Species, is it a limiting label? Do we use this term to a fault? I think so. What is a new or different species? Something completely different right? I think not.
This blog came to me after something I was listening to yesterday while driving home from work. I had a news radio show on when I heard a statement that began "Modern humans first appeared approximately...." It seems like such an odd statement to make. I can envision the mother ship in orbit beaming these first modern humans onto the surface of the Earth to perform this appearance. These so called modern humans are considered apart from everything that has walked the planet before. The discussion around Neanderthals and Cromagnon humans invokes the term species to deal with the problem of finding fossil remains of both from estimated similar geologic time.
Given recent news of flu virus evolving to infect people from pigs on a 10 year time scale and not so recent human changes enabling digestion of lactose in milk developing on a 10,000 year time scale, what changes might be possible in 50,000 years or 100,000 years. Significant changes in physical and physiological attributes of living things can happen well within the time gaps in fossil evidence. Samples of fossilized life or life evidence are rare and represent spotty evidence at best along a continuous time line into the past. Most of the time it is sudden, infrequent events that trap remains in a manner that results in fossils. Can we say that we have complete visibility of how a living thing has changed over time. No, we have snap shots, some of which show things we recognize as similar to others and sometimes do not. Does that mean that a continuous set of minor changes did not occur leading from one fossil to the next. No. But we do not have the evidence to show this gradual evolution from one to the next. In reality there are no actual divisions. This includes in the evolution of humans. The terminology generated by humans to assist with the description of the observed variety in the world of living entities has divided life into species, phylums and so on for convenience.
So what do we really have. We have a continuum of life all representing variations on a theme. A spectrum of possible variations of common ingredients. Nothing just springs into being. Cromagnon and Neanderthal came from a common ancestor and represent subsequent waves of migration from a common source. Variations in life build up with time due to environment and pressure of interaction with that environment. Our scientists look back across the abyss of time and see millions of years condensed into a scale too dense to show transitions that occur over tens or hundreds of thousands of years, as other than instantaneous. This is our failure to see and comprehend the granularity on that scale. All life on earth has a common origin and in a sense represents one family. The appearance of modern humans, or the fossil evidence of these humans, is sudden in our condensed view if history but in fact occurred over hundreds of thousands of years. When Cromagnon ventured out of Africa were the Neanderthal long dead or did they mingle with their own ancestors who had become isolated in the northern colder regions so long they developed unique physical attributes. But calling them a different species is more like an effort to deny our heritage than a scientific fact.
When we meet life on or from another planet will we then truly see another species of life? If all life evolves from common ingredients we may eventually recognize in a sense all life in our galaxy or even universe is related and species is no more than tabbed pages in a book denoting chapters.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
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| Latest From The Observatory |
This is from a hand held simple digital camera. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Moon observers might recognize that this is from a reflecting telescope that inverts and reverses the image. The large impact basins, called seas, are obvious in this photo. Primarily basalt like rock, these higher density areas are believed to be the reason this side of the moon experiences stronger gravitational attraction to the Earth and thus always faces us throughout the moon's monthly orbit. In a recent guest lecture about the moon that I provided at the middle school I was surprised at how difficult it was to demonstrate this fact.
Stay tuned for new photos if I break down and invest in proper astro photographic equipment.
April 18, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
Solar Weather
Around 1963 I my parents called me outside the house in the warm summer evening to see something I had been told about but had never seen, the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights. I am not sure today if my parents had ever witnessed them before or how they noticed what was happening that night but upon stepping out the door it was immediately obvious something was happening in the sky that was very unusual for Connecticut. A yellow green arc stretched from horizon to horizon, east to west, directly overhead. North of this arc, the sky was hazy and blotched with purples and greens. About half way to the eastern horizon was a red blotch that looked like a star burst covering an area several times the size of a full moon and all of this was flickering or oscillating just beyond what I could perceive.
I lived in a subdivision and as I calmed down a bit and looked around I saw whole families setting up lawn chairs out in their yards in the light of this event to watch. The event went on for 2-3 hours with the last purple green curtains limited to the North and Northeast fading around 11:00 that night. From then on I have had a pact with my brother that if either of us was outside and saw the lights that we would call the other immediately regardless of the hour. We have done this two to three times since. The last occurring about four years ago. This was during a period of significant sunspot and flare activity that occurred at the end of the last solar sunspot cycle. I monitored this activity daily on the SOHO solar satellite observatory web site site. Some of the most powerful solar flares ever measured occurred during this period causing the site to revise the x-ray and proton flux line charts to show flare intensity above M and X class that would have gone off the page without the chart adjustment.
