27-10-2014, 03:27 PM
Footnotes
[1] I am not happy about the Israeli produce and will not buy it. Palestinians probably lived on that farm land before they were forcibly evicted for Jewish "settlers" and the store only began trading with Chinese farms after a healthy debate among the cooperative's members and its board, and a compromise was met, in that the cooperative would only do business with Chinese firms that adhered to the cooperative's environmental, animal, and worker treatment standards. I have never heard of that kind of debate ever happening at another American business, which is why I always shop for my food there, even though in many ways it is still mired in scarcity-based practices.
[2] See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews's The Complete World of Human Evolution, p. 208.
[3] See The Beginning of the World as We Know It, edited by John P. Rafferty, pp. 115-120.
[4] For instance, many islands and mountain chains have been formed by volcanic activity, and the mountain chain that formed the Hawaiian Islands is very evident on the Pacific Ocean's floor. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
![[Image: seamount.jpg]](http://www.ahealedplanet.net/seamount.jpg)
Today's satellite technologies can measure the rate and direction in which the tectonic plates move (about the rate that fingernails grow), and rocks in the volcanoes of the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain have been dated, with the oldest volcanoes determined to be more than 80 million years old. Those radioactive ages conform to the rates of movement, as well as the eroded states of the older volcanoes.
Another example is the fossil record and how its relative ages were established long before radioactivity was discovered. When radioactive dating was developed, it not only confirmed the relative dates, but it also established that the estimated absolute dates developed in the 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century were not that far off. In Chapter IX of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, he estimated that the latter part of the Mesozoic Era may have been more than 300 mya. It was more like 100 mya, or well within an order of magnitude of what it is considered to be today, which is far more precise than the 6,000 years of "begats" in the Book of Genesis.
[5] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 34-35, and 89-92.
[6] For example, on sulfur see Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 42-43, and 67-68, and for nitrogen see "Stable isotopes as indicators of change in the food procurement and food preference of Viking Age and Early Christian populations on Gotland (Sweden), by Steven B. Kosiba, et al., in Journal of Anthropological Anthropology, 26 (2007), pp. 394-411, and "Use of Nitrogen-15 natural abundance method to identify nitrate sources in Kansas groundwater," by M.A. Townsend, et al., Proceedings of Waste Research Technology Conference, 2002.
[7] See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard's Energy and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 235-237.
[8] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, pp. 135-140.
[9] See, The Beginning of the World as We Know It, edited by John P. Rafferty, pp. 79-155.
[10] See Jared Diamond's Collapse, pp. 136-156. During my studies, I came upon challenges to the version of Anasazi collapse in Diamond's work, and the book Questioning Collapse, edited by Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee, was a direct challenge to Diamond's hypothesis. Although I have never entirely agreed with Diamond's work, Questioning Collapse was arguably libelous. It literally turned Diamond's views on the Australian megafaunal extinctions upside down. In his Guns, Germs, and Steel, published in 1997, Diamond "credited" humans with that mass extinction, while a contributing author of Questioning Collapse, on the same page where he mentioned Guns, Germs, and Steel, rather snidely wrote that Diamond argued for the opposite: that humans had nothing to do with the extinctions. That means that the author did not even read Guns, Germs, and Steel or that he expected his audience to be uninformed or lazy. That was also by no means a new opinion of Diamond's, as his earlier The Third Chimpanzee, published in 1992, has a chapter titled, "The Golden Age that Never Was," wherein Diamond discussed a number of mass extinctions likely caused by humans, including Australia. Although Diamond's theses deserved to be challenged, as all hypotheses do, efforts such as Questioning Collapse reflect the sloppy scholarship that can abound regarding these subjects.
[11] See Mary H. Schweitzer's "Blood from Stone", in Scientific American's special collector's edition on dinosaurs, titled, Dinosaurs! How they lived; Why they Died, Summer 2014, pp. 104-11.
[12] This essay links many times to Wikipedia. Readers should be cautioned, however. I performed an experiment with a friend in 2008, and the results showed a rather pronounced imperial, Eurocentric bias. On controversial "fringe" subjects, particularly ones that threaten the global power structure, such as free energy suppression, Wikipedia can be worse than worthless (although that article has marginally improved over the years), with Wikipedia articles dominated by trolls, and some of them were professionals. I use Wikipedia with caution, and I suggest that readers of this essay use similar caution. In several places at Wikipedia where this essay links to, I have seen errors and mainstream biases, which will probably always plague Wikipedia. In general, as I wrote this essay, the closer the story of life on Earth got to the human chapters, the more "vandalism" was evident in Wikipedia's articles, where people promoted their theories. When the story finally started dealing with Homo sapiens, the vandalism was so great at times that I hesitated to link to the articles, as they were so badly marred. Readers should be aware of that bias, which is consistent with how the massacre article was distorted and vandalized. If this essay becomes popular, I will suggest that readers might think of donating to Wikipedia. I respect their goal, and the work of millions has made it a valuable resource, even with its obvious limitations.
[13] See Thomas Suddendorf's The Gap, pp. 4-5.
[14] See, for instance, Douglas Futuyma's Evolution, pp. 13-14, or Stephen Marshak's Essentials of Geology, pp. 6-7.
[15] See Michael J. Benton's When Life Nearly Died, chapter 5. See Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky, pp. 34-35.
[16] See Henry Gee's The Accidental Species, p. xiii.
[17] See Donald Prothero's The Eocene-Oligocene Transition, pp. 130-136. Prothero argued that studying mass extinctions became a fad. But studying them was taboo for more than a century, too. Was the "fad" partly an overreaction to suppression? Prothero's observation about how scientists interact all too often is on page 130, which states: "Scientific meetings can degenerate into shouting matches and name-calling, although the preferred method of attack is to demolish one's opponent with a witty riposte."
[18] The tale of the Big Bang and the physics of stars and solar systems can be found in numerous places on the Internet. A brief summary of the Big Bang and its immediate aftermath can be found in A.C. Phillips's The Physics of Stars, pp. 1-3, and a less technical account is in Mark Foster Mortimer's Civilization's Future, How Energy Defines and Constrains our Progress, pp. 5-8.
[19] See also Edward O. Wilson's Consilience, chapter 3.
[20] Many examples can be provided, such as the initially ridiculed light bulb and powered flight; demonstrations of those technologies were made in public, but mainstream scientists ignored the demonstrations as if they were never made. For a less famous example, the great linguist Joseph Greenberg ruffled many specialist feathers with his generalist synthesis for cataloging the world's languages by seeking universal similarities. His generalist synthesis, while having errors in the details, is widely accepted today as largely accurate. See an account of the controversy in Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, pp. 218-232. The taboo against studying mass extinctions prevailed for more than a century and was broken by a team led by a Nobel Laureate working outside of his field of expertise.
[21] See, for instance, Frans B. M. de Wall and Pier Francesco Ferrari, eds., The Primate Mind, for a bottom-up approach, which is a departure from the top-down approaches. In that instance, the top-down approach compared non-human primates with humans, seeing how close their cognitive processes came to human processes. The bottom-up approach explored the foundations of non-human primate cognition, not how they compared to human cognition.
[22] The inventors of the heat pump that my partner sold cut their published performance data in half so that engineers would not ridicule that "impossible" data. The microscopes of Royal Rife and Gaston Naessens are older than I am, and those microscopes attain optical resolutions considered "impossible" by today's optical theory, some of which hails all the way back to Isaac Newton. When Naessens tried patenting his microscope, with its "impossible" optical resolutions, he was unable to explain its resolutions in terms of orthodox optical theory and had to abandon the patent process. Rife earlier invented a microscope that attained similar "impossible" resolutions, and while the medical establishment did its best to crush Rife's work, surviving micrographs prove that it indeed attained such resolutions. Brown's Gas has long been an enigma, with its exact composition unknown. It is made of the hydrogen and oxygen resulting from splitting water, but seems to be unusually bonded. The transmutation experiment with Brown's Gas has been performed a hundred times or more, including by national governments, and orthodox theory cannot explain the results. While scientists were stumped over just exactly what Brown's Gas was and how it produced "impossible" results, Yull Brown was not too interested in the theories; he was more interested in what Brown's Gas could do. Sparky Sweet's free energy device, which produced a million times the energy that went into it, and also produced antigravity effects, was baffling even to Sparky. He and his partner wrote a book to explain how it worked, but there was still plenty of mystery regarding how it worked. When Sparky demonstrated it to a close colleague, Sparky himself shrugged in amazement, saying that it indeed defied electric theory, but there it was, working. The free energy, antigravity, and other exotic technologies that were demonstrated to my friend blew his mind, and almost any scientist viewing that demonstration would have been stunned into bewilderment.
