Intelligent design belongs in Church not Biology class.

[color1]

3.9 or 3.7 billion years ago Earth (still forming into a planet) was bombarded by metoers/astroids that made it a moten mess. (look at the huge craters on the moon!).  The oldest rocks on earth 3.5 to 3.7 billion years old show evidence of complex life. Photosynthesis (and its exact mechanisms) is so complex that it was only fully understood until last year.

"They contain mats of photosynthesizing cyanobacteria that produce food for use by themselves and other bacteria in the mat, and they also produce oxygen through photosynthesis.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-earliest-evidence-life-billion-years.html#jCp"

That means that COMPLEX life came into existance immediately after a prolonged and massive repeated bombardment of the Earth and the Moon.  That implies a creator.  Not simple life, but incredibly complex life came into existance immediately after a prolonged life-extinguishing bombardment of Earth.

If evolution created over 500 million species over Earth's history [""Scientists have estimated that over the course of Earth's history, anywhere between 1 and 4 billion species have existed on this planet.""], then the geologic fossil record should show a trillion factorial cross-over of species. events  The geologic fossil record MAYBE shows 20 (even those claimed cross overs are suspect). 

If evolution created the 500 million species there should be evidence of a trillon factorial cross-over species events recorded in the fossil record.  It is NOT there. Why is it not there?  So the fossil record evidence implies a creator and not evolution as the mechanism for the more than 300 million species over Earth's history.  These species appear fully developed and suddenly in the geologic fossil record.

Where are the trillion factorial cross-over species attempts in the geologic fossil record (most would be failures, but should see many many successes) ?
   None of that is shown in the fossil record.

   Science has resorted to well evolution instantly created these species.  Is that what the scientific method has come to God can't instanltly create species but of course evolution can and not just once but millions of times (hypocrasy)?

[color1]

Snowguy,
  My point is: this incredibly complex DNA (COMPLEX living organisms) came into existence immediately after a major exitinction event 3.6 -3.7 billion years ago.  How does DNA - far more complex than a 500 million transitors chip, come into existence immediately after Earth suffered a prolonged meteor/asteroid bombardment 3.7 - 3.9 billion years ago?

[John Dibble]

"They contain mats of photosynthesizing cyanobacteria that produce food for use by themselves and other bacteria in the mat, and they also produce oxygen through photosynthesis.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-earliest-evidence-life-billion-years.html#jCp"

That means that COMPLEX life came into existance immediately after a prolonged and massive repeated bombardment of the Earth and the Moon.  That implies a creator.  Not simple life, but incredibly complex life came into existance immediately after a prolonged life-extinguishing bombardment of Earth.

Hold on there cowboy. Quote mining out of context is a bad thing done by intellectually dishonest people. Let's look at the full paragraph:

"Microbial mats still form today in a few places such as the Pilbara. They contain mats of photosynthesizing cyanobacteria that produce food for use by themselves and other bacteria in the mat, and they also produce oxygen through photosynthesis. Cyanobacteria are believed to have created the Earth's oxygen around 2.4 billion years ago."

You've completely changed the context of the quote by removing those two sentences. The sentence you quoted is referring to the mats that exist today, not the ones from 3.5-3.7 billion years ago. Nowhere in the article does it state when photosynthesis is suspected to have evolved, only that cyanobacteria would have been doing it by 2.4 billion years ago. All the article states is that there may have been life, with no note of the degree of complexity, at 3.5-3.7 billion years ago.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Dibble, taking quotes out of context is one of color1's specialties.  He has an excellent future ahead for him in writing political attack ads.

[color1]

I'm sure that you took the 5 seconds it took to google "cyanobacteria abd 3.5 billion"
   

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I'm sure that you took the 5 seconds it took to google "cyanobacteria abd 3.5 billion"
   

That appears to be your problem.  Judging by the quality of your posts on this forum so far, you google phrases, find some quotes to cherry-pick and post elsewhere without taking the time to read and comprehend the whole article you just googled to make certain that it says what you want it to say.

[color1]

"Cyanobacteria are aquatic and photosynthetic, that is, they live in the water, and can manufacture their own food. Because they are bacteria, they are quite small and usually unicellular, though they often grow in colonies large enough to see. They have the distinction of being the oldest known fossils, more than 3.5 billion years old, in fact! It may surprise you then to know that the cyanobacteria are still around; they are one of the largest and most important groups of bacteria on earth.
[[http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/bacteria/cyanointro.html]]


Evidence of Life 3.7B Years Ago
Danish researchers said today they had found what they think may be evidence of the oldest life on Earth — a signature left by plankton 3.7 billion years ago.
 
