Missing Law of Evolution

A new “law of increasing functional information” reveals that complex natural systems, beyond just life on Earth, evolve towards higher complexity. This discovery expands traditional evolutionary theory, offering insights from cosmology to astrobiology.

Evolution of plants, animals: “A very special case within a far larger natural phenomenon.” Similar marvels occur with stars, planets, minerals, other complex systems; When a novel configuration works well and function improves, evolution occurs.

A paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today describes “a missing law of nature,” recognizing for the first time an important norm within the natural world’s workings.

In essence, the new law states that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity, and complexity. In other words, evolution is not limited to life on Earth, it also occurs in other massively complex systems, from planets and stars to atoms, minerals, and more.  READ MORE...

Catalyst for LIFE

A new study suggests that the weathering of sulfate rocks, not increasing ocean phosphorus levels, was crucial to the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere, influencing the late evolution of animal life, and also indicates that potential for complex intelligent life on other planets might require longer incubation times.


A recent research study may have discovered a missing link that helps explain Earth’s uniquely oxygen-saturated atmosphere and the corresponding evolution of animal life on our planet.


The study, led by a Fellow of the Forrest Research Foundation at The University of Western Australia and recently published in the esteemed journal Nature, may hold the key to understanding why, for almost 90% of Earth’s history, oxygen levels remained too low for animals to breathe.


The first major evolutionary event of animal life occurred during an event dubbed the Shuram Excursion – between 570 and 550 million years ago – which is believed to represent a massive release of carbon dioxide and oxygen into the atmosphere and oceans as a result of increasing ocean phosphorus levels.


To test the theory, researchers used a newly developed tool to track the abundance of phosphorus in the oceans hundreds of millions of years ago, recorded in six locations in Australia, China, Mexico, and the US.


The data and Earth chemistry model revealed increasing ocean phosphorus levels could not have explained the rise of oxygen. The effect was only replicated by the model when large quantities of sulfate rock were weathered, releasing sulfate into the oceans to produce vast amounts of oxygen.  READ MORE...

The Fuel of Evolution

Darwinian evolution is the process by which natural selection promotes genetic changes in traits that favor survival and reproduction of individuals. How fast evolution happens depends crucially on the abundance of its "fuel": how much genetic difference there is in the ability to survive and reproduce. 

New research by an international research team with participation of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) has now discovered that the raw material for evolution is much more abundant in wild animals than previously believed. The findings were published in Science.

Darwin thought of the process of evolution as something slow, visible only over geological ages. However, researchers have since discovered many examples of evolution occurring in just a few years. 

One such example is that of British populations of the peppered moth, where the abundance of two color morphs changed dramatically in only a few decades, as the result of evolution by natural selection favoring different morphs depending on the level of air pollution. It was unclear however how fast animals with longer lifespans such as birds and mammals can evolve and adapt to environmental change.

Led by Dr. Timothée Bonnet from the Australian National University, a team of 40 researchers from 27 institutions addressed this question and measured how much of the "fuel of evolution" exists overall in wild populations of birds and mammals. 

The answer: many populations of birds and mammals can evolve surprisingly fast—their amount of genetic difference in the ability to survive and reproduce being two to four times higher than previously thought.  READ MORE...

Psychopathy an Evolutionary Adaptation

Dan is a psychopath. But he is smart, charming, and successful. You would not know from first meeting him that he feels pride rather than remorse when he regularly plays the system, deceives people, and exploits others to get what he wants.

But does Dan have a psychological disorder?

Lesleigh Pullman and colleagues recently set out to assess the hypothesis that psychopathy might not be a mental disorder, but rather an effective life strategy. To do so, they analyzed a surprising sign of mental disorders: handedness.
Defining psychopathy and mental disorders

Psychopathy is characterized by emotional and interpersonal deficits such as callousness, grandiosity, and a lack of empathy and remorse. It sometimes involves deviant behavior like aggression and violence. Diagnosis is generally based on interviews or self-reported questionnaires that assess selfishness, remorseless use of others, and lifestyle.

Though the term is often used for run-of-the-mill jerks, less than 5 percent of the population — maybe even less than 1 percent — is selfish and remorseless enough to qualify as a psychopath.

