QUOTE: The first green plants to find their way out of the water were not the soaring trees or even the little shrubs of our present world. They were most likely soft and mossy, with shallow roots and few of the adaptations they would later evolve to survive and thrive on dry land.

DAVID: All types of life started in the seas. When continents poked up into dry land, life got there some how. And the animals arrived and ate the plants and other animals. Life appeared 3.6-8 by ago and this development took a long time to happen.

dhw: The quote encapsulates what I see as the history of evolution – whether initiated by God or not. In terms of its advancement, it is a constant process of organisms surviving and thriving as they learn to cope with or exploit new conditions. If, very broadly speaking, we take “surviving” to mean staying the same and “exploiting” to mean making changes, we can see the logic of advancement, with each new wave of innovations building on what already existed, and expanding the range as environments change. In this context I think it’s crucial to keep in mind your comment that it took a long time. We often take for granted the figures, without considering what they entail. Not just centuries, not just thousands, not just millions, but thousands of millions of years, and millions of millions of generations of organisms. The time is so long that we can’t really imagine it, or the colossal variety of life forms which exist even now but existed up to 99% more in the course of those billions of years. I shan’t comment on its relevance to your theory, except to say that the mind boggles at the colossal range of life forms that have come and gone over this vast period of time. Thank you for yet another extremely interesting development in our understanding of life’s history.

DAVID: It is an unfolding story as science digs in. Just as I noted in the Shapiro thread, we are now just seeing the purpose for bacteria staying around. Obvious purposes can be found as we keep studying. I deeply appreciate your permission to go on with this site so we can keep learning. Our knowledge is never completed. I'm delighted your search team found me in 2008. I've sure had fun.

dhw: I don’t know how many folk have followed our discussions since 2008, but those who have will probably have formed the impression that we are deadly foes! Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite our differences, I not only have the utmost respect for your faith and your erudition, but also for the personal qualities which have resulted in a lasting friendship. I too am delighted that the search team found you, and the fact is that without your vast range of contributions, the website would almost certainly have closed down long ago. Please carry on having fun!

I still find it lots of fun and very much enjoy our close relationship.

DAVID: All types of life started in the seas. When continents poked up into dry land, life got there some how. And the animals arrived and ate the plants and other animals. Life appeared 3.6-8 by ago and this development took a long time to happen.

dhw: The quote encapsulates what I see as the history of evolution – whether initiated by God or not. In terms of its advancement, it is a constant process of organisms surviving and thriving as they learn to cope with or exploit new conditions. If, very broadly speaking, we take “surviving” to mean staying the same and “exploiting” to mean making changes, we can see the logic of advancement, with each new wave of innovations building on what already existed, and expanding the range as environments change. In this context I think it’s crucial to keep in mind your comment that it took a long time. We often take for granted the figures, without considering what they entail. Not just centuries, not just thousands, not just millions, but thousands of millions of years, and millions of millions of generations of organisms. The time is so long that we can’t really imagine it, or the colossal variety of life forms which exist even now but existed up to 99% more in the course of those billions of years. I shan’t comment on its relevance to your theory, except to say that the mind boggles at the colossal range of life forms that have come and gone over this vast period of time. Thank you for yet another extremely interesting development in our understanding of life’s history.

DAVID: It is an unfolding story as science digs in. Just as I noted in the Shapiro thread, we are now just seeing the purpose for bacteria staying around. Obvious purposes can be found as we keep studying. I deeply appreciate your permission to go on with this site so we can keep learning. Our knowledge is never completed. I'm delighted your search team found me in 2008. I've sure had fun.

I don’t know how many folk have followed our discussions since 2008, but those who have will probably have formed the impression that we are deadly foes! Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite our differences, I not only have the utmost respect for your faith and your erudition, but also for the personal qualities which have resulted in a lasting friendship. I too am delighted that the search team found you, and the fact is that without your vast range of contributions, the website would almost certainly have closed down long ago. Please carry on having fun!