[23] See David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order, pp. 240-245, which refers to Bohm's original calculation in his Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, p. 163. Bohm's calculation is summarized as follows: "If one computes the amount of energy that would be in one cubic centimeter of space…it turns out to be very far beyond the total energy of all the matter in the known universe." See discussion of Bohm's theory and the evidence for it in Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe, pp. 51-55, and Bohm's opinions on the relationship between consciousness and quantum phenomena in Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, pp. 213-215.
[24] In Einstein's "Sidelights on Relativity," a speech delivered on May 5[SUP]th[/SUP], 1920, at the University of Leyden, Einstein finished with: "Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical properties; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether."
[25] See Jeane Manning and Joel Garbon's Breakthrough Power, p. 123 for thirty of the names that Jeane has collected over the years for the field that is tapped by so-called free energy technology.
[26] A recent example is Nassim Haramein's "Quantum Gravity and the Holographic Mass", Physical Review & Research International, volume 3, issue 4, October - December 2013, pp. 270-292, and related press release.
[27] "Black projects" are efforts that the public is not officially aware of, engaged in by various "national security" organizations, some large "aerospace" companies and other private interests, many of whose names have never been publicly revealed.
[28] The tales of Rife's and Naessens's microscopes are some of the best that I know of to demonstrate the literal blindness of establishment science. Naessens is still active in 2014, and his microscopes are available to any scientist with the courage to look through the lens. If attaining such "impossible" resolutions were all that those microscopes did, that would be plenty, but those microscopes were the primary instruments used by their inventors to investigate life processes at greater resolutions than any electron microscope or other establishment microscope can attain. They both independently confirmed the general findings of one of Louis Pasteur's contemporaries, Antoine Béchamp, whose research pointed to a very different dynamic of life processes than Pasteur's germ theory, which may have been a poorly understood plagiarism of Béchamp's work. The findings of those microscopes led to, among other things, cancer treatments that are harmless, cheap, and effective, but Morris Fishbein and the American Medical Association wiped Rife out, and Naessens has been treated similarly. They may have even discovered the boundary between inanimate matter and life, which exists in the sub-cellular milieu. That situation is one of the more stunning and public examples of vested economic interests suppressing scientific advances.
[29] Two works that come to mind as I write this were See Thomas Suddendorf's The Gap and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, but I do not want to pick on them unnecessarily. Many orthodox works that I saw took that easy way out when dealing with phenomena that falsified the materialist models of consciousness.
[30] For instance, numerous psi experiments have produced highly consistent results over many years, such as Ganzfeld experiments, receiving information in dreams, and other tests, including influencing the decay rate of radioactive elements. Those thousands of experiments were also subjected to professional meta-analysis, and the experimental results demonstrated high correlation and the odds of their being chance results are less than one in trillions, and even smaller probabilities. See Dean Radin's Entangled Minds, chapter six, and Chris Carter's Science and Psychic Phenomena, pp. 60-104. Carter's book and Robert McLuhan's Randi's Prize analyze the reactions of a politically active arm of the scientific establishment known as organized skepticism. After a scandal, when the leading "skeptical" organization tried performing original research and seemingly manipulated the data to conform to their conclusion (see Chris Carter's Science and Psychic Phenomena, pp. 24-37, and here), they never performed original research again, but challenge experimental results that call into question the materialist assumptions of mainstream science. Their challenges are generally ad hoc hypotheses that often beg the question, and their objections have become more logically strained over the years. My encounters with members of that organization were shocking, as they proved themselves to be deeply dishonest. For scientific investigations of paranormal phenomena, Randi's Prize and Michael E. Flynn's The Articulate Dead are good introductions to the kinds of findings that have been adduced.
[31] See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, pp. 237-255. See Nick Herbert's Elemental Mind, pp. 140-162.
[32] Regarding the foundation of physics, Einstein wrote: "It is basic for physics that one assumes a real world existing independently from any act of perception but this we do not know." See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, p. 166. See Rupert Sheldrake's The Science Delusion for a discussion of the faith-based assumptions that gird mainstream science, which include: ever since the Big Bang, when everything came from nothing, all matter and energy has been at the same total amount; the so-called "laws" of nature are invariable; nature has no purpose, and evolution has no goal; all consciousness is an illusory and ephemeral byproduct of the operation of brains; all biological inheritance is material, there is no such thing as psychic phenomena all evidence adduced so far for it is due to error, wishful thinking, and fraud; mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works. None of those assumptions has been subjected to falsification, and several cannot be falsified, which is the acid test of science. Also, there is a great deal of evidence that those assumptions may be false.
[33] See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, p, 101.
[34] In Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, pp. 3-5, Rosenblum describes a visit to Einstein's home in the 1950s, when Rosenblum was a graduate student in physics. Einstein wanted to discuss the implications of quantum theory. In Rosenblum's quantum physics class, the professor skipped over that part of the book (which Einstein's protégé David Bohm wrote), to get into the math. It was not until many years later that Rosenblum began to understand what Einstein was concerned about. Late in his life, Einstein "reproached" Heisenberg for the randomness introduced by quantum theory. Einstein was upset by the quantum theory's creation of reality by the observer, which would theoretically make the entire universe subjective, not objective. But his greatest disquiet was reserved for the "spooky action at a distance," now termed "quantum entanglement," where separate objects instantly interact with each other, no matter how far apart they are.
[35] See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, p. 186.
[36] See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, chapter 10.
[37] In The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman said, "It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is." Werner Heisenberg voiced the same caution.
[38] See, for instance, Johannes Wirz's "Progress towards complementarity in genetics." Also, molecular clock data, whose timing is based on an assumption of macro-predictable random mutations of DNA, has been shown to be inaccurate, and the early exuberance toward genetic science has been sobered by the reality. Scientists can see what mutated, but have had to become more modest on asserting when it happened. See Richard Cowen's History of Life, pp. 221-223. See Rupert Sheldrake's The Science Delusion, chapter 6.
[39] See T. Langen, et al.'s "Local emergence of thermal correlations in an isolated quantum many-body system", Nature Physics, volume 9, issue 10, pp. 640-643, October 2013.
[40] See A.C. Phillips's The Physics of Stars, p. 23. See Peter Ward and David Brownlee's The Life and Death of Planet Earth, p. 103.
[41] See Sean A. Crowe, et al.'s "Atmospheric oxygenation three billion years ago" in Nature, issue 201, pp. 535-538, September 26, 2013.
[42] The only other plausible explanation for the Great Oxygenation Event is ultraviolet light's splitting water and, as the hydrogen escaped to space, the oxygen was left behind. But early on, atmospheric oxygen would have created the ozone layer and provided a "negative feedback" to ultraviolet light's impact. See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 25-26.
[43] A relatively recent and spectacular event to demonstrate that dynamic is the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora. The next year was called the "Year Without a Summer," as the volcanic ash caused a brief global cooling.
[44] See Peter Ward's "Impact from the Deep" in Scientific American, October, 2006.
[45] See Nigel Harris's "The elevation history of the Tibetan Plateau and its implications for the Asian monsoon", Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, volume 241, Issue 1, November 2006, pp. 4-15. See Chengshan Wang, et al.'s "Constraints on the early uplift history of the Tibetan Plateau", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, April 1, 2008, volume 105, number 13, pp. 49874992.
[46] See Douglas S. Wilson, et al.'s "Initiation of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and estimates of total Antarctic ice volume in the earliest Oligocene", Geophysical Research Letters, volume 40, issue 16, pp. 4305-4309, August 2013. The research put the initial formation of the West Antarctic ice sheet at the same time as the East Antarctic ice sheet, about 34 mya.
[47] The shorter light's wavelength is, the more energy its photons possess, and visible light is ineffective in breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen. Today, scientists are using catalysts and other methods so that visible light can power the process of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, to use the hydrogen as fuel. Photosynthesis also uses light to split water, but does so with catalytic enzymes.
[48] See Richard Cowen's History of Life, p. 6.
[49] See a discussion of that hydrogen-oxygen dynamic in Nick Lane's Oxygen: The Molecule that made the World, especially pp. 319-320, and Lane's Life Ascending, chapter 3.
[50] See Jonathan Lunine's Earth: Evolution of a Habitable World, pp. 208-209.
[51] It is also theorized that the size of the atoms determined where they largely ended up in Earth's layers, with iron largely sinking to Earth's core, while lighter elements such as the alkali and alkaline metals migrated toward the surface. See discussion in Jonathan Lunine's Earth, pp. 124-127.
[52] See Jonathan Lunine's Earth, p. 205.
[53] The paper "Biotic vs. abiotic Earth: A model for mantle hydration and continental coverage", in Planetary and Space Science, was first electronically published on October 25, 2013, by Dennis Höning, et al., and had media coverage, as this essay was being written, and is part of a general trend of seeing life processes as key terraforming processes.