Pullman and her colleagues take an evolutionary perspective on what constitutes a mental disorder, specifying that it must be a harmful dysfunction. To add up to a mental disorder, in other words, behavior cannot just fall outside of the norm. Instead, the behavior must constitute a failure to perform a function that evolution selected because it helps a person.

In other words, psychopathy must harm a person’s functioning or wellbeing if we are to consider it a disorder.

It might seem obvious that psychopathy is in fact harmful. Psychopaths struggle to maintain relationships. They are more likely to die prematurely and to be incarcerated. Hart and Hare, for example, argue that given its negative impact on society, psychopathy is perhaps second only to schizophrenia as a public health concern.  READ MORE...

Lost in Spacetime

Einstein’s forgotten twisted universe

There’s a kind of inevitability about the fact that, if you write a regular newsletter about fundamental physics, you’ll regularly find yourself banging on about Albert Einstein. As much as it comes with the job, I also make no apology for it: he is a towering figure in the history of not just fundamental physics, but science generally.

A point that historians of science sometimes make about his most monumental achievement, the general theory of relativity, is that, pretty much uniquely, it was a theory that didn’t have to be. When you look at the origins of something like Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, for example – not to diminish his magisterial accomplishment in any way – you’ll find that other people had been scratching around similar ideas surrounding the origin and change of species for some time as a response to the burgeoning fossil record, among other discoveries.


Even Einstein’s special relativity, the precursor to general relativity that first introduced the idea of warping space and time, responded to a clear need (first distinctly identified with the advent of James Clerk Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism in the 1860s) to explain why the speed of light appeared to be an absolute constant.

When Einstein presented general relativity to the world in 1915, there was nothing like that. We had a perfectly good working theory of gravity, the one developed by Isaac Newton more than two centuries earlier. True, there was a tiny problem in that it couldn’t explain some small wobbles in the orbit of Mercury, but they weren’t of the size that demanded we tear up our whole understanding of space, time, matter and the relationship between them. But pretty much everything we know (and don’t know) about the wider universe today stems from general relativity: the expanding big bang universe and the standard model of cosmology, dark matter and energy, black holes, gravitational waves, you name it.

So why am I banging on about this? Principally because, boy, do we need a new idea in cosmology now – and in a weird twist of history, it might just be Einstein who supplies it. I’m talking about an intriguing feature by astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter in the magazine last month . It deals with perhaps general relativity’s greatest (perceived, at least) weakness – the way it doesn’t mesh with other bits of physics, which are all explained by quantum theory these days. The mismatch exercised Einstein a great deal, and he spent much of his later years engaged in a fruitless quest to unify all of physics.  READ MORE...

Driving Evolution on Earth

Mounting evidence suggests humans are now a major driving force of evolution on Earth. From selective breeding to environmental modifications, we're altering so much of our world that we're not only now driving the climate, but the direction of life itself.

Now, in a massive project involving 287 scientists across 160 cities in 26 countries, researchers examined how urbanization has influenced evolution on a global scale. They used white clover (Trifolium repens) as a model – a plant native to Europe and west Asia, but found in cities all around the world.

"There has never been a field study of evolution of this scale, or a global study of how urbanization influences evolution," said evolutionary biologist Marc Johnson from the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM).

Collecting more than 110,000 samples along gradients that extended from the cities, through suburbs and out to the country, they found that clover in cities is now more similar to clover in another city a world away than it is to that found in nearby farmland or forests, regardless of climate.

This is an example of parallel adaptive evolution – when separate populations are shaped by the same selective pressure for specific traits in different locations. It shows that the ways humans have changed the environment are having a bigger influence in shaping these traits than natural phenomena like local population genetics and climate.  READ MORE...

Making & Unmaking Crabs

Our planet's convoluted history of evolving life has spawned countless weird and wonderful creatures, but none excite evolutionary biologists – or divide taxonomists – quite like crabs.

When researchers attempted to reconcile the evolutionary history of crabs in all their raucous glory just earlier this year, they arrived at the conclusion that the defining features of crabbiness have evolved at least five times in the past 250 million years.