There is no standard fossil evidence of the plankton, but Minik Rosing and colleagues at the Geologisk Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, looked for a chemical signature in ancient rocks in west Greenland.
 
“The oldest known fossils have an age of 3,500 million years (3.5 billion years) ago and may represent photosynthetic cyanobacteria,” they wrote in a report in the journal Science. These are bacteria that, like plants, use the sun’s energy to feed themselves.
 
What Came Before Fossils?

But Rosing’s group noted that such bacteria would be fairly complex creatures, and would have had to have evolved from something else. “It can be assumed that a long chain of evolutionary steps preceded the development of these complex organisms,” they wrote.
 
The trouble is, any rocks that would have been old enough to carry fossil evidence of this most ancient of life have gone through geologic changes. They have either been ground up, sucked back under the crust and remelted, or buried and compressed — a process known as metamorphism.
 
But at least metamorphic rocks would still contain some remains of any fossils, even if the rocks, which would once have been mud, did not themselves carry the physical imprints.
 
So they looked for chemical evidence.

Specific Carbon Isotopes

All life on Earth is based on the element carbon, and living things make chemical changes to this carbon. Rosing’s team looked at two particular variants, or isotopes, known as carbon-12 and carbon-13.
 
Modern plankton has a lot of carbon-12 and not much carbon-13.

Rosing’s group examined microscopic globules of graphite — which is pure carbon — from some metamorphic rocks known to be 3.7 billion years old and known to have once been seafloor sediment. These include shale and schist.
 
The levels of carbon-12 and carbon-13 were similar to those found in more modern deposits, which scientists know include the waste products and remains of plankton.
 
They took this as good evidence that the rocks contain the chemical traces of very ancient plankton — which would logically have been one of the earliest forms of life on Earth.
 
“These data and the mode of occurrence indicate that the reduced carbon represents biogenic detritus, which was perhaps derived from planktonic organisms,” they wrote.

[[http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98973&page=1]]
 

[color1]

Impact spherules as a record of an ancient heavy bombardment of Earth

Impact craters are the most obvious indication of asteroid impacts, but craters on Earth are quickly obscured or destroyed by surface weathering and tectonic processes1. Earth’s impact history is inferred therefore either from estimates of the present-day impactor flux as determined by observations of near-Earth asteroids, or from the Moon’s incomplete impact chronology2, 3, 4. Asteroids hitting Earth typically vaporize a mass of target rock comparable to the projectile’s mass. As this vapour expands in a large plume or fireball, it cools and condenses into molten droplets called spherules5. For asteroids larger than about ten kilometres in diameter, these spherules are deposited in a global layer. Spherule layers preserved in the geologic record accordingly provide information about an impact even when the source crater cannot be found1. Here we report estimates of the sizes and impact velocities of the asteroids that created global spherule layers. The impact chronology from these spherule layers reveals that the impactor flux was significantly higher 3.5 billion years ago than it is now. This conclusion is consistent with a gradual decline of the impactor flux after the Late Heavy Bombardment.


Editor's summary
The Late Heavy Bombardment was a period of time, generally put at about 4.1 billion to 3.8 billion years ago, when the inner planets of the Solar System were subjected to a high-frequency barrage of a…

[[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7396/abs/nature10982.html]]




Ancient Asteroids Kept Pelting Earth in a ‘Late-Late’ Heavy Bombardment


Even though the Late Heavy Bombardment is somewhat of a controversial idea, new research has revealed this period of impacts to the Earth-Moon system may have lasted much longer than originally estimated and well into the time when early life was forming on Earth. Additionally, this “late-late” period of impacts — 3.8 billion to 2.5 billion years ago — was not for the faint of heart. Various blasts may have rivaled those that produced some of the largest craters on the Moon, and could have been larger than the dinosaur-killing impact that created the Chicxulub crater 65 million years ago.

“Our work provides a rationale that the last big impacts hit over an extended time,” said William Bottke principal investigator of the impact study team at the NASA Lunar Science Institute’s Center of Lunar Origin and Evolution (CLOE), based at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.