[54] See Jonathan Lunine's Earth, pp. 200-209.
[55] See Peter Ward and David Brownlee's The Life and Death of Planet Earth, pp. 96-99. Also see Peter Ward's Out of Thin Air, p. 231, which in turn refers to the PALEOMAP Project.
[56] A similar version of the table below, as far as the human body is concerned, is here.
[TABLE="width: 601, align: center"]
[TR]
[TD]Description
[/TD]
[TD="colspan: 4"]Proportion of
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]Earth's Atoms
[/TD]
[TD]Earth's Mass
[/TD]
[TD]Earth's Atmospheric Atoms
[/TD]
[TD]The Human Body's Atoms
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Oxygen
[/TD]
[TD]50%
[/TD]
[TD]30%
[/TD]
[TD]21%
[/TD]
[TD]24%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Iron
[/TD]
[TD]16%
[/TD]
[TD]32%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.00067%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Silicon
[/TD]
[TD]14%
[/TD]
[TD]15%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Magnesium
[/TD]
[TD]15%
[/TD]
[TD]14%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.007%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Sulfur
[/TD]
[TD]1.6%
[/TD]
[TD]3%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.04%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Aluminum
[/TD]
[TD]1.2%
[/TD]
[TD]1.4%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Nickel
[/TD]
[TD]1.0%
[/TD]
[TD]1.8%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Calcium
[/TD]
[TD]0.88%
[/TD]
[TD]1.5%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.24%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Chromium
[/TD]
[TD]0.21%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Hydrogen
[/TD]
[TD]0.020%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]63%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Sodium
[/TD]
[TD]0.013%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.04%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Potassium
[/TD]
[TD]0.0073%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.03%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Titanium
[/TD]
[TD]0.0040%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Fluorine
[/TD]
[TD]0.0013%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Carbon
[/TD]
[TD]0.00050%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]12%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Phosphorous
[/TD]
[TD]0.00043%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.22%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Chlorine
[/TD]
[TD] 1-in-2.1 million
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.03%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Nitrogen
[/TD]
[TD] 1-in-4.1 million
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]78%
[/TD]
[TD]0.58%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Cobalt
[/TD]
[TD] 1-in-22 million
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.000003%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Argon
[/TD]
[TD] 1-in-2.5 billion
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.9%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Uranium
[/TD]
[TD] 1-in-4.5 billion
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Gold
[/TD]
[TD] 1-in-1.5 trillion
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Carbon Dioxide
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.04%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Oceans
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] 1-in-4,400
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Atmosphere
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] 1-in-1.2 million
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Biosphere
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] 1-in-3.2 billion
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[57] See Peter Ward and David Brownlee's Rare Earth, for a discussion of those dynamics that may be rare in the universe.
[58] The atmospheric pressure may have been more than 60 times today's. See Jonathan Lunine's Earth, p. 171.
[59] See Nick Lane's Life Ascending, chapter 1, and his Power, Sex, Suicide, chapter 6. Another hypothesis is that life evolved in some freshwater pond on land. See Richard Cowen's History of Life, pp. 12-13.
[60] Andrew Knoll wrote on page 245 of his Life on a Young Planet that scientists see the ancient religious texts as parables, and that, "Science's creation story accounts for process and history, not intent." On science and religion, Knoll wrote, "That these two ways of comprehending should be confused in either form or purpose strikes me as both absurd and unfortunate." But arch-materialists such as Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking, and "skeptics" such as Michael Shermer are the face of science that the public sees. The genuine giants of physics, such as Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, are immensely better examples of how scientists approach those issues.
[61] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, chapter 8.
[62] See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard's Energy and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 231-233.
[63] See Jonathan Lunine's Earth, pp. 169-176. See Peter Ward and David Brownlee's The Life and Death of Planet Earth, pp. 57-67, and 105-115.
[64] See Peter Ward and David Brownlee's The Life and Death of Planet Earth, chapters 6 and 7.
[65] See Nick Lane's Life Ascending, chapter 4.
[66] See Nick Lane's "The Evolution of Oxidative Stress", p. 4, in Principles of Free Radical Biomedicine, volume 1, K. Pantopoulos and H. M. Schipper, editors.
[67] See Stefan Bengtson's "Origins and Early Evolution of Predation", Paleontological Society Papers, volume 8, 2002.
[68] See Oliver Morton's Eating the Sun, pp. 168-174.
[69] Chemosynthesis relies on the potential energy of chemicals, as does all life, and the only way that the potential energy exists on Earth is because the Sun's energy keeps the oceans and atmosphere in chemical disequilibrium with Earth's crust. See Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, p. 100. See Oliver Morton's Eating the Sun, p. 173.
[70] See Nick Lane's Life Ascending, p. 25.
[71] Oliver Morton's Eating the Sun surveys the days of unraveling the details of photosynthesis and the chase for Nobel Prizes that attended the pursuit. As recounted on page 45, when Morton asked Andrew Benson if Melvin Calvin deserved his Nobel Prize (for discovering what is called the Calvin Cycle, also known as the Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle), Benson replied that he deserved it more than Calvin did.
[72] See Nick Lane's "The Evolution of Oxidative Stress", chapter 1 in Principles of Free Radical Biomedicine, volume 1, K. Pantopoulos and H. M. Schipper, editors.
[73] See Nick Lane's Life Ascending, chapter 3.
[74] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, p. 73.
[75] See Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky, p. 118. See Nick Lane's Oxygen, p. 73. See Richard Cowen's History of Life, pp. 24-25.
[76] Another hypothesis is that purple photosynthesizing bacteria oxidized iron in its photosynthesis process. Two non-life-based hypotheses for forming at least some BIFs are: ultraviolet light's oxidizing the iron before the ozone layer formed, and the chemistry of hydrothermal vents in the oceans creating BIFs. See a discussion of the BIF formation controversy in Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 37-49. See Jelte P. Harnmeijer's "Banded Iron-Formation: A Continuing Enigma of Geology".
[77] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, pp. 161-163.
[78] The methanogen population may have been severely reduced due to a nickel famine.
[79] See Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, chapter 3.
[80] There was some chemical evidence of eukaryotes existing as early as 2.7 bya, announced in 1999. See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, p. 94, and Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 35-36. However, the leader of the team that produced the evidence was part of an effort to investigate the situation further, and in 2008 that effort determined that the evidence was not as old as originally thought. This is an example of how the evidence regarding findings of early Earth is tentative and subject to revision to the point of completely discarding the evidence.
[81] See Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, p. 12.
[82] See discussion in Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide regarding the controversy regarding the pedigree of mitochondria. On the purple bacterium origin, see these papers (1, 2). According to the hydrogen hypothesis, hydrogenosomes and mitochondria descended from the same ancestor. Some scientists believe that mitochondria descended from a bacterium in the Rickettsia genus. Whatever the true ancestor was, all hypotheses agree that it was purple.
[83] The formula for surface area is four-times-pi-times-the-radius-squared (4Ï€r[SUP]2[/SUP]), and the formula for volume is 4/3Ï€r[SUP]3[/SUP]. See discussion in Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, pp. 121-123.
[84] See discussion in Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, p. 130.
[85] A man's body contains around 100 trillion cells, and each cell contains, on average, 200 mitochondria, and there are about 10,000 ATP Synthase motors per mitochondria, which totals 200 quintillion ATP Synthase molecules. ATP Synthase rotates at up to 700 times per second.
[86] See Nick Lane's "The Evolution of Oxidative Stress", p. 10, in Principles of Free Radical Biomedicine, volume 1, K. Pantopoulos and H. M. Schipper, editors. See discussion in Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, chapter 8.
[87] See Jonathan Lunine's Earth, pp. 139-141.
[88] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, p. 72.
[89] See Miklós Müller, et al.'s "Biochemistry and Evolution of Anaerobic Energy Metabolism in Eukaryotes", Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, June 2012, volume 76, number 2, pp. 444-495.
[90] See Nick Lane's Life Ascending, pp. 163-165 for a delightful description of the workings of complex cells.
[91] See Nick Lane's Life Ascending, chapter 6.
[92] See Peter Ward's and Donald Brownlee's Rare Earth, pp. 222-226. See abstract of Jacques Laskar, et al.'s "Stabilization of the Earth's obliquity by the Moon", Nature, February 18, 1993, volume 361, pp. 615-617.
[93] See Jonathan Lunine's Earth, p. 205.
[94] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 16-28. See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, pp. 106-107.
[95] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, p. 24.
[96] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, pp. 157-159. See these links (1, 2, 3).
[97] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, p. 154.
[98] Andrew Knoll, in his Life on a Young Planet, on page 150, estimates that the event that led to plants happened at least 1.2 bya.
[99] See Oliver Morton's Eating the Sun, p. 206.
[100] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, pp. 149-150.
[101] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, chapter 6.
