13 March 2013

earlier - about Polonnaruwa - later

Some comments include imaginative proposals to rebut the basic conclusion from Jamie Wallis et al. For example: even if the stones are meteorites, and even if they contain biological fossils that are too old to be recent earthly contaminants, still, maybe, somehow old earthly fossils got incorporated into the new meteorite! For another example: maybe the stones recovered were not the ones seen when the meteorite fell. Of course, this objection also could be made for any other witnessed meteorite, such as the one that fell spectacularly, 15 February, over Chelyabinsk, Russia. It isn't, but the point is not crucial anyway. The important question is this: are the actual biological fossils themselves unearthly? Preliminary indications say yes.

6 March 2013

earlier - about Polonnaruwa - later

"...Lack of detectable nitrogen and an anomalous C/O ratio (similar to bitumen)" show that these fossils can hardly be recent contaminants. The case for panspermia is looking stronger than ever.

As I have said, doubts about the reductionist account of life go against the dominant scientific consensus, but that consensus faces problems of probability that I believe are not taken seriously enough, both with respect to the evolution of life forms through accidental mutation and natural selection and with respect to the formation from dead matter of physical systems capable of such evolution. The more we learn about the intricacy of the genetic code and its control of the chemical processes of life, the harder those problems seem.

For giving comfort to "the enemy" Nagel is catching hell from many orthodox scientists. Meanwhile, in cosmic ancestry, the prior existence of genetic programs for all of life would make the story of evolution far less unlikely than the strictly darwinian account — and it would have an appearance of teleolgy. We wonder if this concept would interest Nagel. With sufficient genetic programs, could even consciousness be an emergent property of advanced life? If so, scientific materialism might be adequate after all.

5 February 2013

earlier - about Polonnaruwa - later

In cosmic ancestry, life from space would be closely related to life on Earth and would necessarily sometimes arrive intact — alive.

Yet many orphan genes have important functions; ...a few even seem have played a part in the evolution of the human brain. Important, functional genes with no history of gradual, step-wise composition are not explained by mainstream Darwinism.

Now genomic researchers are finding that close homologs of many orphan genes can be found in silent, or "junk" DNA among species including yeast, rice, mice and fruit flies. When these sequences are activated in more advanced species, they are designated de novo genes. Of course, how unexpressed sequences of hundreds or thousands of nucleotides acquired their programmatic meaning de novo is the issue we just mentioned. The genes remain unexplained by mainstream Darwinism.

Orphan genes are a basic prediction of cosmic ancestry.

22 January 2013

earlier - about Polonnaruwa - later

Meanwhile, last Thursday, 17 January, your correspondent visited The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, where (near to far) Hoover, SEM operator Greg Jerman, and I studied an especially interesting apparent fossil in the just-opened interior of one sample.

11 January 2013

about Polonnaruwa - later

Diatoms are easy to recognize because of their unique, articulated, perforated, geometric shapes. They grow in water or wet environments almost anywhere photosynthesis is possible. The cell walls are mostly rigid, brittle silica. (Larger versions of the figures here are available in the article linked below.)

The SEM images, made at the School of Earth Sciences at Cardiff University, also show round cells (not pictured) similar in size and shape to those found in the "red rain" that fell in Kerala, India, in 2001. The identity of these cells is not clear.

But the diatoms are easily identified and clearly part of the meteorite. While this evidence is new, and therefore not yet widely accepted, it seems conclusive to us — it looks like life from space. Chandra Wickramasinghe has pioneered the theory of cometary panspermia for decades. We would expect this evidence from his group to advance the theory considerably.

The subject retrotransposon is designated BovB, a long interspersed element (LINE) of about 3,200 nucleotides. LINEs are a class of Transposable Elements (TEs) known to copy and paste themselves widely within genomes, often with profound evolutionary effects. However, extracellular TEs are not viable, so they require vectors such as parasites or viruses to horizontally transfer (HT) them among species.

HT of retrotransposons is significant because conservative estimates of their prevalence indicate that they make up between a third and a half of typical vertebrate genomes. Thus, demonstration of widespread HT for retrotransposons has significant implications for our understanding of genome structure and evolution. ...The frequent horizontal movement of BovB illustrates the significant impact HT has had on animal genomes; expansion of BovB in various lineages has contributed large amounts of sequence (and presumably structural variation) to the genomes of distantly related species. It is tempting to speculate that BovB is not the only retrotransposon to have jumped between species....