What's more, crabbiness has been lost possibly seven times or more.  This repeated evolution of a crab-like body plan has happened so often it has its own name: carcinization. (And yes, if you lose crabbiness to evolution, it's called decarcinization.)

Frog crabs (Raninidae) are one unusual example. Features of the crab body plan were also lost en route to almost-legless Puerto Rican sand crabs (Emerita portoricensis) and various lop-sided hermit crabs – but then red king crabs regained crabby features at the last evolutionary minute.

A Puerto Rican sand crab. (Michelle Barros Sarmento Gama/iNaturalist/CC BY-NC 4.0)

Why evolution keeps crafting and shafting the crab-like body plan remain but a mystery, though evolution must be doing something right in fashioning crabby creatures time and time again.

There are thousands of crab species, which thrive in almost every habitat on Earth, from coral reefs and abyssal plains to creeks, caves and forests.  READ MORE...

A Dispute of Evolution

Fossil apes can inform us about essential aspects of ape and human evolution, including the nature of our last common ancestor.

In the 150 years since Charles Darwin speculated that humans originated in Africa, the number of species in the human family tree has exploded, but so has the level of dispute concerning early human evolution. Fossil apes are often at the center of the debate, with some scientists dismissing their importance to the origins of the human lineage (the “hominins”), and others conferring them starring evolutionary roles. A new review out on May 7 in the journal Science looks at the major discoveries in hominin origins since Darwin’s works and argues that fossil apes can inform us about essential aspects of ape and human evolution, including the nature of our last common ancestor.

Humans diverged from apes — specifically, the chimpanzee lineage — at some point between about 9.3 million and 6.5 million years ago, towards the end of the Miocene epoch. To understand hominin origins, paleoanthropologists aim to reconstruct the physical characteristics, behavior, and environment of the last common ancestor of humans and chimps.

“When you look at the narrative for hominin origins, it’s just a big mess — there’s no consensus whatsoever,” said Sergio Almécija, a senior research scientist in the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Anthropology and the lead author of the review. “People are working under completely different paradigms, and that’s something that I don’t see happening in other fields of science.”

There are two major approaches to resolving the human origins problem: “Top-down,” which relies on analysis of living apes, especially chimpanzees; and “bottom-up,” which puts importance on the larger tree of mostly extinct apes. For example, some scientists assume that hominins originated from a chimp-like knuckle-walking ancestor. Others argue that the human lineage originated from an ancestor more closely resembling, in some features, some of the strange Miocene apes.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Through My LENS...

The last time I looked...  I was...

1. Southern Born
2. Cancer survivor
3. Heart Attack survivor
4. A few pounds overweight
5. Over 6 feet in height
6. INTJ Personality
7. Scorpion
8. Retired
9. Married
10. Divorced
11. Veteran
12. Educated
13. Religious  
14. Teacher
15. Father
16. Husband
17. Writer
18. Poet
19. Artist
20. Male

There is nothing I can do to change the way I am even though I can change my behavior...  but, whatever happens to me, flows through the LENSES of my preconceived ideas and ideals that have been forming and reforming throughout my entire life.  I am not who I was nor will I become who I am today.  Choices help formulate my life and its experiences but my life has already been seen by our Creator who is the past, present, as well as the future.  I am and will become that which I am supposed to become and nothing more or nothing less.  Life conforms to my development and evolution as it revolves around my essence and my essence is what life has given me.

We've Been Visited

I have taped and now watching the ANCIENT ALIENS series on cable and I find the evidence rather compelling that EARTH has been visited by extraterrestrials during our early existence by understanding that all of the buildings that were constructed thousands of years ago, could not have been built by the people who lived in those areas across the world because they just did not possess the technological abilities to do so...

For example:

1. How did they move 10 ton stone objects to a height 100 times their height?
2. How did they cut hard stone with precise angles, squared, and cut?
3. How did they come up with the ideas to draw and paint on stone walls?
4. Why do similar structures exist 10,000 miles away?
5. Why do similar stories/myths exist 10,000 miles away?

Today, we still have UFO's flying around that have been acknowledged do exist by our Governments across the world but no explanation can be derived as to why they are here...  yet, we know UFO's can only come here from another planet.

