, or advanced, civilization.
The paper, to be published in Astrobiology, also shows for the first time just what “pessimism” or “optimism” mean when it comes to estimating the likelihood of advanced extraterrestrial life.
“The question of whether advanced civilizations exist elsewhere in the universe has always been vexed with three large uncertainties in the Drake equation,” said Adam Frank, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester and co-author of the paper. “We’ve known for a long time approximately how many stars exist. We didn’t know how many of those stars had planets that could potentially harbor life, how often life might evolve and lead to intelligent beings, and how long any civilizations might last before becoming extinct.”
“Thanks to NASA’s Kepler satellite and other searches, we now know that roughly one-fifth of stars have planets in “habitable zones,” where temperatures could support life as we know it. So one of the three big uncertainties has now been constrained.”
Frank said that the third big question–how long civilizations might survive–is still completely unknown. “The fact that humans have had rudimentary technology for roughly ten thousand years doesn’t really tell us if other societies would last that long or perhaps much longer,” he explained.
But Frank and his coauthor, Woodruff Sullivan of the astronomy department and astrobiology program at the University of Washington, found they could eliminate that term altogether by simply expanding the question.
“Rather than asking how many civilizations may exist now, we ask ‘Are we the only technological species that has ever arisen?” said Sullivan. “This shifted focus eliminates the uncertainty of the civilization lifetime question and allows us to address what we call the ‘cosmic archaeological question’–how often in the history of the universe has life evolved to an advanced state?”
That still leaves huge uncertainties in calculating the probability for advanced life to evolve on habitable planets. It’s here that Frank and Sullivan flip the question around. Rather than guessing at the odds of advanced life developing, they calculate the odds against it occurring in order for humanity to be the only advanced civilization in the entire history of the observable universe. With that, Frank and Sullivan then calculated the line between a Universe where humanity has been the sole experiment in civilization and one where others have come before us.
“Of course, we have no idea how likely it is that an intelligent technological species will evolve on a given habitable planet,” says Frank. But using our method we can tell exactly how low that probability would have to be for us to be the ONLY civilization the Universe has produced. We call that the pessimism line. If the actual probability is greater than the pessimism line, then a technological species and civilization has likely happened before.”
Using this approach, Frank and Sullivan calculate how unlikely advanced life must be if there has never been another example among the universe’s ten billion trillion stars, or even among our own Milky Way galaxy’s hundred billion.
The result? By applying the new exoplanet data to the universe’s 2 x 10 to the 22nd power stars, Frank and Sullivan find that human civilization is likely to be unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilization developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in 10 billion trillion, or one part in 10 to the 22th power.
“One in 10 billion trillion is incredibly small,” says Frank. “To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us. Think of it this way. Before our result you’d be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion. But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about a 10 billion other times over cosmic history!”
For smaller volumes the numbers are less extreme. For example, another technological species likely has evolved on a habitable planet in our own Milky Way galaxy if the odds against it are better than one chance in 60 billion.
But if those numbers seem to give ammunition to the “optimists” about the existence of alien civilizations, Sullivan points out that the full Drake equation–which calculates the odds that other civilizations are around today — may give solace to the pessimists.
“The universe is more than 13 billion years old,” said Sullivan. “That means that even if there have been a thousand civilizations in our own galaxy, if they live only as long as we have been around — roughly ten thousand years — then all of them are likely already extinct. And others won’t evolve until we are long gone. For us to have much chance of success in finding another “contemporary” active technological civilization, on average they must last much longer than our present lifetime.”
“Given the vast distances between stars and the fixed speed of light we might never really be able to have a conversation with another civilization anyway,” said Frank. “If they were 20,000 light years away then every exchange would take 40,000 years to go back and forth.”
But, as Frank and Sullivan point out, even if there aren’t other civilizations in our galaxy to communicate with now, the new result still has a profound scientific and philosophical importance. “From a fundamental perspective the question is ‘has it ever happened anywhere before?'” said Frank. Our result is the first time anyone has been able to set any empirical answer for that question and it is astonishingly likely that we are not the only time and place that an advance civilization has evolved.”
According to Frank and Sullivan their result has a practical application as well. As humanity faces its crisis in sustainability and climate change we can wonder if other civilization-building species on other planets have gone through a similar bottleneck and made it to the other side. As Frank puts it “We don’t even know if it’s possible to have a high-tech civilization that lasts more than a few centuries.” With Frank and Sullivan’s new result, scientists can begin using everything they know about planets and climate to begin modeling the interactions of an energy-intensive species with their home world knowing that a large sample of such cases has already existed in the cosmos. “Our results imply that our evolution has not been unique and has probably happened many times before. The other cases are likely to include many energy intensive civilizations dealing with their feedbacks onto their planets as their civilizations grow. That means we can begin exploring the problem using simulations to get a sense of what leads to long lived civilizations and what doesn’t.”
