Life on Mars, ID, and a prediction
| January 16, 2009 | Posted by Dave S. under Intelligent Design |
As many of you probably saw in the news NASA announced significant new evidence that microbial life exists on Mars. The evidence is methane plumes. There are some rare abiotic mechanisms which can produce methane but the probability that those account for it are slim. For those who follow such things you might also recall that a meteor from Mars found in Antarctica bore what looked like fossilized bacteria. Along with the recent discovery by Mars surface explorers of water and minerals which only form in the presence of water it’s looking like a pretty strong case when all this is taken together.
So what does this mean for ID? Well, it means that those ID supporters who put stock in the notion of panspermia and directed panspermia are looking good. ID supporters like myself, UD author Doctor (MD) David Cook, and NASA physicist Rob Sheldon (see papers 45 and 46), are some of those. And of course I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the discoverers of the DNA double helix Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel who authored articles and a book about directed panspermia.
I will now make a prediction from an ID perspective. Any living organisms found on Mars will be based on DNA and ribosomes essentially identical to what all life on earth utilizes. This is because life, even the simplest forms, is too complex to have originated in our solar system very early in its history. Wherever it came from, and however it got here, it was the same basic structural form that landed in all places – Earth, Mars, and wherever else in our solar system it may have found suitable conditions.
45 Responses to Life on Mars, ID, and a prediction
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Frankly, I’d have to see a heck of a lot more evidence than some fanciful allusion to “raining microbes” for that scenario to even make it into the ballpark of reasonableness for me.
Pardon the sarcasm, but …
The claim made re: life on Mars is pseudo-scientific nonsense since:
1. There is no agreed upon and non-ambiguous definition of “life.”
2. You have to have assumed that life lives on mars first in order to infer life. So they are merely trying to prove the assumption they’ve already made.
3. Just because life creates plums of methane, there is no reason to give up on science and just say that “life did it.” We should look for laws which could account for said production of methane first. In fact, saying “life did it,” is a science stopper since we would then be giving up on scientific law and chance explanations. There could be another law out there which could account for the plumes of methane which we just don’t know about yet.
4. We have never seen life live on Mars, so we can’t invoke this idea of “life” when we don’t know if it even exists on Mars.
To see the point of my sarcasm, substitute “intelligence” for “life” and “complex, functioning, highly improbable machinery” for “[plumes of] methane” and “on Mars” for “extra-terrestrially.”
IOW, life as a basic concept is life no matter where it is and intelligence as a basic concept is intelligence no matter where it is. Furthermore, it is perfectly scientific to use their effects to infer their existence.
Man, does anybody have real data? All of these, “because of this, then probably this” crap, gets annoying. Can nobody provide any real answers?
I feel like some hardcore, no-nonsense, input is needed when discussion possible life on other planets.
If this is held to be true by any means, then that suggests that the universe itself is integrated with the coding for life. It would be like the ultimate anthropic reality!
Dave Scot…Do you think that panspermia is inherently an ID notion? I mean, who’s to say that the seeding organisms didn’t originate in an environment more suitable for evolution (with higher early O2 content, the right catalytic minerals, etc.)?
O’Leary: “If they have the same genetic structure, wouldn’t the most likely explanation be that the two planets swapped bacteria via rocks?”
So Earth and Mars were bumpin’ into each other? Were early bacteria the planet’s equivalent of STDs?
Dave:
I think it’s important to emphasize the distinction that this would be “an” ID perspective. Not necessarily a direct ID prediction. For example, your prediction is based on, it seems, front loaded evolution with the idea that all life might have evovled (correct me if I am mistaken)…whereas some ID proponents may have other theories – example creationists would typically believe in very limited front loading (ie. front loading within kinds of animals from the start).
