Oldest Fossils Arent
A new analysis of the world’s oldest claimed fossil rock, a banded deposit off the coast of Greenland said to be 3.8 billion years old, probably contains no signature of life, reports Stephen Moorbath (Oxford) in Nature.1 He has visited the Akilia site twice where rocks were purported to contain graphite of biological origin. He couldn’t find it.
This persuasive discovery seems an almost inevitable, yet highly problematic, consequence to the increasing scientific doubts about the original claim. We may well ask what exactly was the material originally analysed and reported? What was the apatite grain with supposed graphite inclusions that figured on the covers of learned and popular journals soon after the discovery? These questions must surely be answered and, if necessary, lessons learned for the more effective checking and duplication of spectacular scientific claims from the outset.
To my regret, the ancient Greenland rocks have not yet produced any compelling evidence for the existence of life by 3.8 billion years ago. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)
Add to that the downgrading of claims about life-signatures in Western Australian rocks said to be 3.5 billion years old, and there is a big gap until the more reliable claims of bacterial fossils in Ontario’s Gunflint formation said to be 1.9 billion years old. “ To have a chance of success,” he warns, “it seems that the search for remnants of earliest life must be carried out on sedimentary rocks that are as old, unmetamorphosed, unmetasomatized and undeformed as possible. That remains easier said than done.”
1Stephen Moorbath, “Palaeobiology: Dating earliest life,” Nature 434, 155 (10 March 2005); doi:10.1038/434155a.
This admission does nothing to help the Darwinists. Even trusting the shaky dating methods for the sake of argument, it adds to the problem that life appeared suddenly in a profusion of forms. Moorbath has just robbed his fellow Darwinists of half their allotted practice time for bacteria to hone their engineering skills. Those bacteria must have had to race extra fast to invent all the molecular machines needed for the higher organisms that followed. To add to the Darwinists’ woes, the microbiologists are finding evidence of sophistication in the most “primitive” forms of life (see next entry). A cartoon of a man’s head in a vice comes to mind.
Did you catch the line that a claim was made without sufficient evidence, yet was featured on the covers of “learned and popular journals”? Could that be happening today? Has anyone learned the lesson?