Frank and Sullivan’s argument hinges upon the recent discovery of how many planets exist and how many of those lie in what scientists call the “habitable zone” — planets in which liquid water, and therefore life, could exist. This allows Frank and Sullivan to define a number they call Nast. Nast is the product of N*, the total number of stars; fp, the fraction of those stars that form planets; and np, the average number of those planets in the habitable zones of their stars.
They then set out what they call the “Archaelogical-form” of the Drake equation, which defines A as the “number of technological species that have ever formed over the history of the observable Universe.”
Their equation, A=Nast*fbt, describes A as the product of Nast – the number of habitable planets in a given volume of the Universe – multiplied by fbt – the likelihood of a technological species arising on one of these planets. The volume considered could be, for example, the entire Universe, or just our Galaxy.
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So, we can’t even get along with ourselves on our planet, now we want to invite in aliens ?
“We come in peace.” [Turns dove into a smoking ember.]
The powers that be are salivating at the prospect of extraterrestrial life. They will impose a steep Alien Landing tax. They are running out of OPM, so they are looking for new sources of tax revenue.
Glenn Reynolds said about it:
MATH IN THE ABSENCE OF DATA IS JUST NUMBERS
Nutz
In mankind’s long search for panspermia, no one bothered looking in the mirror. Humans are what is needed for nature to get of the planet and eventually to a new sun. Not for plastic as George Carlin suggests. So the cold hard truth is:
We are chicken little.
The earth and nature is our egg.
Chicken’s eat and brake eggs.
Then they fly away, never to return to the egg.
It’s not just the making of scrambled egg’s that brake em, making chicken will brake an egg as well. 😉
Since we’re discussing personal “equations”, I’ll give one of my own;
The likelihood of faked contact with critters from other star systems (in order to facilitate the establishment of technocratic authoritarian “world” Government, let’s say ; ) goes up in direct proportion to the failure of any attempt to sell a faked climate crisis (in order to facilitate the establishment of technocratic authoritarian “world” Government, ) to intelligent beings on any given planet ; )
See the “Watchmen” comic book series for an extrapolation of that.
“i come in peace. Gimme your dough.”
They show how biased they are with pessimist and optimism qualification.
Larry Fine May 1, 2016 at 11:58 am Nailed it with this comment a la Rud
“It seems pretty fishy that life formed on Earth as soon as it cooled enough to support life, and it supposedly did so by natural processes which appear to be impossible to account for.”
Fish have been falling out of the sky forever.
On a lighter note the third big question–how long civilizations might survive and are we alone.
If a super civilization evolved we would be microbial in comparison. I do not think alien scientists bother to communicate with bacteria or bother about them unless they are a nuisance.
Stepped on accidentally or slapped.
Our only concern might be another bacteria.
They would all want to hang out in the centre of town rather than in the “burbs” so would be moving inwards on the spiral reducing our risk as well.
What if we are the first technologically advanced civilization? Somebody has to the first. If so, we are alone ….
Assuming we were, how long will it be before we decide to “seed” the vacant universe with the building blocks of life?
Imagine a technological world similar to earth, that knows it is about to die. (Asteroid impact, nearby supernova etc.)
Would you sit back and wait for extinction, or take a shot at scattering the seeds of life as far as you can in the hopes that somewhere,in the distant future, a barren rock could be transformed into a living world ?
Precisely, if we’re the first then we’re alone, and *somebody* had to be the first — in a universe where the topic is being discussed, the “first ones” are mandatory. And the “second ones” are completely hypothetical, even imaginary.
The authors said, “a new empirically valid probability to whether any other advanced technological civilizations have ever existed.” OK. Let’s see the empirical part, defined as, “based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic”.
The article authors have NO empirical data other than there are a bunch of stars, galaxies, and planets out there. Oh, there is no data. So what are these guys trying to prove? Maybe that they can get away with writing a paper that says absolutely, NOTHING. I can’t believe we pay people for this kind of trash.
Besides, I have probably written better looking equations after the fourth martini. Well, if I could remember anything after the third one I could have.
“One martini’s allowable;
Two at the very most.
Three and I’m under the table;
Four and I’m under the host.”
―Dorothy Parker
🙂
We have been “listening” for years. nada.
The straight up honest answer is that when scientists try to calculate how many chemical reactions it would take in order to build the first self reproducing life form, there are not enough molecules or time to have passed for life to exist the Universe at this point in time in the history of the universe.
Couple with that, the idea of evolution being random, the chances for life to evolve to intelligence level, the outlook is even more grim.
When they were making those calculations, they were based upon the perfect soup of chemicals to bring forth life from. They were also using a much simpler view of DNA and the aspects of life. Since that time, DNA has been found to have layered programing languages and the minimum number of genes to make a viable self replicating life form have increased rather than decreased. So those calculations were very aggressive.
Nope. Wrong definition of life. See clay hypothesis above. Then get back.
IMO the ice has a lot more going for it, not that I rule out clay. That RNA self-assembles in water pockets within ice isn’t just an hypothesis, but an observation, ie a scientific fact.