QUOTE: The first green plants to find their way out of the water were not the soaring trees or even the little shrubs of our present world. They were most likely soft and mossy, with shallow roots and few of the adaptations they would later evolve to survive and thrive on dry land.

DAVID: All types of life started in the seas. When continents poked up into dry land, life got there some how. And the animals arrived and ate the plants and other animals. Life appeared 3.6-8 by ago and this development took a long time to happen.

dhw: The quote encapsulates what I see as the history of evolution – whether initiated by God or not. In terms of its advancement, it is a constant process of organisms surviving and thriving as they learn to cope with or exploit new conditions. If, very broadly speaking, we take “surviving” to mean staying the same and “exploiting” to mean making changes, we can see the logic of advancement, with each new wave of innovations building on what already existed, and expanding the range as environments change. In this context I think it’s crucial to keep in mind your comment that it took a long time. We often take for granted the figures, without considering what they entail. Not just centuries, not just thousands, not just millions, but thousands of millions of years, and millions of millions of generations of organisms. The time is so long that we can’t really imagine it, or the colossal variety of life forms which exist even now but existed up to 99% more in the course of those billions of years. I shan’t comment on its relevance to your theory, except to say that the mind boggles at the colossal range of life forms that have come and gone over this vast period of time. Thank you for yet another extremely interesting development in our understanding of life’s history.

It is an unfolding story as science digs in. Just as I noted in the Shapiro thread, we are now just seeing the purpose for bacteria staying around. Obvious purposes can be found as we keep studying. I deeply appreciate your permission to go on with this site so we can keep learning. Our knowledge is never completed. I'm delighted your search team found me in 2008. I've sure had fun.

DAVID: All types of life started in the seas. When continents poked up into dry land, life got there some how. And the animals arrived and ate the plants and other animals. Life appeared 3.6-8 by ago and this development took a long time to happen.

The quote encapsulates what I see as the history of evolution – whether initiated by God or not. In terms of its advancement, it is a constant process of organisms surviving and thriving as they learn to cope with or exploit new conditions. If, very broadly speaking, we take “surviving” to mean staying the same and “exploiting” to mean making changes, we can see the logic of advancement, with each new wave of innovations building on what already existed, and expanding the range as environments change. In this context I think it’s crucial to keep in mind your comment that it took a long time. We often take for granted the figures, without considering what they entail. Not just centuries, not just thousands, not just millions, but thousands of millions of years, and millions of millions of generations of organisms. The time is so long that we can’t really imagine it, or the colossal variety of life forms which exist even now but existed up to 99% more in the course of those billions of years. I shan’t comment on its relevance to your theory, except to say that the mind boggles at the colossal range of life forms that have come and gone over this vast period of time. Thank you for yet another extremely interesting development in our understanding of life’s history.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/billion-year-old-algae-and-newer-genes-hint-at-land-plan...

"Around 500 million years ago — when the Earth was already a ripe 4 billion years old — the first green plants appeared on dry land. Precisely how this occurred is still one of the big mysteries of evolution. Before then, terrestrial land was home only to microbial life. The first green plants to find their way out of the water were not the soaring trees or even the little shrubs of our present world. They were most likely soft and mossy, with shallow roots and few of the adaptations they would later evolve to survive and thrive on dry land. And though scientists agree that these plants evolved from some kinds of seaweed, we know comparatively little about those green algal ancestors."

***

"The recently unearthed tiny fossil, smaller than a single grain of rice, appears to be the world’s oldest known specimen of green algae: It rolls back the clock on the confirmed existence of these algae by a staggering 200 million years. “It’s very daunting. A billion years — that’s at least five times older than the oldest dinosaurs,” said Xiao, who is a senior author on the Nature Ecology & Evolution paper that announced the discovery. “It’s before any animals. The world is very, very different from what we know today.'”