[102] See Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, chapters 9 and 10.
[103] This concept is used in The 10,000 Year Explosion, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, p. 181, to explain the rise of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, as they genetically adapted to digesting lactose, making raising cattle for their milk feasible, which produces five times the calories per acre of raising cattle for meat.
[104] See Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, pp. 107-147.
[105] Even the Frankensteinian experiments that may well be happening in the above-top-secret world are not likely to give a tree a brain, or allow humans to get their energy via photosynthetic skin.
[106] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, p. 151.
[107] Some cyanobacterial colonies eventually developed filaments with specialized cells. See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, p. 112.
[108] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, pp. 4, 34.
[109] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, p. 66.
[110] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, p. 87.
[111] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, p. 128.
[112] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, pp. 144-147. See Gabrielle Walker's Snowball Earth, pp. 74-78, 131-132.
[113] See William F. Ruddiman's Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, pp. 169-174.
[114] See, for instance, Jeffrey T. Kiehl and Christine A. Shields's "Climate simulation of the latest Permian: Implications for mass extinction", Geology, September 2005, pp. 757-760. See Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky, pp. 121-128. Ward made a video on this subject on PBS, here.
[115] See Gabrielle Walker's Snowball Earth, pp. 91-92.
[116] See Gabrielle Walker's Snowball Earth, pp. 83-100.
[117] Hoffman's journey is told in great detail in Gabrielle Walker's Snowball Earth.
[118] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, pp. 4-49, for the early days of ice age discoveries and theory, and the role of erratics.
[119] See Hoffman, el at., "A Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth", Science, August 28, 1998, volume 281.
[120] See D.E. Canfield's "A new model for Proterozoic ocean chemistry," in Nature, December 3, 1998, volume 396.
[121] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 60-65.
[122] See Don E. Canfield, et al.'s "Late-Neoproterozoic Deep-Ocean Oxygenation and the Rise of Animal Life", Science, January 5, 2007, volume 315. This is a controversial area. See G. J. Retallack's "Ediacaran Gaskiers Glaciation of Newfoundland reconsidered", Journal of the Geological Society 2013, volume 170, pp. 19-36.
[123] See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 39-44.
[124] See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion, p. 128.
[125] See Daniel H. Rothman, et al.'s "Dynamics of the Neoproterozoic carbon cycle", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, July 8, 2003, volume 100, number 14, pp. 8124-8129. See Andy Ridgwell's "Evolution of the ocean's "biological pump", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, October 4, 2011, volume 108, number 40, pp. 1648516486. The model proposed by Rothman and associates has been generally dismissed, partly because there would not have been enough fecal pellets for the job. See discussion in Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 54-55. Nick Butterfield's hypothesis is that larger organisms in the nascent "arms race" sank instead of floated in the water column, achieving a similar effect.
[126] See John P. Grotzinger, et al.'s "Enigmatic origin of the largest-known carbon isotope excursion in Earth's history", (abstract here) Nature Geoscience, 4, 285292 (2011). See Cal Tech's article on their investigations here.
[127] See Grant Young's "Evolution of Earth's climatic system: Evidence from ice ages, isotopes, and impacts", GSA Today, October 2013.
[128] See Christian J. Bjerrum and Donald E. Canfield's "Towards a quantitative understanding of the late Neoproterozoic carbon cycle", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, April 5, 2011, volume 108, number 14, pp. 55425547 (also here).
[129] This glaciation is called the Gaskiers glaciation, but it is currently questioned as being a global glaciation. See G. J. Retallack's "Ediacaran Gaskiers Glaciation of Newfoundland reconsidered", Journal of the Geological Society 2013, v.170; pp. 19-36. However, see data showing the Gaskiers glaciation discontinuity in carbon ratio data in See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion, p. 41.
[130] See evidence of repeated excursions in Charles Verdel et al.'s "The Shuram and subsequent Ediacaran carbon isotope excursions from southwest Laurentia, and implications for environmental stability during the metazoan radiation", Geological Society of America Bulletin, July/August 2011. Although the authors of that paper do not state the hypothesis directly, those kinds of papers are used by a school of thought, of which Nick Butterfield is a prominent representative, which sees life as the protagonist and geology/environment as the scenery.
[131] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 67-68.
[132] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 65-67.
[133] See Geoffrey Wray, et al.'s "Molecular Evidence for Deep Precambrian Divergences Among Metazoan Phyla", Science, October 25, 1996, volume 274. See another of Wray's papers here, on the subject.
[134] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, pp. 200-205. See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 57-58.
[135] The most beautiful fossil book I have yet encountered is Prehistoric Life, published by Dorling Kindersley.
[136] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, color plates 4 and 6.
[137] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, p. 151.
[138] See Richard Cowen's History of Life, p. 47.
[139] See Richard Cowen's History of Life, p. 2.
[140] Before the 1700s, fossils were not universally recognized as being the mineralized remains of life forms. There were influential schools of thought that presented arguments that fossils were either some kind of faith-testing deceptions placed there by the Creator, or were somehow illusions that were fabricated by some geological "plastic force." It was not until about 1750 that most naturalists accepted the idea that fossils were made from life forms, but they still denied the idea of extinction, as it conflicted with Christian notions of God's inerrancy. See Michael J. Benton's When Life Nearly Died, pp. 25-26.
[141] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, chapter 9.
[142] The arguments and evidence regarding the Ediacaran biota are presented in some detail in Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 128-145.
[143] See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 138-139. See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, pp. 174-177.
[144] See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall's Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 26-29.
[145] See Nicholas Eyles and Nicole Januszczak's "Zipper-rift': a tectonic model for Neoproterozoic glaciations during the breakup of Rodinia after 750 Ma", Earth-Science Reviews 65 (2004) 1 73.
[146] The paper that supports that view was co-authored by scientist who actually coined "Snowball Earth." See Joseph Kirschvink et al.'s "Evidence for a Large-Scale Reorganization of Early Cambrian Continental Masses by Inertial Interchange True Polar Wander", Science, July 25, 1997; volume 277, number 5325, pp. 541-545. See a response and rebuttal here.
[147] See Eli Tziperman, et al.'s "Biologically induced initiation of Neoproterozoic snowball-Earth events", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, July 20, 2011, volume 108, number 37, pp. 15091-15096. See N. J. Butterfield's "Inventing the Phanerozoic biological pump - and inducing Snowball Earth", Goldschmidt 2013 Conference Abstracts. See Gordon D. Love et al.'s "Fossil steroids record the appearance of Demospongiae during the Cryogenian period", Nature, February 5, 2009, volume 457. For the land plant hypothesis, see Daniel S. Heckman, et al.'s "Molecular Evidence for the Early Colonization of Land by Fungi and Plants", Science, August 10, 2001, volume 293.
[148] See Nick Butterfield's "Oxygen, animals and oceanic ventilation: an alternative view", Geobiology (2009), 7, 1 7.
[149] This is Nick Butterfield's view, and it has sympathy among Precambrian specialists. Butterfield's hypothesis of a stratified, anoxic, turbid, cyanobacterial water column giving way to an algae-dominated, clear water column is the preferred scenario in Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion (pp. 52-53).
[150] See Graham E. Budd's "The earliest fossil record of the animals and its significance", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, April 27, 2008. See Graham Shields-Zhou and Lawrence Och's "The case for a Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event: Geochemical evidence and biological consequences", GSA Today, March 2011.
[151] See Graham Shields-Zhou and Lawrence Och's "The case for a Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event: Geochemical evidence and biological consequences", GSA Today, March 2011.
[152] See L. Paul Knauth's "Temperature and salinity history of the Precambrian ocean: implications for the course of microbial evolution", Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 219 (2005) 53 69.
[153] See N. J. Butterfield's "Oxygen, animals and oceanic ventilation: an alternative view", Geobiology January 2009, volume 7, issue 1, pp. 1-7.
[154] This is a general theme in works such as Butterfield's.
[155] See Donald Prothero's After the Dinosaurs, pp. 126-129.
[156] See Michael J. Benton's When Life Nearly Died, chapters 3 to 6.
[157] See George R. McGhee and et al.'s "Ecological ranking of Phanerozoic biodiversity crises: The Serpukhovian (early Carboniferous) crisis had a greater ecological impact than the end-Ordovician", Geology, February 2002, volume 40, number 2, pp. 147-150. On the issue of ranking extinctions, see A. M. Celâl Şengör, et al.'s "A scale of greatness and causal classification of mass extinctions: Implications for mechanisms", in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, September 16, 2008, volume 105, number 37, pp. 13736-13740.
[158] See Douglas Futuyma's Evolution, chapter 18.