BD, you could be right. But clay has the advantage of working at ambient conditions, so also chemically faster than ice might.
what’s your definition of life, ristvan?
so far you’ve not given one
do you not know what a definition is?
for guidance, a definition is the set of distinguishing characteristics that separate an entity from all others in the universal set.
G, wrong. Gave a precise minimalist definition much above. Please read it.
do you mean this:
” Now life can be defined purely as the ability to evolve.”
because that is not a definition of life.
evolution is not a requirement at all and many things change over time, evolving – so it fails to distinguish a life form from orogenesis, say.
if you have given a proper definition which i missed, kindly reiterate or link it. i did make a good faith effort to find it.
G, read the recommended summary book. Then get back. The ‘life’ definition is precise and two sided. Sorry if your comprehension thereof flags. I have no intent to reproduce a ~100 page summary of a ~1500 page tome in a mere paragraph comment to you. Go do your own research. You now have all the lead words to do so.
a 100 page summary is not a definition.
your evasion is totally sufficient to conclude that you will not define the word because you are unable to define it and further, you demonstrate that you fail to understand the very definition of definition.
your maneuver is noted.
it is a defining act.
people who know what they are talking about are never unable to define their terms.
therefore the ineluctable conclusion is you are faking it.
if you do it once, then you are not averse to it in principle and so now it’s just a matter of what degree of dishonesty you indulge in.
who plays these stupid games? stupid people, ristvan. it’s a defining act like mcgregor and his goat.
Ristvan,
Freezing is the ambient condition of most of the universe, including asteroids and much of the surface of earth during the Hadean, despite heavy bombardment.
One of the advantages of water pockets in ice is that the reagents are contained and concentrated, although the reactions occur more slowly. The remaining problem with origin of life experiments is getting from short polypeptide chains to large proteins. Ice containment for what would be impractically long lab experiments but a very short time geologically helps solve this problem.
You fail to understand the most elementary fact of biology. Evolution isn’t random in the way that you imagine. It works on whole genomes and parts thereof. Some of the processes that lead to mutations and other sources of genetic variation are in some sense random, but that doesn’t mean that the first living thing developed from random associations of organic chemicals.
Asteroids and other celestial bodies are replete with amino acids and other complex compounds, including the constituent components of nucleic acids. As I mentioned above, many of these have properties which cause them naturally to combine into even larger molecules under certain conditions, which obtained both on the ancient earth and indeed in asteroids, which have more water than was supposed until very recently.
The origin of life is simply chemistry and physics. No mysterious supernatural forces need apply.
The mere existence of such extraordinary molecules that can self-assemble and replicate their structure is, in my view, a miracle.
B, another fallacy of ID. Hence the alternative clay hypothesis.
R – I’m not an ID’er. I’m a don’t-carer. I don’t see it impacting my life one iota whether I believe my ancestors emerged from primordial slime, or were instantly created by a god who likes to play coy. I don’t see it impacting anything, really, except insomuch as it motivates people to behave in one manner or another. Belief in the unknown is not necessary for science. Science is about discovering the unknown, not belieiving in any particular version of it.
But, philosophically, there is no physical law that says such molecules must exist. Or, even more to the point, there is no universal imperative that says there must be physical laws. Indeed, there is no reason for the universe. Period. Full stop.
There is always a point beyond, and it’s turtles all the way down from there. You seem to have latched onto a particular hypothesis. Well, good luck with that. Maybe, evidence will accrue in favor of it in time. But, then you will always have the question of why? Science is good, at least when properly conducted, at answering questions of how? It’s not so good at why?
Now prove it.
Mark,
Is your comment addressed to me?
“Proof” is more the province of math than science. That complex organic chemical compounds can and do self-assemble and carry out simple metabolic functions (RNA catalyzed peptide formation) and replication is no longer just a confirmed hypothesis but an observation. That larger protein synthesis occurs spontaneously has also been observed.
These facts support the hypothesis that chemistry and physics are all that are needed for life to arise, thus no supernatural force is required. Origin of life research predicts that this is the case. Although it might be hard to test this prediction, it is theoretically falsifiable, hence scientific.
“These facts support the hypothesis that chemistry and physics are all that are needed for life to arise, thus no supernatural force is required.”
There are no supernatural forces. Every force that affects nature is, ipso facto, natural. So, that’s just a throwaway. Do you mean no god or gods are required? How do you know? What, exactly, is a god?
How did the chemistry and physics come to be? Why is matter arranged in just this way? You’ve told me how it works, but you’ve given me no why.
Hypothesis is not proof.
You have a theory that that life can arise without supernatural intervention. You haven’t proven your theory, therefor your attempt to use your theory as proof against supernatural intervention is inherently invalid.
‘when scientists try to calculate how many chemical reactions it would take in order to build the first self reproducing life form, there are not enough molecules or time to have passed for life to exist the Universe at this point in time in the history of the universe.’
False. Short answer: simultaneous trials.
Long answer:
http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB010.html
The calculation of odds assumes that the protein molecule formed by chance. However, biochemistry is not chance, making the calculated odds meaningless. Biochemistry produces complex products, and the products themselves interact in complex ways. For example, complex organic molecules are observed to form in the conditions that exist in space, and it is possible that they played a role in the formation of the first life (Spotts 2001).