The evidence for these prodigious impacts comes from bead-like impact ‘spherules’ found in millimeter- to centimeter-thick rock layers on Earth and date from the Archean period of Earth’s history, more recent than the estimated LHB period of 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago.

“The beds speak to an intense period of bombardment of Earth,” Bottke said. “Their source long has been a mystery.”
 


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The millimeter-scale circles and more irregular gray particles are formerly molten droplets ejected into space when an asteroid hit the early Earth. The image at left is from the Monteville layer in South Africa. Courtesy Bruce Simonson, Oberlin College and Conservatory
 
The circles seen in the image above are all formerly molten droplets ejected into space when an asteroid struck the Earth about 2.56 billion years ago. The droplets returned to Earth and were concentrated at the base of the Reivilo layer in South Africa.

The spherules still contain substantial extraterrestrial material, such as iridium (176 parts per million), which rules out alternative sources for the spherules, such as volcanoes, according to Bruce Simonson, a geologist from the Oberlin College and Conservatory who has studied these ancient layers for decades.

The timing of these impacts also coincides with a record of large lunar craters being created more recently than 3.8-billion years ago.

At least 12 spherule beds deposited between 3.47 and 1.7 billion years ago have been found in protected areas on Earth, such as in shales deposited on the seafloor below the reach of waves.

From these beds, the team found evidence of approximately 70 impacts on Earth during this time period that were likely larger than the Chicxulub impact.

In their paper, which was published in Nature, the team created a computer model of the ancient main asteroid belt and tracked what would have happened when the orbits of the giant planets changed. They extended the work of the Nice Model, which supports the theory that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in different orbits nearly 4.5 billion years ago and migrated to their current orbits about 4 billion years ago, triggering a solar system-wide bombardment of comets and asteroids called known as the LHB.


This image shows a representation of how the giant planets have migrated to the current orbits, destabilizing the extension of the primordial asteroid belt closest to Mars. This drove numerous big impactors onto orbits where they could hit the terrestrial planets, though over a long enough time span that this drawn-out barrage may have lasted more than a billion years. The frequency of these impacts on Earth was enough to reproduce the known impact spherule beds. Image Courtesy David Kring, Center for Lunar Science and Exploration, and the Lunar and Planetary Institute
 
The new computer model shows that the innermost portion of the asteroid belt could have become destabilized, delivering numerous big impacts to Earth and Moon over longer time periods.

Have there been any previous indications about this period of impacts?

“The problem is that we have almost no Archean rocks,” Bottke told Universe Today. “The oldest terrestrial craters, Sudbury and Vredefort, are 1.85 and 2.02 billion years old. The spherule beds are our only window into impacts prior to this time.”
 
Also, Bottke said, the number of people who look for impact spherules is almost equally scarce. “People such as Bruce Simonson, Don Lowe, Gary Byerly, and Frank Kyte, have been carrying on a long, lonely quest to try to get people to consider the implications of their work, which are deeply profound, in my opinion,” Bottke said.
 
As for finding evidence of this later period of impacts on the Moon, Bottke said the problem there is the lack of solid ages for most impact events.

“This means it is difficult say anything definitive about the timing of major impacts,” Bottke said. “We are working this problem now with Michelle Kirchoff, who is counting craters on top of large lunar craters. This can be done now that we have LRO data.” (Listen to a podcast interview of Kirchoff on the 365 Days of Astronomy.)
 
Still, Bottke said, without using “fancy dynamics,” they can address some issues.

“Studies in the post-Apollo era suggested that the Moon has four 160-300 km craters that formed after Orientale, whose age is 3.7-3.8 billion years ago and (i.e., K/T-sized events or larger),” he said. “Crater counts from the Galileo mission and Apollo-era geologic analyses suggest at least one of these events took place near 3.2-3.5 billion years ago. If we account for the gravitational cross section of the planets, we know that for every lunar event, we should get about 20 on the Earth. So, from this argument alone, one should get a lot of big impacts on the Earth after the formation of Orientale.”
 
The new study fits with the available constraints about impacts on the Moon as well as finding the right distribution of spherule beds on Earth.

The best way to confirm everything, however, Bottke said, would be if more lunar rocks from various locations were available for study.

Read the team’s paper in Nature.