[159] A joke in selfish-gene circles is that a chicken is just a way for an egg to reproduce itself. The author of the selfish-gene theory is the arch-materialist Richard Dawkins. Although a materialist and
[1] I am not happy about the Israeli produce and will not buy it. Palestinians probably lived on that farm land before they were forcibly evicted for Jewish "settlers" and the store only began trading with Chinese farms after a healthy debate among the cooperative's members and its board, and a compromise was met, in that the cooperative would only do business with Chinese firms that adhered to the cooperative's environmental, animal, and worker treatment standards. I have never heard of that kind of debate ever happening at another American business, which is why I always shop for my food there, even though in many ways it is still mired in scarcity-based practices.
[2] See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews's The Complete World of Human Evolution, p. 208.
[3] See The Beginning of the World as We Know It, edited by John P. Rafferty, pp. 115-120.
[4] For instance, many islands and mountain chains have been formed by volcanic activity, and the mountain chain that formed the Hawaiian Islands is very evident on the Pacific Ocean's floor. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Today's satellite technologies can measure the rate and direction in which the tectonic plates move (about the rate that fingernails grow), and rocks in the volcanoes of the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain have been dated, with the oldest volcanoes determined to be more than 80 million years old. Those radioactive ages conform to the rates of movement, as well as the eroded states of the older volcanoes.
Another example is the fossil record and how its relative ages were established long before radioactivity was discovered. When radioactive dating was developed, it not only confirmed the relative dates, but it also established that the estimated absolute dates developed in the 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century were not that far off. In Chapter IX of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, he estimated that the latter part of the Mesozoic Era may have been more than 300 mya. It was more like 100 mya, or well within an order of magnitude of what it is considered to be today, which is far more precise than the 6,000 years of "begats" in the Book of Genesis.
[5] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 34-35, and 89-92.
[6] For example, on sulfur see Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 42-43, and 67-68, and for nitrogen see "Stable isotopes as indicators of change in the food procurement and food preference of Viking Age and Early Christian populations on Gotland (Sweden), by Steven B. Kosiba, et al., in Journal of Anthropological Anthropology, 26 (2007), pp. 394-411, and "Use of Nitrogen-15 natural abundance method to identify nitrate sources in Kansas groundwater," by M.A. Townsend, et al., Proceedings of Waste Research Technology Conference, 2002.
[7] See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard's Energy and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 235-237.
[8] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, pp. 135-140.
[9] See, The Beginning of the World as We Know It, edited by John P. Rafferty, pp. 79-155.
[10] See Jared Diamond's Collapse, pp. 136-156. During my studies, I came upon challenges to the version of Anasazi collapse in Diamond's work, and the book Questioning Collapse, edited by Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee, was a direct challenge to Diamond's hypothesis. Although I have never entirely agreed with Diamond's work, Questioning Collapse was arguably libelous. It literally turned Diamond's views on the Australian megafaunal extinctions upside down. In his Guns, Germs, and Steel, published in 1997, Diamond "credited" humans with that mass extinction, while a contributing author of Questioning Collapse, on the same page where he mentioned Guns, Germs, and Steel, rather snidely wrote that Diamond argued for the opposite: that humans had nothing to do with the extinctions. That means that the author did not even read Guns, Germs, and Steel or that he expected his audience to be uninformed or lazy. That was also by no means a new opinion of Diamond's, as his earlier The Third Chimpanzee, published in 1992, has a chapter titled, "The Golden Age that Never Was," wherein Diamond discussed a number of mass extinctions likely caused by humans, including Australia. Although Diamond's theses deserved to be challenged, as all hypotheses do, efforts such as Questioning Collapse reflect the sloppy scholarship that can abound regarding these subjects.
[11] See Mary H. Schweitzer's "Blood from Stone", in Scientific American's special collector's edition on dinosaurs, titled, Dinosaurs! How they lived; Why they Died, Summer 2014, pp. 104-11.
[12] This essay links many times to Wikipedia. Readers should be cautioned, however. I performed an experiment with a friend in 2008, and the results showed a rather pronounced imperial, Eurocentric bias. On controversial "fringe" subjects, particularly ones that threaten the global power structure, such as free energy suppression, Wikipedia can be worse than worthless (although that article has marginally improved over the years), with Wikipedia articles dominated by trolls, and some of them were professionals. I use Wikipedia with caution, and I suggest that readers of this essay use similar caution. In several places at Wikipedia where this essay links to, I have seen errors and mainstream biases, which will probably always plague Wikipedia. In general, as I wrote this essay, the closer the story of life on Earth got to the human chapters, the more "vandalism" was evident in Wikipedia's articles, where people promoted their theories. When the story finally started dealing with Homo sapiens, the vandalism was so great at times that I hesitated to link to the articles, as they were so badly marred. Readers should be aware of that bias, which is consistent with how the massacre article was distorted and vandalized. If this essay becomes popular, I will suggest that readers might think of donating to Wikipedia. I respect their goal, and the work of millions has made it a valuable resource, even with its obvious limitations.
[13] See Thomas Suddendorf's The Gap, pp. 4-5.
[14] See, for instance, Douglas Futuyma's Evolution, pp. 13-14, or Stephen Marshak's Essentials of Geology, pp. 6-7.
[15] See Michael J. Benton's When Life Nearly Died, chapter 5. See Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky, pp. 34-35.
[16] See Henry Gee's The Accidental Species, p. xiii.
[17] See Donald Prothero's The Eocene-Oligocene Transition, pp. 130-136. Prothero argued that studying mass extinctions became a fad. But studying them was taboo for more than a century, too. Was the "fad" partly an overreaction to suppression? Prothero's observation about how scientists interact all too often is on page 130, which states: "Scientific meetings can degenerate into shouting matches and name-calling, although the preferred method of attack is to demolish one's opponent with a witty riposte."
[18] The tale of the Big Bang and the physics of stars and solar systems can be found in numerous places on the Internet. A brief summary of the Big Bang and its immediate aftermath can be found in A.C. Phillips's The Physics of Stars, pp. 1-3, and a less technical account is in Mark Foster Mortimer's Civilization's Future, How Energy Defines and Constrains our Progress, pp. 5-8.
[19] See also Edward O. Wilson's Consilience, chapter 3.
[20] Many examples can be provided, such as the initially ridiculed light bulb and powered flight; demonstrations of those technologies were made in public, but mainstream scientists ignored the demonstrations as if they were never made. For a less famous example, the great linguist Joseph Greenberg ruffled many specialist feathers with his generalist synthesis for cataloging the world's languages by seeking universal similarities. His generalist synthesis, while having errors in the details, is widely accepted today as largely accurate. See an account of the controversy in Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, pp. 218-232. The taboo against studying mass extinctions prevailed for more than a century and was broken by a team led by a Nobel Laureate working outside of his field of expertise.
[21] See, for instance, Frans B. M. de Wall and Pier Francesco Ferrari, eds., The Primate Mind, for a bottom-up approach, which is a departure from the top-down approaches. In that instance, the top-down approach compared non-human primates with humans, seeing how close their cognitive processes came to human processes. The bottom-up approach explored the foundations of non-human primate cognition, not how they compared to human cognition.
[22] The inventors of the heat pump that my partner sold cut their published performance data in half so that engineers would not ridicule that "impossible" data. The microscopes of Royal Rife and Gaston Naessens are older than I am, and those microscopes attain optical resolutions considered "impossible" by today's optical theory, some of which hails all the way back to Isaac Newton. When Naessens tried patenting his microscope, with its "impossible" optical resolutions, he was unable to explain its resolutions in terms of orthodox optical theory and had to abandon the patent process. Rife earlier invented a microscope that attained similar "impossible" resolutions, and while the medical establishment did its best to crush Rife's work, surviving micrographs prove that it indeed attained such resolutions. Brown's Gas has long been an enigma, with its exact composition unknown. It is made of the hydrogen and oxygen resulting from splitting water, but seems to be unusually bonded. The transmutation experiment with Brown's Gas has been performed a hundred times or more, including by national governments, and orthodox theory cannot explain the results. While scientists were stumped over just exactly what Brown's Gas was and how it produced "impossible" results, Yull Brown was not too interested in the theories; he was more interested in what Brown's Gas could do. Sparky Sweet's free energy device, which produced a million times the energy that went into it, and also produced antigravity effects, was baffling even to Sparky. He and his partner wrote a book to explain how it worked, but there was still plenty of mystery regarding how it worked. When Sparky demonstrated it to a close colleague, Sparky himself shrugged in amazement, saying that it indeed defied electric theory, but there it was, working. The free energy, antigravity, and other exotic technologies that were demonstrated to my friend blew his mind, and almost any scientist viewing that demonstration would have been stunned into bewilderment.
[23] See David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order, pp. 240-245, which refers to Bohm's original calculation in his Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, p. 163. Bohm's calculation is summarized as follows: "If one computes the amount of energy that would be in one cubic centimeter of space…it turns out to be very far beyond the total energy of all the matter in the known universe." See discussion of Bohm's theory and the evidence for it in Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe, pp. 51-55, and Bohm's opinions on the relationship between consciousness and quantum phenomena in Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, pp. 213-215.