The calculation of odds assumes that the protein molecule must take one certain form. However, there are innumerable possible proteins that promote biological activity. Any calculation of odds must take into account all possible molecules (not just proteins) that might function to promote life.
The calculation of odds assumes the creation of life in its present form. The first life would have been very much simpler.
The calculation of odds ignores the fact that innumerable trials would have been occurring simultaneously.
I think such considerations miss the forest for the trees. See above.
I prefer science to magic.
I prefer to withhold my judgment until I get solid evidence, rather than accepting speculation and narratives that are truncated at some arbitrary endpoint as “truth”. The point at which you stop asking questions is the point at which science dies.
But biochemistry presumes that life already exists.
How does one get from inorganic chemistry to life ??
G
Well, George, apparently these chemical elements just, you know, get together and, under common circumstances, combine in such and such manner, and start replicating their structure spontaneously, and before you know it, you’ve got multi-cellular life forms and the Kardashians. Yeah, there’s a little bit of the underpants gnomes’ business plan aura about it
1) get the right chemicals together
2) ???
3) Kim and Kanye
but, this is science, and you should never question science, you knuckle-dragging simpleton.
To get intelligent life we not only need a process for life to begin and evolve we also need ‘consciousness’.
As I’m aware there is little if any understanding or theories as to how this came about. I read a book by an atheist philosopher ‘Thomas Nagel – Mind over Cosmos’ which argues that evolutionary theory does not work to explain the beginning and development of consciousness.
http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755
Taking this factor into account when we talk about how intelligent life exists I wonder if we have any clue as to what we are or where we came from.
Even with very conservative numbers, such as only a billion earth like planets in our galaxy, if 1% developed life and 1% of that 1% developed intelligence, there should be 1000 intelligent civilisations ‘nearby’, many of which must much older and therefore more advanced than humankind. So, yeah, where are they? I’m a fan of the Great Filter theory – and that the filter is behind us, it is either impossibly rare for life to begin anywhere, and/or the jump from prokaryote to eurokaryote cells is incredibly unlikely (it took two billion years here…). Eventually, I think it is all mute; if there is intelligent life out there, odds are it will be so far away from us that we will never encounter them.
If life arose 3.8 to 3.5 Ga, then it was “only” about a billion years before eukaryotes evolved. The oldest eukaryotic fossils date from about 2.1 Ga, but biochemical indicators from 2.7 Ga (steranes in Australian shale).
I remember back in the dot-com boom times, it was common to see business plans from inexperienced yet earnest recent grads saying something along the lines of, “if we can sell our software to 0.01% of the Chinese market, we’ll make gazillions.” Selling to 0.01% of the Chinese market at a profit, it turns out, is not easy. I think the B-schools teach it as the “Chinese Fallacy”, or some such.
Colin May 1, 2016 at 4:51 pm
Even with very conservative numbers, such as only a hundred million earth like planets in our galaxy, if 0.1% developed life and 0.1% of that 0.1% developed intelligence, there should be 1 intelligent civilisations ‘nearby’ … and if we count ourselves as “intelligent”, which is debatable, there would be zero intelligent civilizations “nearby”.
That is the problem with the Drake Equation—we DON’T know whether our numbers are too conservative, too optimistic, or just right … which means that we’re just waving our hands.
w.
Based upon big bang acoustics many, if not most, cosmologists believe that the universe is infinite in space and time. Of course this would mean there was no big bang in the classical sense but perhaps some ” local” event giving us the microwave fog we see. In any event, in an infinite universe, as I said above, everything will happen from a probability standpoint. How many times it will happen depends upon if it is a closed, open or flat universe. We have as much chance of knowing the shape of our universe as knwoing all of the unkown variables in the equation being discussed here, possibly more chance. It may be a silly concept but interesting to think about. In the grand scheme of things, of which we really know very little, all of this starting spontaneously, from nothing, is more difficult to believe than many religious concepts, for which there are at least ancient writings of individuals attesting to their happenings.
Well Roy Spencer’s post says it all. If one of the Algebraic Origami factors is zero, it matters not what any of the others are; no matter how large.
G
I think many requirements for life elsewhere in the universe is a given: planets in the Goldielocks Zone, stable suns, availability of water, carbon, and oxygen, etc. It should be no surprise to see some forms of life elsewhere in the universe. But intelligent life?
I don’t see this as a ‘first step’ problem, i.e., the creation of life, but as last step problem, the evolution (or creation) of intelligence.
First, we need some suitable definition of ‘intelligence’, and at this point I really don’t have one. I’m at the ‘I know it when I see it’ stage, but the definition must include the ability to use external forms of energy to produce work, and the ability to generate and manipulate that energy.
Earth has entertained life for billions of years. Billions (my guess) of different organisms have evolved and flourished, at least for a while, over that time. Some species existed for millions of years. Some species still in existence have survived millions of years. Why has only one small branch of mammals evolved sufficient intelligence to even use fire? No other evolutionary path comes close to this level of intelligence. Not even the Chimps nor Orangutans, despite the evidence that they share 99+% of our DNA. To me, there is a huge gulf between Man and all other lifeforms that is difficult to explain.