***
"He excavated some from formations near the city of Dalian in northern China, where geological maps had told him he was likely to find the green-hued rocks containing fossils from that remote epoch. But it wasn’t until he got back to the lab and examined them under an electron microscope that he understood the value of what he had found: “I was very excited when I saw the first piece of this green seaweed,” he said. “These kinds of fossils are totally new to science."

"Ancient as the fossilized algae are, they seem to have many of the characteristics also seen in much later green seaweeds. It isn’t just that they were clearly photosynthetic and multicellular — traits that help to define seaweeds but have murky evolutionary origins. “They have leaves, they have branches,” Tang said.

***

"The evolutionary innovations seen in Tang’s fossil may have helped to set algae on a path that eventually led them ashore by about 470 million years ago. But the transition to land life would probably have begun hundreds of millions of years earlier, with green algae adapting to survive in damp soil or sand that was subject to temporary drying. Evolutionary biologists have generally believed that this transformation probably arose in parallel with the appearance of more complex multicellular structures, some of which lent themselves to these adaptations."

Comment: All types of life started in the seas. When continents poked up into dry land, life got there some how. And the animals arrived and ate the plants and other animals. Life appeared 3.6-8 by ago and this development took a long time to happen.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2167645-a-fossil-may-rewrite-the-story-of-how-plan...

"A plant fossil that gathered dust in a museum drawer for a century is the oldest fossil of large plants ever found.

"The find suggests we need to rethink the plant family tree. It has been estimated that land plants first emerged 515 million years ago but actual fossils are rare and not quite so old. Many botanists assume that the first land plants grew like mosses, and more complex plants like shrubs and trees evolved later.

"However, the new find adds to growing evidence that this picture may be back-to-front. Mosses and their relatives might be more “evolved” than we thought.

***

"Many botanists suspect that the moss condition evolved first, partly because mosses and their ilk seem to be the simplest living land plants. But a team led by Jiří Kvaček at the National Museum Prague, Czech Republic and Viktor Žárský at the Charles University, Prague says that this idea might be wrong – and they have fossil evidence.

"They have reanalysed a 432-million-year-old plant fossil that was discovered more than a century ago near Prague. The fossil belongs to a new species called Cooksonia barrandei. It is 4-5 centimetres high and up to 3 millimetres across.
“[The] Cooksonia barrandei we describe is the oldest unambiguous plant macrofossil known to date,“ says Žárský. The older fossils are all tiny fragments, mostly spores.

***

"Beyond its age, the fossil is significant because it is a sporophyte. Since it is big, it’s likely that C. barrandei’s sporophytes could sustain themselves using photosynthesis. That makes this ancient plant more like a modern tree or shrub than a moss.

"What’s more, since C. barrandei is one of the earliest well-preserved land plants we’ve found, the researchers say it’s possible that the common ancestor of land plants also had these self-sustaining sporophytes.

“'Until now it was assumed that the ‘higher plants’ evolved from [mosses and their relatives],” says Žárský. But mosses, with their reduced sporophytes, might actually have evolved later.

"It all comes down to reproduction.

“'I was genuinely surprised to see this fossil – it’s very cool,” says Kevin Boyce at Stanford University in California. He agrees C. barrandei may well have made sporophytes that could nourish themselves.

"However, Boyce says it’s unclear what the first land plants were like. “It’s now basically up in the air,” he says, partly because the fossil record of plants is so patchy. He is reluctant to draw conclusions from C. barrandei because some of its more recent relatives are believed to have had a moss-like life cycle.

"However, Paul Kenrick at the Natural History Museum in London, UK is open to the idea that the first land plants were not moss-like.

"Kenrich co-authored a study published in March that used molecular data to infer the lifestyle of the first land plants. The research suggested mosses and their relatives belong to a distinct group descended from a more complex ancestor.

“'This implies that [moss-like plants] and their life cycle may not be ancestral, but rather derived,” he says. “Life cycle evolution in the earliest emergent plants needs a rethink.'”