[24] In Einstein's "Sidelights on Relativity," a speech delivered on May 5[SUP]th[/SUP], 1920, at the University of Leyden, Einstein finished with: "Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical properties; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether."
[25] See Jeane Manning and Joel Garbon's Breakthrough Power, p. 123 for thirty of the names that Jeane has collected over the years for the field that is tapped by so-called free energy technology.
[26] A recent example is Nassim Haramein's "Quantum Gravity and the Holographic Mass", Physical Review & Research International, volume 3, issue 4, October - December 2013, pp. 270-292, and related press release.
[27] "Black projects" are efforts that the public is not officially aware of, engaged in by various "national security" organizations, some large "aerospace" companies and other private interests, many of whose names have never been publicly revealed.
[28] The tales of Rife's and Naessens's microscopes are some of the best that I know of to demonstrate the literal blindness of establishment science. Naessens is still active in 2014, and his microscopes are available to any scientist with the courage to look through the lens. If attaining such "impossible" resolutions were all that those microscopes did, that would be plenty, but those microscopes were the primary instruments used by their inventors to investigate life processes at greater resolutions than any electron microscope or other establishment microscope can attain. They both independently confirmed the general findings of one of Louis Pasteur's contemporaries, Antoine Béchamp, whose research pointed to a very different dynamic of life processes than Pasteur's germ theory, which may have been a poorly understood plagiarism of Béchamp's work. The findings of those microscopes led to, among other things, cancer treatments that are harmless, cheap, and effective, but Morris Fishbein and the American Medical Association wiped Rife out, and Naessens has been treated similarly. They may have even discovered the boundary between inanimate matter and life, which exists in the sub-cellular milieu. That situation is one of the more stunning and public examples of vested economic interests suppressing scientific advances.
[29] Two works that come to mind as I write this were See Thomas Suddendorf's The Gap and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, but I do not want to pick on them unnecessarily. Many orthodox works that I saw took that easy way out when dealing with phenomena that falsified the materialist models of consciousness.
[30] For instance, numerous psi experiments have produced highly consistent results over many years, such as Ganzfeld experiments, receiving information in dreams, and other tests, including influencing the decay rate of radioactive elements. Those thousands of experiments were also subjected to professional meta-analysis, and the experimental results demonstrated high correlation and the odds of their being chance results are less than one in trillions, and even smaller probabilities. See Dean Radin's Entangled Minds, chapter six, and Chris Carter's Science and Psychic Phenomena, pp. 60-104. Carter's book and Robert McLuhan's Randi's Prize analyze the reactions of a politically active arm of the scientific establishment known as organized skepticism. After a scandal, when the leading "skeptical" organization tried performing original research and seemingly manipulated the data to conform to their conclusion (see Chris Carter's Science and Psychic Phenomena, pp. 24-37, and here), they never performed original research again, but challenge experimental results that call into question the materialist assumptions of mainstream science. Their challenges are generally ad hoc hypotheses that often beg the question, and their objections have become more logically strained over the years. My encounters with members of that organization were shocking, as they proved themselves to be deeply dishonest. For scientific investigations of paranormal phenomena, Randi's Prize and Michael E. Flynn's The Articulate Dead are good introductions to the kinds of findings that have been adduced.
[31] See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, pp. 237-255. See Nick Herbert's Elemental Mind, pp. 140-162.
[32] Regarding the foundation of physics, Einstein wrote: "It is basic for physics that one assumes a real world existing independently from any act of perception but this we do not know." See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, p. 166. See Rupert Sheldrake's The Science Delusion for a discussion of the faith-based assumptions that gird mainstream science, which include: ever since the Big Bang, when everything came from nothing, all matter and energy has been at the same total amount; the so-called "laws" of nature are invariable; nature has no purpose, and evolution has no goal; all consciousness is an illusory and ephemeral byproduct of the operation of brains; all biological inheritance is material, there is no such thing as psychic phenomena all evidence adduced so far for it is due to error, wishful thinking, and fraud; mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works. None of those assumptions has been subjected to falsification, and several cannot be falsified, which is the acid test of science. Also, there is a great deal of evidence that those assumptions may be false.
[33] See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, p, 101.
[34] In Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, pp. 3-5, Rosenblum describes a visit to Einstein's home in the 1950s, when Rosenblum was a graduate student in physics. Einstein wanted to discuss the implications of quantum theory. In Rosenblum's quantum physics class, the professor skipped over that part of the book (which Einstein's protégé David Bohm wrote), to get into the math. It was not until many years later that Rosenblum began to understand what Einstein was concerned about. Late in his life, Einstein "reproached" Heisenberg for the randomness introduced by quantum theory. Einstein was upset by the quantum theory's creation of reality by the observer, which would theoretically make the entire universe subjective, not objective. But his greatest disquiet was reserved for the "spooky action at a distance," now termed "quantum entanglement," where separate objects instantly interact with each other, no matter how far apart they are.
[35] See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, p. 186.
[36] See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma, chapter 10.
[37] In The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman said, "It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is." Werner Heisenberg voiced the same caution.
[38] See, for instance, Johannes Wirz's "Progress towards complementarity in genetics." Also, molecular clock data, whose timing is based on an assumption of macro-predictable random mutations of DNA, has been shown to be inaccurate, and the early exuberance toward genetic science has been sobered by the reality. Scientists can see what mutated, but have had to become more modest on asserting when it happened. See Richard Cowen's History of Life, pp. 221-223. See Rupert Sheldrake's The Science Delusion, chapter 6.
[39] See T. Langen, et al.'s "Local emergence of thermal correlations in an isolated quantum many-body system", Nature Physics, volume 9, issue 10, pp. 640-643, October 2013.
[40] See A.C. Phillips's The Physics of Stars, p. 23. See Peter Ward and David Brownlee's The Life and Death of Planet Earth, p. 103.
[41] See Sean A. Crowe, et al.'s "Atmospheric oxygenation three billion years ago" in Nature, issue 201, pp. 535-538, September 26, 2013.
[42] The only other plausible explanation for the Great Oxygenation Event is ultraviolet light's splitting water and, as the hydrogen escaped to space, the oxygen was left behind. But early on, atmospheric oxygen would have created the ozone layer and provided a "negative feedback" to ultraviolet light's impact. See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 25-26.
[43] A relatively recent and spectacular event to demonstrate that dynamic is the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora. The next year was called the "Year Without a Summer," as the volcanic ash caused a brief global cooling.
[44] See Peter Ward's "Impact from the Deep" in Scientific American, October, 2006.
[45] See Nigel Harris's "The elevation history of the Tibetan Plateau and its implications for the Asian monsoon", Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, volume 241, Issue 1, November 2006, pp. 4-15. See Chengshan Wang, et al.'s "Constraints on the early uplift history of the Tibetan Plateau", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, April 1, 2008, volume 105, number 13, pp. 49874992.
[46] See Douglas S. Wilson, et al.'s "Initiation of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and estimates of total Antarctic ice volume in the earliest Oligocene", Geophysical Research Letters, volume 40, issue 16, pp. 4305-4309, August 2013. The research put the initial formation of the West Antarctic ice sheet at the same time as the East Antarctic ice sheet, about 34 mya.
[47] The shorter light's wavelength is, the more energy its photons possess, and visible light is ineffective in breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen. Today, scientists are using catalysts and other methods so that visible light can power the process of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, to use the hydrogen as fuel. Photosynthesis also uses light to split water, but does so with catalytic enzymes.
[48] See Richard Cowen's History of Life, p. 6.
[49] See a discussion of that hydrogen-oxygen dynamic in Nick Lane's Oxygen: The Molecule that made the World, especially pp. 319-320, and Lane's Life Ascending, chapter 3.
[50] See Jonathan Lunine's Earth: Evolution of a Habitable World, pp. 208-209.
[51] It is also theorized that the size of the atoms determined where they largely ended up in Earth's layers, with iron largely sinking to Earth's core, while lighter elements such as the alkali and alkaline metals migrated toward the surface. See discussion in Jonathan Lunine's Earth, pp. 124-127.
[52] See Jonathan Lunine's Earth, p. 205.
[53] The paper "Biotic vs. abiotic Earth: A model for mantle hydration and continental coverage", in Planetary and Space Science, was first electronically published on October 25, 2013, by Dennis Höning, et al., and had media coverage, as this essay was being written, and is part of a general trend of seeing life processes as key terraforming processes.
[54] See Jonathan Lunine's Earth, pp. 200-209.