Once you filter every star system down that those which can support life, how many of them will be teeming with life, but none that is intelligent?
Sometimes I think Kurt Vonnegut may have had it correct in his novel, “Galopagos”; Nature intended for Man to be an animal content to lie in the sun, eat, sleep, fart, and have sex, but mistakenly made his brain too large.
Perhaps a once in the universe mistake, and not a predictable end result of evolution..
Evolution has no end result.
Until temperatures start trending up again, global warming has ended. Until something higher on the evolutionary scale than intelligence is found, then that is the end of result of evolution. Man can evolve wings and a third eye, but he will not have evolved into a higher life form.
Can you even posit what would be higher than intelligence?
Jtom,
To imagine that evolution has an end is fundamentally to misunderstand it. As long as organisms reproduce, evolution will operate.
Intelligence has so far been adaptive for humans and some other species. The costs of a larger brain and more complex behaviors have been worth it. But in an evolutionary sense, intelligence isn’t “higher” than other “strategies”, such as high reproductive rate, larger body size or any number of other trends in other lineages.
In terms of biomass among animals (multicellular, motile, heterotrophic eukaryotic organisms), the Antarctic krill is more successful than H. sapiens.
Two possible tests. The Turing algorithm, which implicitly requires intelligence have evolved first. Or, my hypothsis in the first comment set. Another option?
Why has only one small branch of mammals evolved sufficient intelligence to even use fire?
Because whoever gets there first, wins. Rival species are obliterated. From a geological timeline perspective, we went from control of fire to colonizing the entire planet nearly instantaneously.
“From a geological timeline perspective, we went from control of fire to colonizing the entire planet nearly instantaneously.”
You forgot to say “It is imagined …”, and no matter how many times you (Evolutionists) forget, I won’t ; )
John,
By “evolutionist”, do you mean “scientist”?
Under oath in the Dover case, the hatcher of the ID scam, Behe, was forced to admit that evolution occurs. His testimony was so devastating for his side, the creationist complainers, that the judge cited Behe’s testimony extensively as the basis for his ruling that intelligent design is not scientific. The trial also hilariously showed that so-called ID is nothing but creationism rebottled to try to get around prior rulings against teaching a religious doctrine as science in public schools.
Bye Doom,
“By “evolutionist”, do you mean “scientist”?”
I capitalized the word intentionally, because variation within a given sort of creature is obvious and was never disputed by anyone, that I am aware of. No “scientist” was needed to “discover” it.
John,
The fact that variation within species can and does change from one generation to the next and that these heritable changes can and do produce new species, genera and higher categories of living things was not recognized by science until the middle of the 19th century. Before that, it was clear that what was then called “development”, ie change in the species living at any one time in the past, had occurred, but there was not yet a good scientific explanation for this observed fact. The discovery of natural selection and other evolutionary processes provided the scientific explanation. Before that, the prevailing paradigm was not “transmutation” of species, what would now be called evolution, but “special creation”, ie that new species were continuously being created by some outside force beyond the ken of science.
ID’ers have always admitted that evolution exists, they just believe that evolution was guided by the hand of God.
Your eagerness to lie about what others believe says nothing good about you.
What rival species did we obliterate, with the possible exception of closely related mammals on our same branch, that had the potential to ever use fire?
Bye Doom,
You can imagine all the pretend facts you like, but no one could even possibly have observed new “genera and higher categories of living things” evolving into existence . . your talking utter nonsense, to me . . just ignoring that these are IMAGINED occurrences, not observed ones.
And, you have apparently been trained to see “expert” imaginings as if observations . .. which naturally (it seems to me) leads us to the present Siants of ‘climate change”. Whole generations of kids trained to believe that if you stare at bones long enough (with a degree in bone staring ; ) you can see them Evolving . . NOT SCIENCE, I warn.
John,
You couldn’t be more wrong. Your biological ignorance is total, as was evident by your linking to a pack of creationist lies here. The least effort spent in Internet research would have educated you. New genera have indeed been created in the lab, by a variety of evolutionary processes.
The first one that I know of happened decades ago, via the hybridization of two clearly distinct genera. Nowadays it’s quite common to create new genera in the lab.
It appears that you imagine that evolution requires many generations to occur. Nothing could be farther from the truth. From 30 to 70% of new plant species, for instance, arise in a single generation, thanks to polyploidy. Animals also show whole or partial genome duplication, leading to new species incapable of interbreeding with parental species. There have been at least two whole genome duplications in the human line, producing a lot of genetic material on which evolution has worked.
But new species also arise from single point mutations, both in nature and the lab. Most such instances occur in microbes, but again also in the history of human evolution, as shown in our genome and even gross chromosomal anatomy.
It’s highly presumptuous of you to comment on a topic about which you know nothing.