If there is bacterial life on Mars, then there is also a creationist prediction that they would resemble life on earth at the molecular & morphological level. I would refer you to Dr Walter Brown’s ‘hydroplate theory’. He explains with this theory the origin of comets, meteors & asteroids (though not necessarily all).
http://www.creationscience.com.....#wp4093458
This is an old prediction of his in fact. Prediction #39 from the above link:
“PREDICTION 39: Bacteria will be found on Mars. Their DNA will be similar to Earth’s bacteria. Furthermore, isotopes of the carbon in Mars’ methane will show the carbon’s biological origin.”
http://www.creationscience.com.....#wp4093458
If you ask me, Dr Brown is a step ahead of these other scientists.
JGuy out
bornagain77 #30:
Some items of interest for your consideration:
19 May 1995: two scientists at Cal Poly showed that bacteria can survive without any metabolism for at least 25 million years; probably they are immortal.
24 November 1995: The New York Times ran a story about bacteria that can survive radiation much stronger than any that Earth has ever experienced.
7 August 1996: NASA announced fossilized evidence of ancient life in meteorite ALH 84001 from Mars.
27 October 1996: geneticists showed evidence that many genes are much older than the fossil record would indicate. Subsequent studies have strengthened this finding.
29 July 1997: a NASA scientist announced evidence of fossilized microscopic life forms in a meteorite not from any known planet.
Spring, 1998: a microfossil that was found in a meteorite and photographed in 1966, was recognized by a Russian microbiologist as a magnetotactic bacterium.
Fall, 1998: NASA’s public position on life-from-space shifted dramatically.
4 January 1999: NASA officially recognized the possibility that life on Earth comes from space.
19 March 1999: NASA scientists announced that two more meteorites hold even stronger fossilized evidence for past life on Mars.
26 April 2000: the German team operating the mass spectrometer on NASA’s Stardust mission announced the detection of very large organic molecules in space. Nonbiological sources for organic molecules so large are not known.
19 October 2000, a team of biologists and a geologist announced the revival of bacteria that are 250 million years old, strengthening that case that bacterial spores can be immortal.
13 December 2000: a NASA team demonstrated that the magnetosomes in Mars meteorite ALH 84001 are biological.
June 2002: Geneticists reported evidence that the evolutionary step from chimps to humans was assisted by viruses.
2 August 2004: Very convincing photos of fossilized cyanobacteria in a meteorite were reported by a NASA scientist.
25 January 2005: J. Craig Venter endorses panspermia.
10 May 2007: E. O. Wilson endorses panspermia.
18 Apr 2008: Richard Dawkins endorses panspermia.
I had pretty much exactly the same attitude toward panspermia as you do when I first heard the idea. Out of interest, however, I bought and read some of Hoyle’s books. I think you would find them interesting as well.
Here is one summarizing Hoyle’s work.
dacook. Read my posting to dave (#36). I woudl agree wiht you that life may be able to make a space trip to another planet…say on a rock or in some ice?!?
Doesn’t it make more sense though, mathematically & intuitively speaking that any life on Mars actually came from the [lush] Earth and that life didn’t hitch-hike (no pun intended) to Earth from Mars, ie. wallah!…life on earth! (from there)… rather life hitchhiking to Mars makes more sense…and Wallah!…..life on Mars is from here. Seems more logical, I think…
buty as my prior post shows..it is one prediction based on a creationist theory.
19 May 1995: two scientists at Cal Poly showed that bacteria can survive without any metabolism for at least 25 million years; probably they are immortal.
Bacteria! The ultimate goal of Darwinian evolution!!!!!
Ancient bacteria dacook? well i got a few things about ancient bacteria:
there are many ancient bacterium fossils recovered and “revived” from salt crystals and amber crystals that have been compared to their living descendants of today. Some bacterium spores, in salt crystals, dating back as far as 250 million years have been revived, had their DNA sequenced, and compared to their offspring of today (Vreeland RH, 2000 Nature). Scientists accomplished this using a technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). To the disbelieving shock of many scientists, both
ancient and modern bacteria were found to have the almost exact DNA sequence.