Comment: This is not long after the Cambrian Explosion of animals. It lead to the plant bloom that confused Darwin. Evolution always results in complexity.

tony: Yes, I acknowledged that the first one was biased. The second one showed no religious leanings that I could detect, and neither does this one.-Fair enough. I understand the possible variability in interpretation, but C-14 only dates back up to 40,000 years ago or slightly more. The maim issues is dating to be really concerned about are at least 100,000 years ago and beyond.

Tony; I know this is a biased source, but the explanation of WHY the methods are truly messed up is quite good.
> 
> But, because I want to make sure to catch some information NOT biased by a religious view:
> 
> http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/w/Research:Radioactive_dating-The website you give is a "Biblical-view" source which mentions the 'flood', and is completely biased as I read it. I know there are inconsistences in dating, and I've had geologic courses in the Grand canyon itself, so I am also biased, but without enough background to debate it further.


> Tony: This is one of those areas where I am quite happy to say both "I don't know" and "In some ways it doesn't even matter." It is not simply that I don't trust dating methods, it is just that there is a lot of circular reasoning, assumptions, and even incongruity in the data derived from the methods..... I disagree with them on a purely scientific basis. However, in this case I was merely wanting to point out the simplest and most likely reason that the data does not fit the theories.-My problem is I am not trained enough in physics to see the problems. I have accepted the statements that the five/six isotopic methods all agree within 10-20%.


> > Tony: A third interpretation is that the atmosphere trapped in the two rocks is the same atmosphere because it was captured at the same time, and that there dating methods are wrong.
> 
>David: I know you don't trust the dating methods. How old do you think the Earth is?-This is one of those areas where I am quite happy to say both "I don't know" and "In some ways it doesn't even matter." It is not simply that I don't trust dating methods, it is just that there is a lot of circular reasoning, assumptions, and even incongruity in the data derived from the methods. If the data were solid, with solid congruity even using the SAME method repeatedly, much less using different methods, I would likely be more inclined to trust the dating methods. However, they are not, so you are correct that I do not trust them. I just want to point out that my mistrust has nothing to do with pre-conceived notions of how old the Earth is or with my personal religious beliefs. I disagree with them on a purely scientific basis. However, in this case I was merely wanting to point out the simplest and most likely reason that the data does not fit the theories.


> Tony: A third interpretation is that the atmosphere trapped in the two rocks is the same atmosphere because it was captured at the same time, and that there dating methods are wrong.-I know you don't trust the dating methods. How old do you think the Earth is?

Not much oxygen:
> 
> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150114115247.htm
> 
> "In the new study, a team led by researchers from McGill's Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, used mass spectrometry to measure the amounts of different isotopes of sulfur in rocks from the Nuvvuagittuq belt. The results enabled the scientists to determine that the sulfur in these rocks, which are at least 3.8 billion years old and possibly 500 million years older, had been cycled through Earth's early atmosphere, showing the air at the time was extremely oxygen-poor compared to today, and may have had more methane and carbon dioxide.
> 
> "We found that the isotopic fingerprint of this atmospheric cycling looks just like similar fingerprints from rocks that are a billion to 2 billion years younger," said Emilie Thomassot, a former postdoctoral researcher at McGill and lead author of the paper. Emilie Thomassot is now with the Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques (CRPG) in Nancy France.
> 
> "Those younger rocks contain clear signs of microbial life and there are a couple of possible interpretations of our results," says Boswell Wing, an associate professor at McGill and co-author of the new study. "One interpretation is that biology controlled the composition of the atmosphere on early Earth, with similar microbial biospheres producing the same atmospheric gases from Earth's infancy to adolescence. We can't rule out, however, the possibility that the biosphere was decoupled from the atmosphere. In this case geology could have been the major player in setting the composition of ancient air, with massive volcanic eruptions producing gases that recurrently swamped out weak biological gas production."
> -A third interpretation is that the atmosphere trapped in the two rocks is the same atmosphere because it was captured at the same time, and that there dating methods are wrong.