In all mythologies around the world there are stories of gods coming to earth and providing humans with knowledge and technology.

In all mythologies there is are stories of CREATION by gods or by a single entity including our own Christian God...  all these mythologies speak of a great floor that covered the earth and killed all living creatures.

How could all mythologies be so similar unless it were true?

GENESIS 1:26   26And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

So...   why use us in the sentence?  Especially if and when we are talking about only 1 God...  For a long time, I thought that this was reference to the TRINITY...  but now...  I am not so sure.

Wouldn't it be nice to finally get the real answer to these questions?

Some believe that our DNA was altered by aliens and as a result we are the creatures we are today...  and, there is a lot of truth to that belief or so it seems to me because I never really subscribed to the belief that HUMANS were products of EVOLUTION...  and, the reason I have never bought into this notion is the fact that HUMANS are simply too damn complicated on the inside to be mere byproducts of evolution...  does not make sense nor is it logical...  not when you look around and see the complexities of all life.

Since evolution is out the window...  that leaves us with CREATION...  and, this makes more sense to me...  and, if we were created by aliens from another planet in another solar system in another galaxy...  well...  that makes even more sense.

Why have we had some simply brilliant people, like:

• Da Vince
• Einstein
• Tesla
• von Braun

if it were not for aliens messing around with our DNA and/or visiting these people and giving them special abilities...

Russian Cosmism

Russian cosmism is a philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in Russia at the turn of the 19th century, and again, at the beginning of the 20th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a burst of scientific investigation into interplanetary travel, largely driven by fiction writers such as Jules Verne and Herbert Wells as well as philosophical movements like the Russian cosmism.

Cosmism entailed a broad theory of natural philosophy, combining elements of religion and ethics with a history and philosophy of the origin, evolution, and future existence of the cosmos and humankind. It combined elements from both Eastern and Western philosophic traditions as well as from the Russian Orthodox Church.

Cosmism was one of the influences on Proletkult, and after the October Revolution, the term came to be applied to "...the poetry of such writers as Mikhail Gerasimov and Vladimir Kirillov...: emotional paeans to physical labor, machines, and the collective of industrial workers ... organized around the image of the universal 'Proletarian', who strides forth from the earth to conquer planets and stars."  This form of cosmism, along with the writings of Nikolai Fyodorov, was a strong influence on Andrei Platonov.

Many ideas of the Russian cosmists were later developed by those in the transhumanist movement.  Victor Skumin argues that the Culture of Health will play an important role in the creation of a human spiritual society into the Solar System.

The Culture of Health is the basic science about Spiritual Humanity. It studies the perspectives of harmonious development of "Spiritual man" and "Spiritual ethnos" as a conscious creator of the State of Light into the territory of the Solar System" (by Skumin).

Officially Official

AS OF 1:20 PM ON THE THIRTIETH DAY OF OUR LORD TWENTY TWENTY...  I took down, repackaged, and returned to storage all our outside Christmas Decoration...  and I say Christmas because this Holiday Season is more than just a holiday season in which we exchange gifts without a birthday celebration associated with that exchange of gifts...  it is a birthday celebration for one person in particular and that is Jesus of Nazareth.

AND WHILE IT DOES NOT REALLY MATTER IF I AM FOREGIVEN OR NOT, I choose not to attend man's churches that were built as tributes to themselves but worship in my own way, in my own style, and in my own private communications with the one who created it all.

I simply do not believe in the BIG BANG THEORY or in the THEORY OF EVOLUTION (at least for mankind) as the human body is just so friggin complicated that it had to have been designed rather than simply evolving.  Now, that does not rule out Extraterrestrials manipulating our DNA and they might even be our creators...  but, with that idea needing some pondering...  who CREATED THEM so that they could create us?

The BIG BANG just does not do a very good job of answering that question.  Plus, where in the hell did all the ingredients come from that were inside the big bang to begin with?  So...  guess what?  Scientists are now trying to prove that something can really come from nothing because that nothing in the first place was not nothing at all, it was in fact...  something...   we just called it nothing for lack of a better word.

How far up their asses are the heads of these scientists anyway?