“Almost without exception, bacteria isolated from ancient material have proven to closely resemble modern bacteria at both morphological and molecular levels.” Heather Maughan*, C. William Birky Jr., Wayne L. Nicholson, William D. Rosenzweig§ and Russell H. Vreeland ; (The Paradox of the “Ancient” Bacterium Which Contains “Modern” Protein-Coding Genes)
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/...../19/9/1637
and this:
Revival and identification of bacterial spores in 25- to 40-million-year-old Dominican amber
Dr. Cano and his former graduate student Dr. Monica K. Borucki said that they had found slight but significant differences between the DNA of the ancient, 25-40 million year old amber-sealed Bacillus sphaericus and that of its modern counterpart, thus ruling out that it is a modern “comtaminant”, yet, at the same time, confounding Darwinists since the change is not nearly as great as the Darwinists “genetic drift” theories require.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/...../5213/1060
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/f.....gewanted=2
Commenting on a “Fitness” test, which compared the ancient bacteris to its modern decendents, Dr. Cano stated:
“We performed such a test, a long time ago, using a panel of substrates (the old gram positive biolog panel) on B. sphaericus. From the results we surmised that the putative “ancient” B. sphaericus isolate was capable of utilizing a broader scope of substrates. Additionally, we looked at the fatty acid profile and here, again, the profiles were similar but more diverse in the amber isolate.”
RJ Cano and MK Borucki (personal correspondence)
Thus, the most solid scientific evidence available for the most ancient DNA scientists are able to find does not support evolution happening on the molecular level to the DNA of bacteria. In fact it conforms to the exact opposite, Genetic Entropy: a loss of information! According to the prevailing naturalistic evolutionary dogma, there “HAS” to be “significant mutational drift” to the DNA of bacteria within 250 million years, even though the morphology (shape) of the bacteria could have remained the same. In spite of their preconceived naturalistic bias, scientists find there is no detectable “drift” from ancient DNA according to the best evidences we have so far. I find it interesting that the naturalistic theory of evolution “expects” and even “demands” that there be a significant amount of drift from the DNA of ancient bacteria while the morphology is expected to remain exactly the same with its descendants. Alas for the naturalists once again,
the hard evidence of ancient DNA has fell in line with the anthropic hypothesis.
As well dacook you seem to be throwing all that is known for the origin of life out the window!
On The Origin Of Life And God – Henry F. Schaefer, III PhD.
http://www.godtube.com/view_vi.....43dd87e4e8
Origin Of Life – Evolution vs. Probability – A Hard Look At The Cold Facts – Prof. John Walton PhD.
http://www.godtube.com/view_vi.....84c57107e7
as well i should point out that you have semi established that bacteria can withstand radiation but you have not even touched on the fact that many underlying chemical cycles lie in support of bacterial life! i.e. Has anyone actually simulated a Martian climate to see if bacteria can survive there in the first place, and if so how long is the life sustained before the constrants are “thrown out of wack” You seem to have left hard science behind and have fallen in with the “life happens if we just add water crowd”.
JGuy;
Panspermia holds that life is ubiquitous in the universe. Therefore it’s neither Mars to Earth nor Earth to Mars. Rather it’s the universe to both Mars and Earth, with comets being the proposed delivery vehicle. Any back and forth between the two would be secondary.
Your way (Earth to Mars only) still leaves the very large problem of how life got, or arose, on Earth in the first place.
tribune7;
In panspermia, bacteria are not any sort of goal. They are a proposed delivery mechanism for genetic programs.
Whether they were created by intelligence or naturalistic processes, either way it’s interesting they can survive so long, don’t you think?
If designed, what is the purpose of such longevity?
If by Darwinian processes, how, and where, was such longevity selected for?
In panspermia, bacteria are not any sort of goal.
In Darwinism, survival is the goal. It seems if you get something immortal, then the goal has been reached so why evolve?
And yes, it is interesting.
DavScot,
Extraterrestrial lifeforms coded in the same language – ok, this would be pretty uncanny.
I think you’d still have a very difficult time convincing your opponents that you’ve made a prediction on the basis of ID theory. Have there not been many predictions from the other side of the fence that extraterrestrial life likely resembles life on earth?
Who gets to claim that their theory predicted an outcome consistent with both views? What does this add? How does this affect the weight of the prediction?