PS, I believed in Evolution since I was a little boy, because I was facinated by dinosaurs. trilobites, etc. I could have done a better job of defending Evolution than you when I was twelve, I believe.
I brief, the problem Mr. Darwin called the greatest one for his Evolution hypothesis was the lack of “transition” fossils then uncovered. That is to say, that essentially all known examples of living things in the fossil record, enter and exit it (if extinct) with virtually identical (mundane special variation) remains . . No abundance of gradually changing characteristics, as the hypothysis suggest must have existed.
This lack continues to the present, and was the reason the “punctuated equilibrium” model became all the rage back when I was in collage . . The problemj is, of course, that if all the changing happens “off stage”, in short localized bursts, there are VASTLY fewer critters involved in the process . . meaning vastly fewer rolls of the dice so to speak, in order for mutation to operate as an effective agent of change.
That problem remains, and you can believe it doesn’t, but you need to show us the evidence, to be taken seriously around here.
John,
That’s quite amusing, since you have produced zero evidence. I doubt very much that as a child you could state the fact of evolution as well as an adult biologist today. Talk about presumption and delusions of competence!
All the evidence on earth supports the fact of evolution. I doubt you have ever read Darwin or any other book on biology, or you wouldn’t have so badly misquoted him. Not that evolution today needs Darwin. What was an insight in his day is now a trivial fact observed everywhere all the time.
Of course I can list transitional fossils. More are found every year. The usual creationist gambit is to say, OK, now you have two gaps when before there was only one! Now we can see the transitions in the genome and embryology as well as written in stone.
All organisms are transitional or going extinct. Those are the only two options. Sometimes organisms persist superficially unchanged for millions or tens of millions of years, if they are well adapted to an unchanging environment, but eventually all go extinct or evolve into something else.
But it appears you want instances. One of the most amusing is the evolution of the mammalian jaw. Creationists used to claim that it was impossible for our jaw to have evolved because it meant that at some point proto-mammals must have had two jaws. Then fossil synapsids were discovered around the world with exactly that. Just as scientists predicted would be the case, the bones at the back of the jaw in all other vertebrates migrated into the skull to become the bones of the middle ear, while the mammalian jawbone, the dentary, became the only lower jaw bone. Transitional mammals were already using their back jaw bones to augment hearing while still outside the skull, at the same time the dentary-skull joint was functioning.
Fossils show how lobe-finned fish evolved into tetrapods, the ancestors of land vertebrates. Scientists predicted that lobe-finned fish, specifically lungfish, would be the closest ancestors to tetrapods among fish, and sure enough, when the lungfish genome (enormous BTW) was sequenced, that was the result.
But transitions such as these but one tiny bit of evidence for the fact of evolution. Chromosomes and genes are dispositive.
You have everything to learn, Grasshopper, but apparently don’t want to do so.
“That’s quite amusing, since you have produced zero evidence”
Evidence for non occurrences? Not logical, sir.
“Fossils show how lobe-finned fish evolved into tetrapods, the ancestors of land vertebrates. Scientists predicted that lobe-finned fish, specifically lungfish, would be the closest ancestors to tetrapods among fish, and sure enough, when the lungfish genome (enormous BTW) was sequenced, that was the result.”
Why would one expect similar creatures to have anything but similar genetic coding, regardless of how they came into existence? I predict the same thing will be evident in all sorts of creatures . . So what? It’s just what makes sense . .
John,
It’s not just that they are similar, but that they get progressively more similar the closer you get to humans.
We are closest genetically to chimps and bonobos, then to gorillas, then orangs, then gibbons and other “lesser” apes, then New World Monkeys, then Old World Monkeys, then tarsiers, then “prosimians” (lemurs and lorises), then other mammals, then reptiles and birds (which are phylogenetically “reptiles”), then amphibians, then lobe-finned fish, then ray-finned fish, then cartilaginous fish, then jawless fish, etc.
Does it make sense that an intelligent designer would reuse the same broken parts, as is the case for the lack of ability to make vitamin C in tarsiers, monkeys, humans and other apes? The same gene is broken in different ways in guinea pigs, some bats and birds. Now there may be some adaptive function to not being able to make vitamin C, but otherwise it is a defect, leading to risk of scurvy when the acid isn’t available in a diet.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3145266/
“All organisms are transitional or going extinct.”
Like polar bears for instance, eh? ; )
John,
All kidding aside, polar bears are in fact evolving quite rapidly. Their dentition for instance is notably different from just 20,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Maximum. They are a young species, since the present Arctic environment is still so new, geologically speaking.
They can still hybridize with brown bears.
“It’s not just that they are similar, but that they get progressively more similar the closer you get to humans.”
Of course . . again, what in the world would one expect? The code determines the creature (to a great extent) so similar creatures ought to have similar code. With many millions of creatures, there HAS to be many similar creatures (with generally proportionate similarities in formative coding, most logical).
You’ve been conned, I tell you, by con artists )and/or dupes) who present the logical as if extraordinary. Whether or not it is ultimately true that significant Evolution occurred, none of what your telling us is evidence for Evolution, any more than for a Created life array so vast.
