flog

Repeated from the book list, but the quote is sufficiently cool to bear repeating.

"Once, aeons ago, the Appalachians were of a scale and majesty to rival the Himalayas....That the Appalachian Mountains present so much more modest an aspect today is because they have had so much time in which to wear away. The Appalachians are immensely old--older than the oceans and continents (at least in their present configurations), far, far older than almost all other landscape features on earth. When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them."

-- Bill Bryson, A Walk In The Woods

"Such a low background temperature [the 2.7K background radiation left over from the Big Bang] does not directly affect us on Earth because our Sun (normally) grants us a cozy life. But as each generation of stars is born from clouds of interstellar gas, less and less gas remains to comprise the next generation of stars. This precious gas supply will eventually run out, as it already has in nearly half the galaxies in the universe. The small fraction of stars with the highest mass will collapse completely, never to be seen again. Some stars end their lives by blowing their guts across the galaxy in a supernova explosion. This returned gas can then be tapped for the next generation. but the majority of stars--Sun included--ultimately exhaust the fuel at their cores and, after the bulbous giant phase, collapse to form a compact orb of matter that radiates its feeble leftover heat to the frigid universe.

The short list of corpses may sound familiar: black holes, neutron stars (pulsars), and white dwarfs are each a dead end on the evolutionary tree of stars. But what they each have in common is an eternal lock on the material of cosmic construction. In other words, if stars burn out and no new ones are formed to replace them, then the universe will eventually contain no living stars.

How about Earth? We rely on the Sun for a daily infusion of energy to sustain life. If the Sun and the energy from all other stars were cut off from us then mechanical and chemical processes (life included) on and within Earth would 'wind down'. Eventually, the energy of all motion gets lost to friction and the system reaches a single uniform temperature. Earth, sitting beneath starless skies, will lie naked in the presence of the frozen background of the expanding universe. The temperature on Earth will drop, the way a freshly baked apple pie cools on a windowsill. Yet Earth is not alone in this fate. Trillions of years into the future, when all stars are gone, and every process in every nook and cranny of the expanding universe has wound down, all parts of the cosmos will cool to the same temperature as the ever-cooling background. At that time, space travel will no longer provide refuge because even Hell will have frozen over.

We may then declare that the universe has died--not with a bang, but with a whimper."

p 267, "Death by Black Hole" by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

"But what happened before all this cosmic fury? What happened before the beginning?

Astrophysicists have no idea. Rather, our most creative ideas have little or no grounding in experimental science. Yet the religious faithful tend to assert, often with a tinge of smugness that something must have started it all: a force greater than all others, a source from which everything issues. A prime mover. In the mind of such a person that something is, of course, God, whose nature varies from believe to believe but who always bears the responsibility for starting the ball rollling.

But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition that we have yet to identify--a multiverse, for example, in which everything we call the universe amounts to only a tiny bubble in an ocean of suds? Or what if the universe, like its particles just popped into existence from nothing we could see?

These rejoinders typically satisfy no one. Nevertheless, they remind us that informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. And therein lies a fascinating dichotomy. 'The universae always was,' gets no respect as a legitimate answer to 'What was around before the beginning?' But for many religious people, the answer, 'God always was,' is the obvious and pleasing answer to 'What was around before God?'"

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, "Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution", pp 44-45

"Sixty million years ago, not long after an asteroid slammed into the Earth to end the rule of the dinosaurs, India began to sense the presence of Asia. The bulk of what is now the Indian subcontinute had been drifting, footloose, ever since it broke away from Antarctica during the shattering of Pangea [225 Mya]. Now it was moving steadily northward at the rate of a few inches per year, and Asia was in its way. There was only one possible outcome: a continental pileup. When ocean basins collide, one or other of the crusts tends t obe forced downward, back into the Earth's interior. But continents are not nearly dense enough to sink. When two continents crash, the only way is up.

So India crashed into Asia, and the land began to rise. First the rust of Asia squeezed around the sides of the thrusting arriviste. Then, as India wedged itself like a chisel farther beneath Asia, the surface crust crumpled and folder into a range of mountains more than two thousand miles long. These were the beginnings of the Himalayas. And the land around the mounts was forced up into a vast plateau, the "roof of the world", whose average height is greater than the highest mountain in America. India is still pushing. The Himalayas grow by nearly half an inch a year, and Everest and its kin would be taller if their fresh young rocks weren't eroding away as they rose.

Meanwhile, partway around the world, Africa was aggressively reacquainting itself with its old Pangean neighbor, Europe. The first part to hit was a peninsula, sticking out from the northern part of the African plate and bearing what is now Italy and Greece and the countries of former Yugoslavia. This collision threw up the beginning of the Alps. Spain crammed into France, and henceforth there were Pyrenees. And though Africa and Europe may seem as if they are joined only at their Arabian hip, the Mediterranean is slowly closing. When Africa itself collides with the European continent a mighty new range of mountains will be born.