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/94810/ancient-asteroids-kept-pelting-earth-in-a-late-late-heavy-bombardment/#ixzz2YSFicqrT

[[http://www.universetoday.com/94810/ancient-asteroids-kept-pelting-earth-in-a-late-late-heavy-bombardment/]]

[color1]

The implication is LIFE on planet Earth was totally destroyed multiple times by the LHB bombardments of Earth and the LLHB of Earth after 3.7 billion years ago.  Oceans totally vaporized and molten crust.
---

The existence of liquid water at 4.4Gyr ago could have important
implications for the evolution of life. Microfossils as old as 3.5Gyr
are known24. Metasediments and carbonaceous materials with
biogenic carbon isotope ratios as low as d13C ˆ 228½ are
known at 3.8 Gyr ago 25. Zircon crystal W74/2-36 is over 500Myr
older than this organic matter and if liquid water was available to
cause the evolved geochemistry that we have measured, then such
water was also available for possible biological processes. High energy
asteroid bombardment before 3.9 Gyr ago is consistent with
periodic formation and destruction of early oceans and the possibility
that primitive life, if it evolved in the oceans, was globally
extinguished more than once. M
Table 2

[[http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~rcoe/eart206/Wilde%20et%2001%20Nature%20409-175.pdf]]

[John Dibble]

I don't think you really read the articles in question, either that or you have no understanding of what they are saying. IF life formed multiple times and was wiped out multiple times - which is a big if that the articles you link do not conclusively state as having occured - it only implies that primitive life forms more easily that we might have thought. It in no way implies an intelligent creator. None of the articles you link do.

Additionally, the articles do not state that later impacts (those happening after 3.8 billion years ago) were great enough to vaporize the oceans or turn the Earth's crust molten. (you wouldn't be able to detect evidence of molten droplets if the entire crust was molten) They also do not state that life during those periods got wiped out.

You're trying to fit a square peg through a round hole - I suggest you give up, as you are only displaying your own ineptitude.

[Torie]

I am going to throw Darwin's Doubt onto the pile. I listened to the author on the Michael Medved show and found him to be other than in the kook category. His gig in substantial part is that the host of the new phylums that popped out in the Precambrian age in an instant of geologic time, with exponentially more complexity (90 cell types rather than six, complex eye structures, etc), cannot be explained by normal Darwinian mutation mechanisms. The changes were just too drastic and too quick and seem, well, to have been as if "designed."  I am probably going to get the book.

The moral of the story to me here is that the gaps in the theory, and what we don't know, do in fact need to be discussed, as opposed to it all being treated as holy writ - just like the global warming issue. Awareness of ignorance is the first step to knowledge, and that goes for the intellectual elite as well.

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

I listened to the author on the Michael Medved show

Before or after Rush Limbaugh?

[Torie]

I listened to the author on the Michael Medved show

Before or after Rush Limbaugh?

After, from Noon to 3 pm PST in my area.

[afleitch]

I am going to throw Darwin's Doubt onto the pile. I listened to the author on the Michael Medved show and found him to be other than in the kook category. His gig in substantial part is that the host of the new phylums that popped out in the Precambrian age in an instant of geologic time, with exponentially more complexity (90 cell types rather than six, complex eye structures, etc), cannot be explained by normal Darwinian mutation mechanisms. The changes were just too drastic and too quick and seem, well, to have been as if "designed."  I am probably going to get the book.

The moral of the story to me here is that the gaps in the theory, and what we don't know, do in fact need to be discussed, as opposed to it all being treated as holy writ - just like the global warming issue. Awareness of ignorance is the first step to knowledge, and that goes for the intellectual elite as well.

Stephen C Meyer the author is a Christian advocate of intelligent design and indeed is one it's most vociferous as one of the founding fathers of you will of the 'Intelligent Design' movement. He has been flogging the same 'teach the controversy' bull for the past two decades.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/doubting-stephen-meyers-darwins-doubt.html

[Torie]

I am going to throw Darwin's Doubt onto the pile. I listened to the author on the Michael Medved show and found him to be other than in the kook category. His gig in substantial part is that the host of the new phylums that popped out in the Precambrian age in an instant of geologic time, with exponentially more complexity (90 cell types rather than six, complex eye structures, etc), cannot be explained by normal Darwinian mutation mechanisms. The changes were just too drastic and too quick and seem, well, to have been as if "designed."  I am probably going to get the book.

The moral of the story to me here is that the gaps in the theory, and what we don't know, do in fact need to be discussed, as opposed to it all being treated as holy writ - just like the global warming issue. Awareness of ignorance is the first step to knowledge, and that goes for the intellectual elite as well.