AND NOW...

we are playing around with the concept of multiple dimensions that co-exist and are somewhat parallel to our own dimension in which the same thing happens as does happen in ours, it's just a little different and perhaps a little odd ballish.

For example...

for every degree in a circle, assuming our universe is a perfect circle, we could have another universal dimension...   which means that since each circle is composed of 360 degrees, we could have 360 different dimensions...

BUT... WHAT IF...

there were an infinite number of dimensions between each degree of a circle...  then, there is no telling how many dimensions of which our universe might be comprised.

In the sub atomic world...  the three particles of an atom are further broken down into smaller particles and those particles broken down into more particles until there is nothing left but VIBRATING STRINGS OF ENERGY WHOSE MOVEMENTS CANNOT BE PREDICTED...  hence the different dimensions that could be available to us.

NOW...

Let's consider this...

That our Solar System, not our Milky Way Galaxy, is considered to be one of these vibrating strings of energy in comparison to the rest of the universe...  and, its movement while seemingly pretty damn consistent to us, is unpredictable when it comes to the rest of our immense universe...

Mind Boggling...

RIGHT?

BUT...

do you really think that all of this uncertainty is a byproduct of some hypothetical BIG BANG or the byproduct of some sort of hypothetical INTELLIGENT DESIGN?

Life Is Life

There is one undeniable certainty about life and that fact is IT HAPPENS TO ALL OF US ONCE WE ARE BORN INTO IT...

1. Whites have life
2. Blacks have life
3. Latinos & Hispanics have life
4. Asians have life
5. Alaskans, Hawaiians, & Native Americans

note:  list in rank order as their percentage of the population

AND...  while that life is hardly ever EQUAL in all aspects of EQUALITY, it is nonetheless life that can only be taken away by the hands of death knowing that those hands of death could be manipulated by a "live" person.

WHOEVER gave us LIFE, did not promise nor did they guarantee WEALTHY, STATUS, POWER, CONTROL, or HATRED...  we got these items on our own of course they are could have been inherited as well.

BUT...  natural talents, natural skills, natural abilities ARE NOT GIVEN to everyone...  and, the ones that receive that extra little gift get it through their DNA...

Government can never be held responsible nor can it be tasked with the authority to regulate the DNA or human beings in an effort to make us all equal.

The life we are given whether rich or poor or somewhere in between is precious even though some of us will NEVER EXPERIENCE what so many others take for granted...  and in that notion is the GREAT FLAW of the HUMAN BEING EXPERIMENT...  even in God's eyes we will never be completely equal because HE gave us DNA...  and, it is this DNA that gives us some of our unique characteristics and differences.

But, in LIFE as in DEATH we are equal in that we are all born and we all die...  and this happens regardless of our DNA.

What is it about life that makes it SO SPECIAL in that people either want to keep it or take it away from others?

• We eat, sleep, defecate, feel, smell, procreate, protect, and survive...
• We earn money, build houses, have children, and thrive...
• We worship or not, giving back to our community or not as well...
• AND...  in many ways what we do is a celebration of the life we have been given

LIFE GIVEN...  is the correct word to use here...  and while life comes from the seeds of our parents, the first set of parents had to be given this gift from somewhere otherwise we would be walking around like animals with no concept of being alive...  

That spark of AWARENESS is given...  it does not evolve...

With LIFE comes the desire to SURVIVE and with the desire to survive comes the need to CONTROL so that survival can happen.  Power shifts from one people to another and then back again.  Sometimes, we are on the top, sometimes we are on the bottom.  But, regardless of the outcomes, one group WILL ALWAYS CONTROL until resentment from the other group(s) grows...

AND...  the interesting thing about control is that the group under control is ALWAYS LARGER than the group doing the CONTROLLING...

Saturdays are Peaceful

                                          

Even though I am retired and cannot really tell one day from the next day, SATURDAYS are still special in that they remain, at least for me, peaceful...  that is to say that Saturdays reflect the end of a week's worth of labor and one can relax and simply enjoy the SLOW-PACED unfolding day...  and, while Sundays are another day off...  they are different because the next day we return to work whereas with Saturdays we still have another day off...

