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Geological history of the uplift-structures in the Western Desert (Egypt, Libya)

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The regional stratigraphy is continuous across North Africa and have been controlled by the tectonic history of individual basins. Deformational events in the region, most of them minor, are recorded by unconformities reflecting basin tilting, uplift, and erosion of intracratonic structural axes at various throughout the Phanerozoic. The main old deformational events occured in the Precambrium to Early Cambrium, Late Silurian to Early Devonian, Carboniferous to Permian.

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Next time: JFGI.

Hi Dennis, This is, of course, not true. Perhaps you should try looking at it for more than thirty minutes. First, Genesis says no such thing. Second, are you aware that 600 multiplied by 1000 is 600 000, not 6000? Third, why the hell should we care what you say when you prove yourself incapable of performing simple arithmetic? Sure kid. Have a Kewpie doll. Whatever makes you happy.Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Dennis, there are no gods at all, Christian or otherwise. I absolutely accept that the Bible makes a variety of claims. So what you're saying is that if any of the Bible can be shown to be false, you'll stop believing in God? Again, theism is the belief structure predicated on absurd, just-in-time coincidence. Atheism is not.

So what.There is physical evidence in Gone With the Wind & The Illiad. Such evidence is speculative any fictious or mythical story can have real evidence.

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969Since Evolution is only ~90% correct it should be thrown out and replaced by Creation which has even a lower % of correctness. W T Young, 2008

Oh, my.You do know that the area of earth we call Egypt was not always desert, don't you? Any idea how deep the water was over this area? Or how many times it was submerged, dried out and re-submerged?And to be accurate, subsidence, in this case more accurately called subduction, occurs in almost half the cases. Care to guess what is happening to that part of the neighboring plate it is subducting under?Subsidence usually refers to an area of crust losing elevation because the underlaying structure cannot support the crust or because a lot of new material has been added like in an ice age.Except you don't believe in Ice Ages, do you? I mean the evidence we have shows the last one occurred some 25,000 years ago, well before the earth was even formed, right?Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

I'm watching an old episode of the original "The Outer Limits" called "The Sixth Finger".In it, a scientists is able to increase a man's intelligence by using weird energies to quickly evolve him. As the man's intelligence evolves, his head and brain increase dramatically in size and he develops increased intelligence beyond genius level and other abilities such as telekinesis.So, I'm not inquiring about TK, what I am inquiring about is that if our brain were to increase in size over time, would our intelligence and reasoning abilities increase over time?

Brain size is not related to intelligence. This has been known for decades.However, this is only concerning modern humans who barely live past the age of 70 in the mean. Were we to live significantly longer -- maybe 2 centuries would be enough, maybe more; I'll try doing some maths to get some guesstimates -- it is likely we would no longer be able to form new memories or connections.
There simply wouldn't be enough space in the brain left, both physically and biologically: there's only so much room for dendrites and axons, there's only so many neurons to form them.In that case, yes, having a larger brain might help, but you'd have to get around the issue of mortality to even bother considering it.

Message 1 of 412 (566197)
06-20-2010 1:51 AM--------------------------------------------------------------------------------I just finished reading a brief review of a paper in Nature 467, 929-934 (21 Oct. 2010) Nick Lane and William Martin.This is a quote from the paper." All complex life is composed of eukaryotic (nucleated) cells. The eukaryotic cell arose from prokaryotes just once in four billion years, and otherwise prokaryotes show no tendency to evolve greater complexity. Why not? Prokaryotic genome size is constrained by bioenergetics. The endosymbiosis that gave rise to mitochondria restructured the distribution of DNA in relation to bioenergetic membranes, permitting a remarkable 200,000-fold expansion in the number of genes expressed. This vast leap in genomic capacity was strictly dependent on mitochondrial power, and prerequisite to eukaryote complexity: the key innovation en route to multicellular life"
Later Lane and Martin state:"The transition to complex life on Earth was a unique event that hinged on a bioenergetic jump afforded by spatially combinatorial relations between two cells and two genomes (endosymbiosis), rather than natural selection acting on mutations accumulated gradually among physically isolated prokarykotic individuals. Given the energetic nature of these arguments, the same is likely to be true of any complex life elsewhere"My question is: Does this mean the authors are saying that natural selection was not the cause of the evolution of the eukaryotic cell from the prokaryotic cell?And if true what effect does that have for The Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theory of gradual descent by random mutution and natural selection?

No. They're saying that complex life was dependent on the formation of mitochondria, and that this was apparently an event of unique importance. It's possible that similar adaptations from prokaryotes may have happened at other times, but that the existing eukaryotes thought they were tasty and/or out-competed them. Or that we just aren't aware of them - we aren't omniscient after all.Nothing whatsoever in the material you quoted contradicts the theory of evolution. At all. [qs]And if true what effect does that have for The Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theory of gradual descent by random mutution and natural selection? /qsNone. Random mutations of unique significance happen all throughout history. All vertebrates are related to a common ancestor, just as all eukaryotes are related to a single common ancestor. The development of the backbone was no less a singular and massively important development in the history of modern biodiversity than the development of mitochondria - without either adaptation, life on Earth would look MUCH different than it does today.You could take basically any example of an extremely successful adaptation and say similar things.But one-time mutations that make massive effects on the appearance of biodiversity a few million years later do not contradict the theory of evolution - rather, they support it.The development of mitochondria allowed for the development of more complex organisms which were able to take over a rather large unoccupied niche and thrived. That's all, and that's exactly what we'd expect given mutation and natural selection.Evolution doesn't require that similar adaptations, if successful, must happen repeatedly and independently. It does happen sometimes (see the eye), but evolution is not guided by anything more than survival and reproduction.

No, they're saying that the transition didn't arrise from the normal gradual accumulation of mutations but rather by the combination of organisms.Take a look at:Symbiogenesis - Wikipedia More details on how shit went down...

Thanks Rahvim and Catholic Scientist.
The reviewer of the paper at SelectSmart.com Selectors, Quizzes, Flowcharts, Polls, Articles, Commentary one Pate De Parodic stated after reviewing the paper:"Basicially the problem is that a primitive bacteria cannot evolve mitochondria by 'jugglilng its genes'. It would require that one of these primitive bacteria absorb and adapt by swallowing or absorbing an entirely new cell. On earth this has never been observed happening with prokaryotic cells. However eukaryotic cells indeed have been observed to do this. For a prokaryotic cell to transform to a eukaryotic cell it would have to do things that seem to only happen in eukaroytic cells"What does he mean by that statement?

They're trying to "poke holes" in evolution...Did you read about the Endosymbiotic Theory that I linked to?The idea is that some organelles were originally a seperate thing that then got absorbed into a prokaryote.This guys is saying that it hasn't been observed yet, so therefore it can't happen, ergo there's a problem with evolution... or something like that.

[gs]Did you read about the Endosymbiotic Theory that I linked to?[/gs]I did but my understanding of that article is that the theory has not been fully accepted. Lane and Martin state that a prokaryote has evolved once in four billion years into a eukaryote. So I am still quite confused.
Thanks for your help

No, natural selection would still be operating --- the endosymbiotes would have succeeded because endosymbiosis was a good idea. Well, first of all, that isn't the neo-Darwinian theory: the theory incorporates everything that actually happens. This includes mutation and natural selection but is not limited to them.Second, what has happened is indeed mutation plus selection, plus a bit of lateral gene transfer. The fact that we can "chunk" these events at a higher level and call it "the origin of obligate endosymbiosis" doesn't stop it from also being a set of lower-level events.

Who are the hold-outs?