Stephen C Meyer the author is a Christian advocate of intelligent design and indeed is one it's most vociferous as one of the founding fathers of you will of the 'Intelligent Design' movement. He has been flogging the same 'teach the controversy' bull for the past two decades.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/doubting-stephen-meyers-darwins-doubt.html

Whatever. Let's teach the "unresolved" issues in the theory however. And yes, it would be good to get a response from the evolutionary biology experts about the various gap assertions. And no, having gaps does not lead to the conclusion that some mastermind preprogrammed it. There isn't any evidence for that. If a mastermind did it, it is probably more likely to be space aliens than God to my little skeptical un-mastermind, but I digress.

[DemPGH]

Wow, the OP goes back to the days of the Dover trial here in PA.

Darwin's Doubt is misleading in lots of ways - Darwin did not "doubt" his theory - yes, he was skeptical of it, as all scientists are, but the more he researched the more he found it to be likely. He revised his Origin many times over the course of his life and career.

So the IDers want to say that the Cambrian explosion is now proof of a deity? Classic "god of the gaps." It's been happening since Copernicus, truly. Then a tangible mechanism is discovered and, oh! Back to drawing board. Where else can we try to insert a deity? The eyeball. Well, they've been using that one and it's pretty much been debunked. A modern eyeball could evolve without being considered "fast track" from a cranial sense organ in a few hundred thousand years under the right conditions. And having an eyeball or a cranial sense organ was evolutionarily advantageous, most certainly, so voila. Plus, the fossil record is too incomplete to nail down hard to the day when this or that happened, like many of these IDers want to do.

But actually, there's an interesting theory that goes that geologic activity could have been behind the Cambrian explosion. A spike in gamma or cosmic radiation could have caused it, I would think, or at least could have caused lots of mutations.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120418131429.htm

As far as life being wiped out and starting again, I fail to see how that has anything to do with a deity at all by necessity. "Life finds a way." And the stuff of life is everywhere in the universe very abundantly from carbon to the basic elements needed to build life. There was a time of heavy bombardment of the early Earth, which is where the basic elements came from: space.

[John Dibble]

I am going to throw Darwin's Doubt onto the pile. I listened to the author on the Michael Medved show and found him to be other than in the kook category. His gig in substantial part is that the host of the new phylums that popped out in the Precambrian age in an instant of geologic time, with exponentially more complexity (90 cell types rather than six, complex eye structures, etc), cannot be explained by normal Darwinian mutation mechanisms. The changes were just too drastic and too quick and seem, well, to have been as if "designed."  I am probably going to get the book.

The moral of the story to me here is that the gaps in the theory, and what we don't know, do in fact need to be discussed, as opposed to it all being treated as holy writ - just like the global warming issue. Awareness of ignorance is the first step to knowledge, and that goes for the intellectual elite as well.

Stephen C Meyer the author is a Christian advocate of intelligent design and indeed is one it's most vociferous as one of the founding fathers of you will of the 'Intelligent Design' movement. He has been flogging the same 'teach the controversy' bull for the past two decades.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/doubting-stephen-meyers-darwins-doubt.html

Whatever. Let's teach the "unresolved" issues in the theory however. And yes, it would be good to get a response from the evolutionary biology experts about the various gap assertions. And no, having gaps does not lead to the conclusion that some mastermind preprogrammed it. There isn't any evidence for that. If a mastermind did it, it is probably more likely to be space aliens than God to my little skeptical un-mastermind, but I digress.

And yet that is exactly the conclusion that Meyer and his ilk are pushing. Their logic is entirely "you can't explain this, therefore design (and therefore God, but we won't say that so it doesn't look like we're pushing religion)" - it's obviously fallacious, but they don't care.

[Torie]

I am going to throw Darwin's Doubt onto the pile. I listened to the author on the Michael Medved show and found him to be other than in the kook category. His gig in substantial part is that the host of the new phylums that popped out in the Precambrian age in an instant of geologic time, with exponentially more complexity (90 cell types rather than six, complex eye structures, etc), cannot be explained by normal Darwinian mutation mechanisms. The changes were just too drastic and too quick and seem, well, to have been as if "designed."  I am probably going to get the book.

The moral of the story to me here is that the gaps in the theory, and what we don't know, do in fact need to be discussed, as opposed to it all being treated as holy writ - just like the global warming issue. Awareness of ignorance is the first step to knowledge, and that goes for the intellectual elite as well.