We are now supposedly climbing up the sunspot cycle towards a peek expected within the next 2-3 years, yet since the surge in events at the end of the last cycle this activity has seemed to go to sleep. I just looked at the SOHO site and noted not one sunspot or irregular area visible. The chart that four years ago showed a line chart regularly interrupted with spikes exceeding M and X class intensities was flat. It seems odd that there could be such dramatic variance when you consider the size of the sun and the violence and intensity of the "normal" activity occurring, Thermonuclear reactions continuously occurring held in check by the weight of the nuclear fuel itself. What would cause it to go from complete turmoil to quiescent uniformity in a short 2-3 year span of time? A view of earth at any time from space will not fail to show some stormy areas boiling up and spiraling to the north or south. How could the sun be so calm over most of its enormous surface? Is this something new that we have not witnessed to date?
Solar wind, the particle flow from the sun, enhanced by flares and eruptions that eject plasma in our direction, normally impact the Earth's magnetic field that protects us from what might otherwise be lethal radiation levels. The system overloads occasionally releasing of high energy particles along the magnetic field lines into the atmosphere, mostly over the poles, a resulting in the aurora. The lights are evidence of energy being deposited into the atmosphere on a global scale. In the rarefied air at the altitudes where the aurora normally occur, temperature does not have the same meaning it does on the surface of the earth. The speeding up of the air molecules caused by solar particle impacts technically is a temperature rise but not one that would sensed by our skin. However as the energy cascades down towards the surface the effect spreads out and can not help but raise the temperature even minutely of the ocean of air it is impacting.
For many years we have been experiencing large scale activity on the sun and heightened levels of particle and electromagnetic energy impingement on the Earth's atmosphere. Though there is no doubt that human activity is raising the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere, could there also have been a contributing factor from the sun? Now with the sun experiencing the least activity recorded in recent history, could there be a noticeable effect in the rate of warming or possibly even a reversal. Not immediately of course but over a period of months or years and the longer this quite sun persists could the effect become more pronounced?
For the past 1-2 million years, based on sediment analysis of deposits of pollen, river debris and other material laid down by wind and water, it is believed the Earth has experienced major glacial advances about every 100,000 years. The last major glaciation melted about 50,000 years ago. We are due for the beginning of the next cycle. What causes the cycle is not known. Latest theories of global warming have the next glacial cycle being delayed or cancelled. This is based on the trends in temperature rise observed in the past few hundred years. However, it has been hotter than it is currently in the past and glaciers still advanced. Assuming we can extrapolate recent past atmospheric temperature history through the next glacial cycle may not be as secure as we believe. Reducing carbon emissions is the right thing to do. We need to live in harmony with our spaceship Earth. However, the statement "we do not know what we do not know" may never be truer. We do not understand why the Earth plummets into cold periods lasting tens of thousands of years but we know this has happened many times in the past. Could this be as simple as a sustained reduction in solar particle and radiation impingement on the Earth and if so is a gradual cooling and refreezing of the poles as inevitable as a oil tanker hitting the reef hours after making the wrong turn?
Stay tuned.
April 13, 2009
I lived in a subdivision and as I calmed down a bit and looked around I saw whole families setting up lawn chairs out in their yards in the light of this event to watch. The event went on for 2-3 hours with the last purple green curtains limited to the North and Northeast fading around 11:00 that night. From then on I have had a pact with my brother that if either of us was outside and saw the lights that we would call the other immediately regardless of the hour. We have done this two to three times since. The last occurring about four years ago. This was during a period of significant sunspot and flare activity that occurred at the end of the last solar sunspot cycle. I monitored this activity daily on the SOHO solar satellite observatory web site site. Some of the most powerful solar flares ever measured occurred during this period causing the site to revise the x-ray and proton flux line charts to show flare intensity above M and X class that would have gone off the page without the chart adjustment.
We are now supposedly climbing up the sunspot cycle towards a peek expected within the next 2-3 years, yet since the surge in events at the end of the last cycle this activity has seemed to go to sleep. I just looked at the SOHO site and noted not one sunspot or irregular area visible. The chart that four years ago showed a line chart regularly interrupted with spikes exceeding M and X class intensities was flat. It seems odd that there could be such dramatic variance when you consider the size of the sun and the violence and intensity of the "normal" activity occurring, Thermonuclear reactions continuously occurring held in check by the weight of the nuclear fuel itself. What would cause it to go from complete turmoil to quiescent uniformity in a short 2-3 year span of time? A view of earth at any time from space will not fail to show some stormy areas boiling up and spiraling to the north or south. How could the sun be so calm over most of its enormous surface? Is this something new that we have not witnessed to date?