Arabia is now shoving into Iran. Europe and Asia have never parted since Pangea, and Australia is heading northward to join in. In a few tens of millions of years, Australia's left should will probably catch on the southernmost islands of Southeast Asia. It will twist and jerk upward, to slam into Borneo and the southern parts of China."

-- "Snowball Earth", Gabrielle Walker, pp 241-243

From the footnotes:
More can be found at the Paleomap Project web site: http://www.scotese.com/

My personal UFO remains unidentified, leaving me free to believe what I want of it. If I want to, I can decide to follow my heart and imagine that I caught a glimpse of some of the intelligent beings who I really do believe share our universe with us. Or, I can keep my usual skepticism, and hold fast to my argument that it was more likely just a meteor.

And now I think you can understand the title of this book [Beyond UFOs]. No matter what I may believe about my UFO, there is nothing I can do to convince you that my belief is correct, especially if you are as skeptical as me. Some people think that makes skepticism bad, but I don't. It just means that instead of trying to convince you that aliens exist by telling you what I saw with my eyes, I need to go about it by concentrating on evidence that we can examine together. And that means we need to go beyond UFOs, and beyond arguments based solely on personal beliefs and opinions, and turn to science. Only through science will we actually learn something about other life in the universe, if indeed it exists.

-- Jeffrey Bennett, "Beyond UFOs", p 40

Mirroring another item from Facebook before the profile is deactivated:

"The closeness with which Hox genes regulate one another is illustrated - startlingly - by the fact that Hox genes frome one species can regulate corresponding Hox genes in another, totally different species. A Hox gene called 'deformed', for example, is involved in shaping the back of the head in flies. In addition to the DNA sequence that encodes a regulatory protein, the 'deformed' gene contains a regulatory element akin to the operator sequence that Jacob and monod found in the 'lac' operon [a group of 3 genes that work together to oversee the breakdown of lactose in E. coli]. This element is essential for the 'deformed' gene to do its job properly. Mammals, such as mice and humans, also contain a gene very like 'deformed' which is involved in the development of the back of the head, specifically part of the hindbrain. It is reasonable to suppose that the mammalian and fly versions of 'deformed' are homologues - that they share a common evolutionary descent from a gene which shaped the backs of the heads of the long-extinct common ancestor of flies and mammals some 600 million years ago. Given that all other traces of this common ancestor vanished more than half a billion years ago, it is remarkable that genes from flies and mammals can stand in for each other. In 1992, Alexander Awgulewitsch and Donna Jacobs of the Medical University of South Carolina took the 'deformed' regulator element from flies and showed that it regulated the activity of the mouse version of 'deformed', in the mouse hindbrain. To show that this was no fluke, William McGinnis of Yale University and colleagues did a converse experiment, showing how regulatory elements associated with the version of 'deformed' found in humans could substitute for the 'deformed' regulatory element in embryonic flies. These amazing results show that Hox genes have been as vital to the evolution of animal form as they are to the creation of every new animal embryo - whether fly maggot or human baby." -- "Jacob's Ladder", Henry Gee, p 179

"I believe both the existence of broad algal fronds and Eophyllophyton hints at something rather important; they suggest that marine and terrestrial plants evolved the capacity to make flattened organs long before the idea took off. We should be cautious, however, in supposing from evidence of this sort that all land plants had the genetic capability of producing leaves whenever in their evolutionary history it suited them. To reach beyond speculation of this sort, we need to turn to molecular developmental genetics, the study of genetic pathways used and reused to build organisms. Making a leaf, and much else besides, requires homeobox gene networks (also present in animals) t organize growth and development by ensuring cells take on the right form and function depending on where they are on the plant. In plants, the so-called knotted homeobox gene (KNOX) family plays a critical role in leaf formation and is present in some green algae, mosses, ferns, conifers, and flowering plants. It functions in a similar manner in different plant groups: when KNOX genes of a fern are put into a flowering plant and vice versa, they still work. In other words, plants with diverse evolutionary histories posses them and their function is highly conserved, exactly as we would expect if the genes are very old." -- "The Emerald Planet", David Beerling, pp 19-20

I'm left wondering where the evidence is for the wall of separation that evolution deniers hypothesize exists between species. They are fond of admitting (because the plain facts of reality require them to, not because it is a natural conclusion of their hypothesis) that "microevolution" (that is to say, adaptation or variation) occurs, but are equally fond of proclaiming that "macroevolution" (that is to say, speciation) never occurs. The reason speciation doesn't occur is because species represent separate kinds of god's special creation and the kinds must remain distinct. Besides, it's still "just a mosquito/horse/ape/bacterium" anyway.

Ok, so if that is the case, then why are species so goddamned similar on a molecular level?