SATURDAYS for me are days of reflection, pondering what I cannot understand or will ever know, sitting on the porch witnessing the activities of my community neighbors (which is nothing done outside) and watching the animals, especially the rabbits and birds that enjoy safety and security on my property.

Spring, Summer, and Fall SATURDAYS are spent on the back screened-in porch contemplating the benefits and frustrations of still being alive in today's AMERICA...  an AMERICA that is divided along several lines of political ideologies and philosophies which has little to do with LIFE's PURPOSE...  at least as I see it.

Life is about LIFE which is about living and living is about appreciate and gratitude and that revolves around one's being given life (birth) and whether we wanted life or not is meaningless and irrelevant since life is what we have.

In other words, I did not REQUEST that I be given life via birth from my mother and yet, life is nonetheless what I have received; consequently, I am grateful for that life and appreciative for what that life has allowed me to SEE...  EXPERIENCE...  and DOUBT...

• We have not been designed (???) to live a long time.
• We have not been designed to live without food or oxygen.
• We have not been designed to want the same things.
• We have not been designed to think the same way.
• We have not been designed to serve each other.
• We have been designed to procreate.

WHY?

It seems inconceivable and illogical that human beings simply EVOLVED into what we are today and it seems inconceivable and illogical that we should only live 8 decades +/- and then we simply die and

it seems inconceivable and illogical that we have been given free will and choice during our lives but had no free will or choice with our births and deaths outside of suicides...  and yet, this is exactly what has taken place with our lives and with our living of those lives.

BUT, regardless of these inconsistencies, most of us do not appear to be appreciate of our own lives or the lives of our friends and neighbors and potential enemies and those we do not yet know or will never know...  and yet, WE ALL HAVE BEEN GIVEN LIFE.

• manufacturing of HATE also evolve inside of us over the years?
• Did the inability to show appreciation or gratitude evolve inside of us over the years?
• Did the desire to acquire wealth, position, and power evolve inside of us over the years?

SATURDAYS for me are days of reflection and pondering...  and, in so doing I am filled with an inner peace inside even though there is turmoil all around me.

Just Another Fairy Tale...

I started this BLOG in March 2020 because after writing down my thoughts each day since 2001, I decided what the f _ _ _, I might as well share them with others as I really have nothing to lose and perhaps nothing to gain either but at least it gave me something to do each day now that I was retired...

In just 3 quickly passing months and while my readership is still not as high as readers would like, I have been visited by people from TEN FRIGGING COUNTRIES...  and, for me that is a success...  and, worth my continued writing...  although, if no one had visited this BLOG I still would be writing and posting here because I am still retired and have nothing better to do...  seriously...

I retired 5 years ago after working for 45 years and it was not a day too soon either as I had gotten pretty fed up with the bullshits that exists in the workplace by little people who have acquired a little power...  and, what they have not realized yet is that power is not taken, it is earned and given to that person by the people who are their subordinates.

Similarly, in a DOMINANT/submissive relationship, the POWER given to the DOMINANT has been given willingly and voluntarily by the submissive...  so, who really has the power? 

ALSO similarly, are our lives here on earth and the fact that our lives (none of whom asked for birth) were given to us as a gift by GOD or our CREATOR or by whatever other name you want to use...  our birth did not come because any of us asked for it and our death will not arrive either because any of us asked for it...  OUR LIVES ARE BEING CONTROLLED by HE who some of us worship and in so doing give HIM power and DOMINION over us whether we want it or not...   and, that my friends is TRUE POWER...

Why were YOU in particular given birth by your parents???
And, did your mom really give birth to you in the sense of allowing you to grow in her womb?
Was your birth location predetermined?
Were your parents predetermined?
Was your face predetermined?

OR,

was this some crazy result of SCIENTIFIC EVOLUTION OF SPECIES...  that miraculously took place over millions of years...  starting with the BIG BANG and later a POOL OF LIFE from which the first one celled animal grew which later created animals with millions of cells which later and after numerous cell and DNA mutations created MANKIND and over time, evolution quite unscientifically created white, black, brown, olive, and red creatures all of whom would fight each other for domination...  because that fighting survival GENE had evolved from their original DNA...

JUST HOW MUCH BULLSHIT DO YOU WANT TO BELIEVE PEOPLE???