John,
You have been lied to by professional liars.
Again, it’s not that creatures are similar, but that their genomes confirm their descent as predicted by the fact of evolution. There have been some surprises in genomics, but none of them falsify evolution.
Consider the inheritance of SNPs. Consider the evolution of the human brain, an instance of a single mutation followed by gradual increase. Consider human chromosome #2. It resulted from the fusion of two smaller, standard ape chromosomes. This event is associated with upright walking.
The instance of evolution apparent in the genomic record reflects that in fossils, embryology, biogeography and every other line of evidence.
Would you consider creating a nylon-eating bacterium from a sugar-eating microbe with a single mutation from a cosmic ray or the equivalent in the lab to be an instance of evolution, or not? This has occurred repeatedly since the invention of nylon and been reproduced in labs. Before the advent of nylon, this mutation was lethal. Now it’s beneficial, due to a new food source in the environment of the formerly sugar-eating microbes.
You apparently have no interest in educating yourself, preferring to luxuriate in ignorance. All the evidence in the world support the fact of evolution, while no evidence exists opposing it.
Bye Doom,
“All kidding aside, polar bears are in fact evolving quite rapidly.”
That is where our “definitions” problem is coming into play, as I see the matter. Slight changes brought on by normal sexual reproduction are NOT Evolution. I believe you know that . . I sure hope you do, anyway. And neither are random mutations that cause no discernible enhancement of a creature’s ability to survive (in the real natural world).
NEW, functional genetic coding, coming into existence (naturally), would be evidence in favor of the Evolution hypothesis . . that is going to be very hard to detect even if it does occur.
But have they figured out how to get their amps to go up to 11?
But using our method we can tell exactly how low that probability would have to be for us to be the ONLY civilization the Universe has produced.
Seriously? EXACTLY? SERIOUSLY??!
Stopped reading right there.
These guys are no different than the climate fr**dtsers. They don’t give a d*mn about actual science. Just producing enough paper (publish or perish) that they can keep their jobs and scarf up a few more grants to study…nothing.
What utter nonsense. An equation of unknowns is supposed to be taken seriously?
Precisely. It’s just too daft to justify rational criticism.
Where did these people miss the basic instruction – that an equation is useful if it expresses an unknown in terms of knowns, or at least factors which may potentially be revealed via further enquiry.
What a complete joke. Even just one of the terms (the fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears) is unknown and unknowable.
How shall we establish a value for that? All we need is millions of “suitable” planets made afresh and then we can carry out an experiment over billions of years to see how often life springs out of the primordial soup. Assuming that we can maintain strict hygiene in our planet containing laboratory!!
And that is just one of the unknowns.
I’m pretty sure that the point of equations is supposed to be expressing an unknown in terms of knowns so that we can figure out a value for the unknown.
I always thought that this pretend “equation” was just a kind of nerdy joke for space and SETI fans.
But people keep pretending to take it seriously.
Please tell me that I am dreaming.
Transit – Radial Velocity discrepancies are a possible new way to spot alien civilisations.
See trvdiscrepancies.com
The biggest proof of their validity would be trvdiscrepancies neighbouring other trvdiscrepancies.
Jim G1 May 1, 2016 at 2:08 pm wrote: “TA, oh, the prime directive. But why triangular?”
Well, I was thinking about the giant, silent, triangular UFO that was seen by thousands of people over Arizona some years back. This thing was described as being the size of several football fields, as gliding silently, and slowly over the heads of the observers, in plain view, and as being triangular in shape.
That sounds pretty extraordinary, and it doesn’t sound like Earth-tech. Humans don’t have a vehicle that can do that, AFAIK. The spectators were average, ordinary people, including numerous police and other authorities. If it was a conspiracy or a mass delusion, it included hundreds of people in several states. Probably the best UFO sighting I have heard about.
And there have been numerous other sightings of a triangular-shaped UFO, although the variety of UFO shapes through history is a little mind-boggling. It seems like the triangular shape is more often reported today, for some reason. Perhaps each different UFO design is a vehicle from a different planet! 🙂
I noticed a flaw in the discussion software: Jim G1 replied to a post of mine, but there was no reply button underneath his reply to me, so I had to put my response back to him here at the bottom of the page. It would sure be more convenient to have the posts listed in time/date order, instead of nesting. You really need to quote the text you are replying to anyway, to make yourself perfectly clear. But I can live with any format, if I have too.
This triangular “UFO” was also shown to be nothing more than three flares dropped from military aircraft on maneuvers.
Shown, MarkW? Don’t you mean alleged? . .
No, shown. As in logs of military planes dropping flares over the city were produced.
t is simply not true that some plane dropping flares “shows” no one saw anything else in the sky that night.
(Or in geek speak ; ) Correlation is not causation.
TA,
“Well, I was thinking about the giant, silent, triangular UFO that was seen by thousands of people over Arizona some years back. This thing was described as being the size of several football fields, as gliding silently, and slowly over the heads of the observers, in plain view, and as being triangular in shape.”
