Scary Scorpions

File this in the handy file you keep for reasons to be thankful we live now instead of 390 million years ago:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2007) — The discovery of a giant fossilised claw from an ancient sea scorpion indicates that when alive it would have been about two and a half meters long, much taller than the average man.

This find, from rocks 390 million years old, suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought.

As if this weren't scary enough, next we're treated to some really crazy quotesmanship from one of the docs:

Dr Simon Braddy from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, co-author of an article about the find, said, 'This is an amazing discovery. We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies, but we never realised, until now, just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were.'

Why was such a large critter with such a large claw needed? The surprisingly witty story gives us the answer:

Some geologists believe that giant arthropods evolved due to higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere in the past. Others, that they evolved in an 'arms race' alongside their likely prey, the early armoured fish.

Arms race? Like a claw competition?

By the way, how did that extra oxygen get there without us to jack it up, as we're supposedly doing with greenhouse gases?

Quote Of The Day: GULP! Edition

"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened." -- Jack Szostak, Harvard Medical School

Jack Szostak is reputedly one of the leaders of the frightening and unethical scientific movement that's seeking to create artificial life from scratch, and the best he can hope for is to turn on the switch, stand back, and see what happens.

just because we have the ability to walk up to someone and poke their eye out, that doesn't make it right, no more than having the technical ability makes it right to try to create molecules that are alive. But they are pursuing it, nonetheless:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer.

Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life."

"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. "We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways—in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."

That first cell of synthetic life—made from the basic chemicals in DNA—may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you'll have to look in a microscope to see it.

"Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe," Bedau said. "This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role."

Frankly, I don't give these folks much chance for success. Molecules are marvelously, divinely complex, with so many parts that the time required and chances for error make their manufacture by humans unlikely.

Still, very smart minds are working on the probem just because there is funding available to allow them to do it. Why do we need to make molecules? Who knows? They say these molecules might eat up greenhouse gas (how trendy) or eat toxic waste.

Of course, they could also use good ol' evolution to become something else entirely -- something, perhaps that eats beneficial gases in the atmosphere or creates a massive spawn of new toxicity.

From Goo To Zoo To You To Confused

It was a bad day for the the chimp is your ancestor bunch today and a good day for those of us who see a divine hand in the putting together of things.

The source: nothing less than Maeve Leakey ... yes, those Leakeys, who are still sifting the dirt in Kenya.

The old theory was that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became us, Homo sapiens. But those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years, Leakey and colleagues report in a paper published in Thursday's journal Nature.

In 2000 Leakey found an old H. erectus complete skull within walking distance of an upper jaw of the H. habilis, and both dated from the same general time period. That makes it unlikely that H. erectus evolved from H. habilis, researchers said.

It's the equivalent of finding that your grandmother and great- grandmother were sisters rather than mother-daughter, said study co- author Fred Spoor, a professor of evolutionary anatomy at the University College in London. (Breitbart)

On a personal level, I couldn't be more thrilled with the timing of the announcement. I just finished listening to the audiobook of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is full-bore evolutionist and espoused the now old school H. habilis to H. erectus jabber.

The whole time I was listening to it, I was thinking, "Yeah, but how can they say they're related? It seems to me that it's much more likely that they're all just different critters, like Jersey cows and Herefords.

And now it turns out I was right.

Overall what it paints for human evolution is a "chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us," Spoor said in a phone interview from a field office of the Koobi Fora Research Project in northern Kenya.

To Bryson's credit, he does say that evolution is a relentless march toward all sorts of critters, some that have come and gone, some that have hung around. But he doesn't see humans as a particularly significant earthly life form.

The latest Leakey discovery doesn't do much for Bryson's point of view. It's becoming increasing clear that Homo sapiens are unique and quite different from their bi-pedal, opposed-thumb inhabitants of the ancient African plains.

So chalk up another one for God.