Solar wind, the particle flow from the sun, enhanced by flares and eruptions that eject plasma in our direction, normally impact the Earth's magnetic field that protects us from what might otherwise be lethal radiation levels. The system overloads occasionally releasing of high energy particles along the magnetic field lines into the atmosphere, mostly over the poles, a resulting in the aurora. The lights are evidence of energy being deposited into the atmosphere on a global scale. In the rarefied air at the altitudes where the aurora normally occur, temperature does not have the same meaning it does on the surface of the earth. The speeding up of the air molecules caused by solar particle impacts technically is a temperature rise but not one that would sensed by our skin. However as the energy cascades down towards the surface the effect spreads out and can not help but raise the temperature even minutely of the ocean of air it is impacting.
For many years we have been experiencing large scale activity on the sun and heightened levels of particle and electromagnetic energy impingement on the Earth's atmosphere. Though there is no doubt that human activity is raising the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere, could there also have been a contributing factor from the sun? Now with the sun experiencing the least activity recorded in recent history, could there be a noticeable effect in the rate of warming or possibly even a reversal. Not immediately of course but over a period of months or years and the longer this quite sun persists could the effect become more pronounced?
For the past 1-2 million years, based on sediment analysis of deposits of pollen, river debris and other material laid down by wind and water, it is believed the Earth has experienced major glacial advances about every 100,000 years. The last major glaciation melted about 50,000 years ago. We are due for the beginning of the next cycle. What causes the cycle is not known. Latest theories of global warming have the next glacial cycle being delayed or cancelled. This is based on the trends in temperature rise observed in the past few hundred years. However, it has been hotter than it is currently in the past and glaciers still advanced. Assuming we can extrapolate recent past atmospheric temperature history through the next glacial cycle may not be as secure as we believe. Reducing carbon emissions is the right thing to do. We need to live in harmony with our spaceship Earth. However, the statement "we do not know what we do not know" may never be truer. We do not understand why the Earth plummets into cold periods lasting tens of thousands of years but we know this has happened many times in the past. Could this be as simple as a sustained reduction in solar particle and radiation impingement on the Earth and if so is a gradual cooling and refreezing of the poles as inevitable as a oil tanker hitting the reef hours after making the wrong turn?
Stay tuned.
April 13, 2009
Saturday, April 11, 2009
In the begining
This is my first blog. Cerebral Contents is just that. Cleaning out the dust bunnies from my cranium. These thoughts are like seeds that I plant in a new medium to see if they take root.
Thought for today. Ever notice how relaxing it is to sit by a camp fire and stare into the flames. In fact does it seem that it is warmer just looking at a fire. I think that there is an ancient body knowledge that we tap into when we do this. Fire emits infrared radiation that obviously warms your body. Your brain needs to be warm. Is is possible that staring into a fire actually gets heat to the brain faster than warming the blood in your extremities? By warming the fluid in the eyes and the blood vessels in the retina that are in close proximity to the brain and of that brain the area you need to make decisions, the cerebrum, you maintain higher cognitive capability than might otherwise be possible in colder climates. When fire was tamed did it give prehistoric people with fire an advantage over those without. Were they warming their brains during cold nights thinking thoughts, expanding neural networks and intelligence in an extended operational mode from what might have been without fire.
We are some of what we were, we are and what we will be.
Oxide April 11, 2009
Thought for today. Ever notice how relaxing it is to sit by a camp fire and stare into the flames. In fact does it seem that it is warmer just looking at a fire. I think that there is an ancient body knowledge that we tap into when we do this. Fire emits infrared radiation that obviously warms your body. Your brain needs to be warm. Is is possible that staring into a fire actually gets heat to the brain faster than warming the blood in your extremities? By warming the fluid in the eyes and the blood vessels in the retina that are in close proximity to the brain and of that brain the area you need to make decisions, the cerebrum, you maintain higher cognitive capability than might otherwise be possible in colder climates. When fire was tamed did it give prehistoric people with fire an advantage over those without. Were they warming their brains during cold nights thinking thoughts, expanding neural networks and intelligence in an extended operational mode from what might have been without fire.
We are some of what we were, we are and what we will be.
Oxide April 11, 2009
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