About seventeen years ago, I was returning home at about 1:00 AM, and paused on my porch to look up at the sky, sort of unwinding a bit after much work . . At first I thought there were just common low clouds above, but as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could see there was something odd about the “clouds”. They were similarly shaped and oriented, long rounded rectangular forms, spaced apart in an unusually regular way.
As I focused on one area nearly directly overhead, and thought I could see a long vague “connection” between two of these oddly shaped clouds, it became clear that it was “too regular”, and I thought I could see faint coloration . . as in my brain was trying to process what I was seeing as clouds, but was “failing” to do so. I was looking at very precise shapes, of differing hues, and all at once my mind was in a state of amazement, and then panic, as I saw the whole sky above me (that I could see) was covered in these shapes, with connecting “tubes” between them. I was literally knocked backward, by the realization, and immediate flood of implications/ramifications of what I was observing.
After a moment or two in that stunned/shocked state, some portion of my mind began to “doubt” that all was as it seemed . . something was “wrong” with the very wrong picture. Such a “craft” was utterly illogical. No one on earth would make such a thing, and no one from elsewhere would travel here in such a thing . . And then I could see that it was a projection, and remembered reading about such a “capability” that was rumored to have been tested in the (First and only, then) “Gulf War”.
I studied it for about ten minutes, concluding it was probably some sort of mapping system component, being projected from a satellite . . and thought I’d probably here something about it eventually, but never did.
The nearest of these planets is 12 light years away more than 10^9 times the distance to the moon and back. The laser used to measure the distance to the moon has one in 10^17 photons come back after the round journey. Roughly, a photon has a 1 in 10^33 chance of being detected if a laser hits its mark on the nearest inhabitable planet(Wikipedia has about the laser aimed at the moon ” scientists liken the task of aiming the beam to using a rifle to hit a moving dime 3 kilometers away”).
Assuming at least 1 photon per second needs to hit the detector for effective communication and the low end of the microwave spectrum is used (300MHz) you need more than a 1 MW maser to communicate so a medium sized bird killer is needed just to power one. In practice, enough to kill every last eagle on the planet is needed for communication with any intelligent lifeform on the closest possible planet. That’s assuming that they don’t think that we are idiots and pretend that nobody’s home.
I am not yet convinced that intelligence is an overwhelming evolutionary advantage.
It’s enabled man to go from a minor species running away from predators in one small corner of the African savannah to an animal that dominates just about ever ecological niche on the planet in just a few thousand years.
“Domination” is illusory and temporary.
Nice evasion.
Now if you care to actually present an actual, logical argument, I will refute it for you.
If all you want to do is play childish semantic games, then you aren’t worth my time.
I have yet to see evidence there is advanced intelligent life on this planet.
Just because we say we are, doesn’t make it so.
mod, some of the threads since 2, 3 weeks appear to me as
The phrase “Potemkin village” (also “Potyomkin village”, derived from the Russian: Потёмкинские деревни, Potyomkinskiye derevni) was originally used to describe a fake portable village, built only to impress.
Potemkin village – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki › Pote…
of course I can think of a legitim reason Hans
“And it shows that unless the odds of advanced life evolving on a habitable planet are astonishingly low, then human kind is not the universe’s first technological, or advanced, civilization.”
This is precisely the type of qualification that makes the entire paper pointless. Absent the ability to quantify the odds of life developing on a habitable planet there is absolutely no significance in discerning the number of habitable planets (even setting aside how anyone could know the boundaries of what is “habitable” given that we have a sample of precisely, only, ONE planet that we know TO BE habitable).
Does anyone really think, given that: (1) the Earth is the only planet that we know to sustain “life as we know it;” (2) we have never been to, or even delivered a probe to, a planet outside our solar system; (3) our calculations of how many planets exist in the universe is entirely theoretical; and (4) we have no way of testing whether scientists’ assumptions about the boundaries of “habitable zones” around other stars are correct – that we can improve our practical understanding of whether life does now exist, or ever has existed elsewhere in the universe, by manipulating an equation?
This is perhaps the poster-child for data-less science run amok. I don’t know which is more dumbfounding – the stupidly pointless exercise of doing this research, or the gullibility of the journalist who did the write-up on the paper.
P.S. – Isn’t an “astrobiology program” almost an oxymoron?
We have found planets around most of the stars we have examined so far.
However, in everyone of those cases, the arrangement of the planets found has made a habitable planet impossible.
All we have proven so far is that while planets are common, habitable ones are not.
the Aliens are here and running the EU!
Probability is the constant ratio of two frequencies. If the numerator is a constant (c) and the denominator (N) may vary between one and infinity, high school algebra suffices for the conclusion that c/N is zero for N infinite (c/N is not a constant). For that reason it is not a theorem of modal logic that the possibility of an event implies that its probability exceeds zero. The Drake equation is based on a fake-theorem violating basic mathematics. Just apply it, and the fact that the Goldberg Variations are possible, will produce the amazing conclusion that as many versions of this piece of music exist in deep space as allowed by the choice of N.