Stephen C Meyer the author is a Christian advocate of intelligent design and indeed is one it's most vociferous as one of the founding fathers of you will of the 'Intelligent Design' movement. He has been flogging the same 'teach the controversy' bull for the past two decades.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/doubting-stephen-meyers-darwins-doubt.html

Whatever. Let's teach the "unresolved" issues in the theory however. And yes, it would be good to get a response from the evolutionary biology experts about the various gap assertions. And no, having gaps does not lead to the conclusion that some mastermind preprogrammed it. There isn't any evidence for that. If a mastermind did it, it is probably more likely to be space aliens than God to my little skeptical un-mastermind, but I digress.

And yet that is exactly the conclusion that Meyer and his ilk are pushing. Their logic is entirely "you can't explain this, therefore design (and therefore God, but we won't say that so it doesn't look like we're pushing religion)" - it's obviously fallacious, but they don't care.

So just tune that bit out, and deal with the more interesting bits, as a vehicle to inquire further. Anyway, in the radio interview, Meyer was careful to not say God did it; rather he said that design "theory" seemed to fit what happened better in this life form explosion event, even though there is no independent evidence of that. Indeed, don't call this discussion "intelligent design" for the reasons that you stated, and to avoid the contretemps; just be careful to be candid about the limits of the theory at present.

[afleitch]

I am going to throw Darwin's Doubt onto the pile. I listened to the author on the Michael Medved show and found him to be other than in the kook category. His gig in substantial part is that the host of the new phylums that popped out in the Precambrian age in an instant of geologic time, with exponentially more complexity (90 cell types rather than six, complex eye structures, etc), cannot be explained by normal Darwinian mutation mechanisms. The changes were just too drastic and too quick and seem, well, to have been as if "designed."  I am probably going to get the book.

The moral of the story to me here is that the gaps in the theory, and what we don't know, do in fact need to be discussed, as opposed to it all being treated as holy writ - just like the global warming issue. Awareness of ignorance is the first step to knowledge, and that goes for the intellectual elite as well.

Stephen C Meyer the author is a Christian advocate of intelligent design and indeed is one it's most vociferous as one of the founding fathers of you will of the 'Intelligent Design' movement. He has been flogging the same 'teach the controversy' bull for the past two decades.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/doubting-stephen-meyers-darwins-doubt.html

Whatever. Let's teach the "unresolved" issues in the theory however. And yes, it would be good to get a response from the evolutionary biology experts about the various gap assertions. And no, having gaps does not lead to the conclusion that some mastermind preprogrammed it. There isn't any evidence for that. If a mastermind did it, it is probably more likely to be space aliens than God to my little skeptical un-mastermind, but I digress.

And yet that is exactly the conclusion that Meyer and his ilk are pushing. Their logic is entirely "you can't explain this, therefore design (and therefore God, but we won't say that so it doesn't look like we're pushing religion)" - it's obviously fallacious, but they don't care.

So just tune that bit out, and deal with the more interesting bits, as a vehicle to inquire further. Anyway, in the radio interview, Meyer was careful to not say God did it; rather he said that design "theory" seemed to fit what happened better in this life form explosion event, even though there is no independent evidence of that. Indeed, don't call this discussion "intelligent design" for the reasons that you stated, and to avoid the contretemps; just be careful to be candid about the limits of the theory at present.

But there was no overnight 'explosion' event. That's the whole point that he willfully fails to grasp. The rebound took 30 million years and even then fully diverse life didn't 'jump' out of nothing; it took trilobites a further 20 million years to evolve. Three out of the 35 phyla existed prior to the Cambrian period and only 12 are definitively known to have came about after the 'explosion' (the rest generally being soft bodied and leaving a patchy fossil record)

[color1]

Metorite/astroid bombardment event reaching peak 3.9 - 3.8 billion years ago on earth(all life on Earth exinquished multiple times!!!).  But bombardment continued for hundreds of millions of years afterwards (new study) - but less frequently. 

