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Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everything

Anomalism

Anomalism

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...single-biological-mistake-changed-everything/

If life is effectively an endless series of photocopies, as DNA is transcribed and passed on from one being to the next, then evolution is the high-stakes game of waiting for the copier to get it wrong. Too wrong, and you’ll live burdened by a maladaptive mutation or genetic disorder. Worse, you might never live at all. But if the flaw is wrong in exactly the right way, the incredible can happen: disease resistance, sharper eyesight, swifter feet, big brains, better beaks for Darwin’s finches. In a paper published in the open-access journal eLife this week, researchers say they have pinpointed what may well be one of evolution’s greatest copy mess-ups yet: the mutation that allowed our ancient protozoa predecessors to evolve into complex, multi-cellular organisms. Thanks to this mutation — which was not solely responsible for the leap out of single-cellular life, but without which you, your dog and every creature large enough to be seen without a microscope might not be around — cells were able to communicate with one another and work together.

Incredibly, in the world of evolutionary biology, all it took was one tiny tweak, one gene, and complex life as we know it was born. “It was a shock,” co-author Ken Prehoda, a biochemist at the University of Oregon, told The Washington Post. “If you asked anyone on our team if they thought one mutation was going to be responsible for this, they would have said it doesn’t seem possible.” The discovery was made thanks to choanoflagellates — tiny balloon-shaped creatures that are our closest living unicellular cousins — and a cool bit of evolutionary time travel known as ancestral protein reconstruction, which allows scientists to resurrect the genomes of long-dead creatures based on their modern descendants’ DNA.
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Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Anomalism said:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...single-biological-mistake-changed-everything/
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That a certain gene facilitates intercellular cooperation in no indicates that it was created at some specific point in time. That is, as your source admits, just the researchers' imaginations.

Also, I'd note that bacteria (generally considered to be lower forms of life than protozoa), also are known to cooperate.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Paleocon said:
That a certain gene facilitates intercellular cooperation in no indicates that it was created at some specific point in time. That is, as your source admits, just the researchers' imaginations.

Also, I'd note that bacteria (generally considered to be lower forms of life than protozoa), also are known to cooperate.
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Really? You think they just invented that number without anything to support it?
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Deuce said:
Really? You think they just invented that number without anything to support it?
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I would guess they believe, for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, that multicellular life began to exist about that long ago, and from that extrapolated that this gene therefore began to exist at that time.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Paleocon said:
I would guess they believe, for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, that multicellular life began to exist about that long ago, and from that extrapolated that this gene therefore began to exist at that time.
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And when do you think multicellular life began?
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Deuce said:
And when do you think multicellular life began?
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I don't purport to know such things.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Paleocon said:
I don't purport to know such things.
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And how familiar are you with the evidence these scientists are working from?
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Deuce said:
And how familiar are you with the evidence these scientists are working from?
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I'm familiar with the basics. They assume that if a rock and a fossil are found together, they must both be the same age (unless they contradict established chronology in which case the fossil must have been displaced). I don't share that assumption.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Paleocon said:
I'm familiar with the basics. They assume that if a rock and a fossil are found together, they must both be the same age (unless they contradict established chronology in which case the fossil must have been displaced). I don't share that assumption.
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You've been misinformed by religious zealots. If you want to understand even "the basics" of scientists, don't get it from people who have a vested interest in fighting science.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Deuce said:
You've been misinformed by religious zealots. If you want to understand even "the basics" of scientists, don't get it from people who have a vested interest in fighting science.
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This thread isn't about your hatred of religion.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Paleocon said:
This thread isn't about your hatred of religion.
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No it's about how your religious indoctrination causes you to not think logically and ignore science.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

EnigmaO01 said:
No it's about how your religious indoctrination causes you to not think logically and ignore science.
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As I said, religion and your hatred thereof isn't the topic, and I'm not going to discuss it.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Paleocon said:
This thread isn't about your hatred of religion.
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You don't even know the basics of the science. You claim to know, but you then demonstrated ignorance by repeating the language of religious zealots who try to undermine science.

They didn't "find a rock and a fossil and assume they came from the same era." That's false. You are therefore misinformed and clearly have no interest in rectifying that.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Deuce said:
You don't even know the basics of the science. You claim to know, but you then demonstrated ignorance by repeating the language of religious zealots who try to undermine science.

They didn't "find a rock and a fossil and assume they came from the same era." That's false. You are therefore misinformed and clearly have no interest in rectifying that.
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Why is that false? You seem to be repeating the language of zealots who try to undermine religion. Are you claiming that paleontologists do not ordinarily take the fact a fossil was discovered in sedimentary rock known to have been formed in a certain geologic period as solid evidence the organism that fossil represents lived during that same period? I thought that was basic science, but maybe you can point out where I am misinformed.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

matchlight said:
Why is that false? You seem to be repeating the language of zealots who try to undermine religion. Are you claiming that paleontologists do not ordinarily take the fact a fossil was discovered in sedimentary rock known to have been formed in a certain geologic period as solid evidence the organism that fossil represents lived during that same period? I thought that was basic science, but maybe you can point out where I am misinformed.
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They don't assume, they test.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Deuce said:
You don't even know the basics of the science. You claim to know, but you then demonstrated ignorance by repeating the language of religious zealots who try to undermine science.

They didn't "find a rock and a fossil and assume they came from the same era." That's false. You are therefore misinformed and clearly have no interest in rectifying that.
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I always love it when clueless people on the internet try to tell me that I don't understand science.

If there is some other means of dating fossils to be millions of years old, please, do explain it.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Deuce said:
They don't assume, they test.
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What test can establish that a fossil is millions of years old?
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Paleocon said:
What test can establish that a fossil is millions of years old?
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Radioisotope dating.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Deuce said:
Radioisotope dating.
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Radioisotope dating can't be done on fossils, it's done on rocks, and it's assumed that fossils found in rocks are the same age (unless they're not, of course).
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Paleocon said:
Radioisotope dating can't be done on fossils, it's done on rocks, and it's assumed that fossils found in rocks are the same age (unless they're not, of course).
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Yes, and when this happens a few thousand times with the same results we can prove the assumption.

Unless4 your suggestion is that vast quantities of fossils somehow get embedded in between ancient rock layers millions of years after the layers formed.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Deuce said:
Yes, and when this happens a few thousand times with the same results we can prove the assumption.

Unless4 your suggestion is that vast quantities of fossils somehow get embedded in between ancient rock layers millions of years after the layers formed.
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Given that there are cases where fossil dates by radioisotope dating of the rocks they're in yields results that are rejected, the idea that many fossils may have been posthumously displaced isn't exactly novel. Also, the case of vertical fossils demonstrates the problem with assuming fossils to be the same age as their rock layer.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Deuce said:
Really? You think they just invented that number without anything to support it?
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I figure it is a guess that will be changed at a later date.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Paleocon said:
This thread isn't about your hatred of religion.
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For him it is... This thread is nothing more than A's attempt to find a way to disprove that God exists. If he can show that life just suddenly came into existence then perfectly evolved using random changes in DNA, then he can feel justified in denying God.
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

Life may have started as a virus.....and nobody knows where viruses come from but they're finding that they predate all multicellular organisms and might help explain the mutations discussed in the OP.

Could Giant Viruses Be the Origin of Life on Earth?
 
Re: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everyth

faithful_servant said:
This thread is nothing more than A's attempt to find a way to disprove that God exists.
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:confused:
 
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