[55] See Peter Ward and David Brownlee's The Life and Death of Planet Earth, pp. 96-99. Also see Peter Ward's Out of Thin Air, p. 231, which in turn refers to the PALEOMAP Project.
[56] A similar version of the table below, as far as the human body is concerned, is here.
[TABLE="width: 601, align: center"]
[TR]
[TD]Description
[/TD]
[TD="colspan: 4"]Proportion of
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]Earth's Atoms
[/TD]
[TD]Earth's Mass
[/TD]
[TD]Earth's Atmospheric Atoms
[/TD]
[TD]The Human Body's Atoms
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Oxygen
[/TD]
[TD]50%
[/TD]
[TD]30%
[/TD]
[TD]21%
[/TD]
[TD]24%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Iron
[/TD]
[TD]16%
[/TD]
[TD]32%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.00067%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Silicon
[/TD]
[TD]14%
[/TD]
[TD]15%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Magnesium
[/TD]
[TD]15%
[/TD]
[TD]14%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.007%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Sulfur
[/TD]
[TD]1.6%
[/TD]
[TD]3%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.04%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Aluminum
[/TD]
[TD]1.2%
[/TD]
[TD]1.4%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Nickel
[/TD]
[TD]1.0%
[/TD]
[TD]1.8%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Calcium
[/TD]
[TD]0.88%
[/TD]
[TD]1.5%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.24%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Chromium
[/TD]
[TD]0.21%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Hydrogen
[/TD]
[TD]0.020%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]63%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Sodium
[/TD]
[TD]0.013%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.04%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Potassium
[/TD]
[TD]0.0073%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.03%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Titanium
[/TD]
[TD]0.0040%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Fluorine
[/TD]
[TD]0.0013%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Carbon
[/TD]
[TD]0.00050%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]12%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Phosphorous
[/TD]
[TD]0.00043%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.22%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Chlorine
[/TD]
[TD] 1-in-2.1 million
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.03%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Nitrogen
[/TD]
[TD] 1-in-4.1 million
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]78%
[/TD]
[TD]0.58%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Cobalt
[/TD]
[TD] 1-in-22 million
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.000003%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Argon
[/TD]
[TD] 1-in-2.5 billion
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.9%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Uranium
[/TD]
[TD] 1-in-4.5 billion
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Gold
[/TD]
[TD] 1-in-1.5 trillion
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Carbon Dioxide
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]0.04%
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Oceans
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] 1-in-4,400
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Atmosphere
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] 1-in-1.2 million
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Biosphere
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] 1-in-3.2 billion
[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[57] See Peter Ward and David Brownlee's Rare Earth, for a discussion of those dynamics that may be rare in the universe.
[58] The atmospheric pressure may have been more than 60 times today's. See Jonathan Lunine's Earth, p. 171.
[59] See Nick Lane's Life Ascending, chapter 1, and his Power, Sex, Suicide, chapter 6. Another hypothesis is that life evolved in some freshwater pond on land. See Richard Cowen's History of Life, pp. 12-13.
[60] Andrew Knoll wrote on page 245 of his Life on a Young Planet that scientists see the ancient religious texts as parables, and that, "Science's creation story accounts for process and history, not intent." On science and religion, Knoll wrote, "That these two ways of comprehending should be confused in either form or purpose strikes me as both absurd and unfortunate." But arch-materialists such as Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking, and "skeptics" such as Michael Shermer are the face of science that the public sees. The genuine giants of physics, such as Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, are immensely better examples of how scientists approach those issues.
[61] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, chapter 8.
[62] See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard's Energy and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 231-233.
[63] See Jonathan Lunine's Earth, pp. 169-176. See Peter Ward and David Brownlee's The Life and Death of Planet Earth, pp. 57-67, and 105-115.
[64] See Peter Ward and David Brownlee's The Life and Death of Planet Earth, chapters 6 and 7.
[65] See Nick Lane's Life Ascending, chapter 4.
[66] See Nick Lane's "The Evolution of Oxidative Stress", p. 4, in Principles of Free Radical Biomedicine, volume 1, K. Pantopoulos and H. M. Schipper, editors.
[67] See Stefan Bengtson's "Origins and Early Evolution of Predation", Paleontological Society Papers, volume 8, 2002.
[68] See Oliver Morton's Eating the Sun, pp. 168-174.
[69] Chemosynthesis relies on the potential energy of chemicals, as does all life, and the only way that the potential energy exists on Earth is because the Sun's energy keeps the oceans and atmosphere in chemical disequilibrium with Earth's crust. See Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, p. 100. See Oliver Morton's Eating the Sun, p. 173.
[70] See Nick Lane's Life Ascending, p. 25.
[71] Oliver Morton's Eating the Sun surveys the days of unraveling the details of photosynthesis and the chase for Nobel Prizes that attended the pursuit. As recounted on page 45, when Morton asked Andrew Benson if Melvin Calvin deserved his Nobel Prize (for discovering what is called the Calvin Cycle, also known as the Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle), Benson replied that he deserved it more than Calvin did.
[72] See Nick Lane's "The Evolution of Oxidative Stress", chapter 1 in Principles of Free Radical Biomedicine, volume 1, K. Pantopoulos and H. M. Schipper, editors.
[73] See Nick Lane's Life Ascending, chapter 3.
[74] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, p. 73.
[75] See Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky, p. 118. See Nick Lane's Oxygen, p. 73. See Richard Cowen's History of Life, pp. 24-25.
[76] Another hypothesis is that purple photosynthesizing bacteria oxidized iron in its photosynthesis process. Two non-life-based hypotheses for forming at least some BIFs are: ultraviolet light's oxidizing the iron before the ozone layer formed, and the chemistry of hydrothermal vents in the oceans creating BIFs. See a discussion of the BIF formation controversy in Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 37-49. See Jelte P. Harnmeijer's "Banded Iron-Formation: A Continuing Enigma of Geology".
[77] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, pp. 161-163.
[78] The methanogen population may have been severely reduced due to a nickel famine.
[79] See Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, chapter 3.
[80] There was some chemical evidence of eukaryotes existing as early as 2.7 bya, announced in 1999. See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, p. 94, and Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 35-36. However, the leader of the team that produced the evidence was part of an effort to investigate the situation further, and in 2008 that effort determined that the evidence was not as old as originally thought. This is an example of how the evidence regarding findings of early Earth is tentative and subject to revision to the point of completely discarding the evidence.
[81] See Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, p. 12.
[82] See discussion in Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide regarding the controversy regarding the pedigree of mitochondria. On the purple bacterium origin, see these papers (1, 2). According to the hydrogen hypothesis, hydrogenosomes and mitochondria descended from the same ancestor. Some scientists believe that mitochondria descended from a bacterium in the Rickettsia genus. Whatever the true ancestor was, all hypotheses agree that it was purple.
[83] The formula for surface area is four-times-pi-times-the-radius-squared (4Ï€r[SUP]2[/SUP]), and the formula for volume is 4/3Ï€r[SUP]3[/SUP]. See discussion in Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, pp. 121-123.
[84] See discussion in Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, p. 130.
[85] A man's body contains around 100 trillion cells, and each cell contains, on average, 200 mitochondria, and there are about 10,000 ATP Synthase motors per mitochondria, which totals 200 quintillion ATP Synthase molecules. ATP Synthase rotates at up to 700 times per second.
[86] See Nick Lane's "The Evolution of Oxidative Stress", p. 10, in Principles of Free Radical Biomedicine, volume 1, K. Pantopoulos and H. M. Schipper, editors. See discussion in Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, chapter 8.
[87] See Jonathan Lunine's Earth, pp. 139-141.
[88] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, p. 72.
[89] See Miklós Müller, et al.'s "Biochemistry and Evolution of Anaerobic Energy Metabolism in Eukaryotes", Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, June 2012, volume 76, number 2, pp. 444-495.
[90] See Nick Lane's Life Ascending, pp. 163-165 for a delightful description of the workings of complex cells.
[91] See Nick Lane's Life Ascending, chapter 6.
[92] See Peter Ward's and Donald Brownlee's Rare Earth, pp. 222-226. See abstract of Jacques Laskar, et al.'s "Stabilization of the Earth's obliquity by the Moon", Nature, February 18, 1993, volume 361, pp. 615-617.
[93] See Jonathan Lunine's Earth, p. 205.
[94] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 16-28. See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, pp. 106-107.
[95] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, p. 24.
[96] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, pp. 157-159. See these links (1, 2, 3).
[97] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, p. 154.
[98] Andrew Knoll, in his Life on a Young Planet, on page 150, estimates that the event that led to plants happened at least 1.2 bya.
[99] See Oliver Morton's Eating the Sun, p. 206.
[100] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, pp. 149-150.
[101] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, chapter 6.
[102] See Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, chapters 9 and 10.