Evidence that life existed on Earth 3.8+ billion years ago. And evidence for complex photosysnthisys microbes 3.5 - 3.6 billion years ago, that began producing more oxygen on earth = took them over a billion years (2.5 billion years ago) to produce enough oxygen for Earth to support more complex life -- worms, fish, bees, dinosaurs, etc.
----------------
""As explained in a study at the University of Wisconsin, “One constraint on the presence of a stable hydrosphere on the Earth is the extensive meteorite bombardment experienced in the Early Archean [that has been] decued from the lunar record.” The study explains that the meteor impacts occurred between 4.4 and 3.8 Ga (Ga = "billion years ago"), noting that “recent work has documented a strong peak in impact intensity at ~3.9 Ga,” ...

What is interesting about these impacts is the effect they would have had on ancient oceans. The NASA Science News article suggests that (emphasis added), “…Until roughly 3.9 billion years ago, swarms of comets and meteorites whacked the young Earth often enough to occasionally vaporize the surface zones of the oceans and erase any life residing there.”  Consequently, “the earliest known evidence of microbial life on Earth comes from carbon isotope patterns investigated by Mojzsis and colleagues in 3.85-billion-year-old Greenland sediments.” (Astrobiology Magazine has a good article on this as well.)

This explains why mainstream scientists had not previously seen beyond 3.9 Ga... everything was getting destroyed by meteor impacts! Well, almost everything. The zircon crystals appear to be the only surviving remnant.""

[color1]

From some study from CU:

The Moon experienced an interval of intense bombardment peaking at 3.85 Ga +- 0.05 Ga;
subsequent impacts as old as 3.7 or 3.8 Ga are preserved. It can be assumed that the early
Earth must have been subjected to an even more intense impact flux resulting from its larger
size and because of its proximity to the Moon.

[barfbag]

I took a Religion and Science course in the Spring of my sophomore year of college. You can't teach one without the other. Intelligent design would explain the order of things and how things have a routine and cycle. However, intelligent design doesn't necessarily have to be based on the order of things. If you think about how old our universe is, then it should be realized that we only know order and physics as they pertain to our world. Our planet's existence may be so random that only those within it can recognize the order of things as intelligent design. If you talk about a Creator, then you are talking about intelligent design by definition as the Creator would be the first cause and the first cause would be all knowing and therefore design matter by intelligence. Again though, this would be intelligence as we know it. In the just given example of an intelligent designer, we are still only talking about intelligence as we know intelligence to be. When regarding a Creator, we aren't necessarily discussing intelligence, but Intelligence. Biology is different from religion and science, but biology itself is interpreted as intelligent design as there is an order and pattern to biology. Even if we don't mention "intelligent design" we're still talking about it whether we realize it or not by discussing the subject of biology.

[color1]

Heavy bombardment of Earth by meteors/comets/asteroids reaching its horrific peak around 3.85 billion years ago.  And yet exisitance of life found 3.85 billion years ago.  So all life on Earth must have been repeated obliterated over and over again.


""Archaean

The oldest fossils are found in rocks that were formed during the Archaean eon, which lasted from 3.6 to 2.7 billion years ago. Before this time, during the Hadean eon that covered the time from 4.6 billion to 3.6 billion years ago, the surface of the Earth was covered in molten rock on which no life could survive. Once the rock cooled and hardened, the geological history of the Earth could begin. During the Archaean period, life began on Earth, and some of this life is preserved in the fossil record.


Blue-Green Algae



Blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, are single-celled photosynthetic organisms that lived in the seas. All life on Earth during the Archaean eon consisted of single-celled organisms, such as bacteria and archaeans, that first evolved in the seas. Blue-green algae differ from the other single-celled organisms of the period because they were protected by a thick cell wall. As well, blue-green algae sometimes formed large, layered dome-shaped structures known as stromatolites or round structures known as oncolites. Stromatolites and oncolites, when fossilized, protect the inner cells so that thinly sliced sections of these fossilized structures reveal well preserved details of cyanobacteria.""

[Antonio the Sixth]

Dear God just shut up.

[color1]

NSF:
"""Our evidence establishes beyond reasonable doubt that life emerged on Earth at least 3.86 billion years ago," says Stephen Mojzsis, a graduate student in geochemistry at Scripps and lead author of a recent paper on the subject in the scientific journal Nature. "This is not the end of the story. We may well find that life on Earth existed even earlier." ""


illinoisstate.edu  & harvard.edu:
"First evidence for microbial life can be found in rocks ~3.86 billion years old (Figure 16.1)"

aug.edu:
""Life probably arose on Earth more than 3.85 billion years ago, shortly after the end of heavy bombardment.  Evidence comes from fossils and carbon isotopes""