Cyanobacteria Fossils Disproven !

[CraigS]

Tea-leaf gazing I hear you say, eh ? :)

Source: Research overturns oldest evidence of life on Earth (http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-overturns-oldest-evidence-life-earth.html)



This is interesting in the light of the recent declaration by Richard Hoover (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=72673), and his conclusions about finding 'life' from what he says are fossilised cyanobacteria filaments.

In spite of the too-ing and fro-ing, at least its good input for the forthcoming hype when they find something unusual on Mars .. (a foregone conclusion, it seems).

A parting quote …


Cheers

[renormalised]

Just means they need to do more sampling and looking for the old bugs.

However, what the researchers here need to be mindful of is they don't know how much the other minerals (in this case hematite) may have replaced the carbon in any bacteria that may have been fossilised. They may actually have bugs that have been completely replaced by other minerals during the fossilisation process. I've seen plenty of fossils in just such a state...it wouldn't matter what you did to analyse them, you'd find no organic material (or its remnants) left.

[CraigS]

Pattern recognition is important too, eh ?

Got to be careful with that though .. patterns can be deceiving. :question:

I find it amazing that we have such difficulty in recognising life forms … either past ones or present !

Cheers

[renormalised]

Yes, but you have to be careful, as you have said.

Sometime scientist can over analyse and be too cautious.

[CraigS]

This is an interesting topic (and off-topic, also .. its Ok .. I started the thread)…

The scientific approach calls for breaking a problem down into its constituent components, to look for the simplest building blocks for which we understand the behaviours of. When one does this, one tends to lose track of the big picture.

Recently, this earthquake prediction business that I'm on about, has reminded me of the Complexity/Chaos approach to complex systems which normally appear meanlinglessness in their constituent forms.

Perhaps we need more of these kinds of approaches to complex problems?

Cheers

[mswhin63]

think we need to spend more money on getting onto an asteroid take some samples there.

[CraigS]

What do we do with the samples, though ?
:)

Cheers

[Astro78]

Interesting. The oldest life known is actually Stomatolites though, structures of cyanobacteria as opposed to sediment as with the Apex Chert. Apex chert has biomarkers for life only. Big difference. We have biomarkers on martian meteorites such as in ALH84001 but that doesn't prove life (to most).

Anyway I have the actual paper if anyone is interested (it's a 1.1meg PDF...Mods?) Note they still say it's consistent with life....Isotope ratios of C13 still indicate life.