[103] This concept is used in The 10,000 Year Explosion, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, p. 181, to explain the rise of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, as they genetically adapted to digesting lactose, making raising cattle for their milk feasible, which produces five times the calories per acre of raising cattle for meat.
[104] See Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide, pp. 107-147.
[105] Even the Frankensteinian experiments that may well be happening in the above-top-secret world are not likely to give a tree a brain, or allow humans to get their energy via photosynthetic skin.
[106] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, p. 151.
[107] Some cyanobacterial colonies eventually developed filaments with specialized cells. See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, p. 112.
[108] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, pp. 4, 34.
[109] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, p. 66.
[110] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, p. 87.
[111] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, p. 128.
[112] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, pp. 144-147. See Gabrielle Walker's Snowball Earth, pp. 74-78, 131-132.
[113] See William F. Ruddiman's Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, pp. 169-174.
[114] See, for instance, Jeffrey T. Kiehl and Christine A. Shields's "Climate simulation of the latest Permian: Implications for mass extinction", Geology, September 2005, pp. 757-760. See Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky, pp. 121-128. Ward made a video on this subject on PBS, here.
[115] See Gabrielle Walker's Snowball Earth, pp. 91-92.
[116] See Gabrielle Walker's Snowball Earth, pp. 83-100.
[117] Hoffman's journey is told in great detail in Gabrielle Walker's Snowball Earth.
[118] See Doug Macdougall's Frozen Earth, pp. 4-49, for the early days of ice age discoveries and theory, and the role of erratics.
[119] See Hoffman, el at., "A Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth", Science, August 28, 1998, volume 281.
[120] See D.E. Canfield's "A new model for Proterozoic ocean chemistry," in Nature, December 3, 1998, volume 396.
[121] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 60-65.
[122] See Don E. Canfield, et al.'s "Late-Neoproterozoic Deep-Ocean Oxygenation and the Rise of Animal Life", Science, January 5, 2007, volume 315. This is a controversial area. See G. J. Retallack's "Ediacaran Gaskiers Glaciation of Newfoundland reconsidered", Journal of the Geological Society 2013, volume 170, pp. 19-36.
[123] See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 39-44.
[124] See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion, p. 128.
[125] See Daniel H. Rothman, et al.'s "Dynamics of the Neoproterozoic carbon cycle", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, July 8, 2003, volume 100, number 14, pp. 8124-8129. See Andy Ridgwell's "Evolution of the ocean's "biological pump", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, October 4, 2011, volume 108, number 40, pp. 1648516486. The model proposed by Rothman and associates has been generally dismissed, partly because there would not have been enough fecal pellets for the job. See discussion in Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 54-55. Nick Butterfield's hypothesis is that larger organisms in the nascent "arms race" sank instead of floated in the water column, achieving a similar effect.
[126] See John P. Grotzinger, et al.'s "Enigmatic origin of the largest-known carbon isotope excursion in Earth's history", (abstract here) Nature Geoscience, 4, 285292 (2011). See Cal Tech's article on their investigations here.
[127] See Grant Young's "Evolution of Earth's climatic system: Evidence from ice ages, isotopes, and impacts", GSA Today, October 2013.
[128] See Christian J. Bjerrum and Donald E. Canfield's "Towards a quantitative understanding of the late Neoproterozoic carbon cycle", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, April 5, 2011, volume 108, number 14, pp. 55425547 (also here).
[129] This glaciation is called the Gaskiers glaciation, but it is currently questioned as being a global glaciation. See G. J. Retallack's "Ediacaran Gaskiers Glaciation of Newfoundland reconsidered", Journal of the Geological Society 2013, v.170; pp. 19-36. However, see data showing the Gaskiers glaciation discontinuity in carbon ratio data in See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion, p. 41.
[130] See evidence of repeated excursions in Charles Verdel et al.'s "The Shuram and subsequent Ediacaran carbon isotope excursions from southwest Laurentia, and implications for environmental stability during the metazoan radiation", Geological Society of America Bulletin, July/August 2011. Although the authors of that paper do not state the hypothesis directly, those kinds of papers are used by a school of thought, of which Nick Butterfield is a prominent representative, which sees life as the protagonist and geology/environment as the scenery.
[131] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 67-68.
[132] See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 65-67.
[133] See Geoffrey Wray, et al.'s "Molecular Evidence for Deep Precambrian Divergences Among Metazoan Phyla", Science, October 25, 1996, volume 274. See another of Wray's papers here, on the subject.
[134] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, pp. 200-205. See Nick Lane's Oxygen, pp. 57-58.
[135] The most beautiful fossil book I have yet encountered is Prehistoric Life, published by Dorling Kindersley.
[136] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, color plates 4 and 6.
[137] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, p. 151.
[138] See Richard Cowen's History of Life, p. 47.
[139] See Richard Cowen's History of Life, p. 2.
[140] Before the 1700s, fossils were not universally recognized as being the mineralized remains of life forms. There were influential schools of thought that presented arguments that fossils were either some kind of faith-testing deceptions placed there by the Creator, or were somehow illusions that were fabricated by some geological "plastic force." It was not until about 1750 that most naturalists accepted the idea that fossils were made from life forms, but they still denied the idea of extinction, as it conflicted with Christian notions of God's inerrancy. See Michael J. Benton's When Life Nearly Died, pp. 25-26.
[141] See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, chapter 9.
[142] The arguments and evidence regarding the Ediacaran biota are presented in some detail in Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 128-145.
[143] See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 138-139. See Andrew Knoll's Life on a Young Planet, pp. 174-177.
[144] See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall's Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 26-29.
[145] See Nicholas Eyles and Nicole Januszczak's "Zipper-rift': a tectonic model for Neoproterozoic glaciations during the breakup of Rodinia after 750 Ma", Earth-Science Reviews 65 (2004) 1 73.
[146] The paper that supports that view was co-authored by scientist who actually coined "Snowball Earth." See Joseph Kirschvink et al.'s "Evidence for a Large-Scale Reorganization of Early Cambrian Continental Masses by Inertial Interchange True Polar Wander", Science, July 25, 1997; volume 277, number 5325, pp. 541-545. See a response and rebuttal here.
[147] See Eli Tziperman, et al.'s "Biologically induced initiation of Neoproterozoic snowball-Earth events", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, July 20, 2011, volume 108, number 37, pp. 15091-15096. See N. J. Butterfield's "Inventing the Phanerozoic biological pump - and inducing Snowball Earth", Goldschmidt 2013 Conference Abstracts. See Gordon D. Love et al.'s "Fossil steroids record the appearance of Demospongiae during the Cryogenian period", Nature, February 5, 2009, volume 457. For the land plant hypothesis, see Daniel S. Heckman, et al.'s "Molecular Evidence for the Early Colonization of Land by Fungi and Plants", Science, August 10, 2001, volume 293.
[148] See Nick Butterfield's "Oxygen, animals and oceanic ventilation: an alternative view", Geobiology (2009), 7, 1 7.
[149] This is Nick Butterfield's view, and it has sympathy among Precambrian specialists. Butterfield's hypothesis of a stratified, anoxic, turbid, cyanobacterial water column giving way to an algae-dominated, clear water column is the preferred scenario in Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion (pp. 52-53).
[150] See Graham E. Budd's "The earliest fossil record of the animals and its significance", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, April 27, 2008. See Graham Shields-Zhou and Lawrence Och's "The case for a Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event: Geochemical evidence and biological consequences", GSA Today, March 2011.
[151] See Graham Shields-Zhou and Lawrence Och's "The case for a Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event: Geochemical evidence and biological consequences", GSA Today, March 2011.
[152] See L. Paul Knauth's "Temperature and salinity history of the Precambrian ocean: implications for the course of microbial evolution", Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 219 (2005) 53 69.
[153] See N. J. Butterfield's "Oxygen, animals and oceanic ventilation: an alternative view", Geobiology January 2009, volume 7, issue 1, pp. 1-7.
[154] This is a general theme in works such as Butterfield's.
[155] See Donald Prothero's After the Dinosaurs, pp. 126-129.
[156] See Michael J. Benton's When Life Nearly Died, chapters 3 to 6.
[157] See George R. McGhee and et al.'s "Ecological ranking of Phanerozoic biodiversity crises: The Serpukhovian (early Carboniferous) crisis had a greater ecological impact than the end-Ordovician", Geology, February 2002, volume 40, number 2, pp. 147-150. On the issue of ranking extinctions, see A. M. Celâl Şengör, et al.'s "A scale of greatness and causal classification of mass extinctions: Implications for mechanisms", in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, September 16, 2008, volume 105, number 37, pp. 13736-13740.
[158] See Douglas Futuyma's Evolution, chapter 18.
[159] A joke in selfish-gene circles is that a chicken is just a way for an egg to reproduce itself. The author of the selfish-gene theory is the arch-materialist Richard Dawkins. Although a materialist and
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.