Evolution Conspiracy: Oxygen Photosynthesis Began Earlier Than Thought

Evolutionists are putting the rise of oxygen 700 million years earlier than thought, requiring the origin of photosynthesis that much earlier, too.

A co-author of a paper in Nature commented on the implications of putting oxygen back nearly a billion years earlier: “These findings imply that it took a very long time for geological and biological processes to conspire and produce the oxygen rich atmosphere we now enjoy” (press release, Univ. of British Columbia).

Trouble is, it puts the rise of the complex process of photosynthesis back that far, too: “This study now suggests that the process began very early in Earth’s history, supporting a much greater antiquity for oxygen producing photosynthesis and aerobic life,” lead author Sean Crowe said – specifically, about 3 billion years ago, according to the abstract of the paper.  They claim this on the basis of some South African rocks.  Even if the oxygen was far below current levels, the amount they deduced implies that photosynthesis had already arrived.

After ruling out geological methods for producing the excess oxygen, they said: “This would imply that cyanobacteria may have evolved by this time, indicating a much deeper history, by 300–400 Myr, for oxygenic photosynthesis than previously realized.”  To Crowe, though, this is not a problem, as quoted by the BBC News:

“Oxygenic photosynthesis is a very complicated metabolism and it makes sense that the evolution of such a metabolism would take perhaps two billion years – that we might not see its manifestation until the Great Oxidation Event. But now that we see oxygen much earlier in the atmosphere, it tells us that even really complex metabolisms can evolve very fast,” said team-member Dr Sean Crowe from the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Crowe did not elaborate on how photosynthesis evolved, nor what “makes sense” means for an unguided, mindless world.

If geology and biology conspired to give us our beautiful blue skies we enjoy, did they do it by intelligent design?  That may have been just a figure of speech, but Crowe’s comment was no joke, at least to him.  First he says that photosynthesis is so complicated, it “makes sense” that it would have taken 2 billion years.  Then he turns around and claims, based on indirect theory-laden assumptions about a few samples in one location on Earth, that a rock “tells us that even really complex metabolisms can evolve very fast.”  Instead of crying in his coffee about how wrong he was to think such a thing, instead of repenting for his folly, he just turns up the evolutionary speed dial, telling the world that irreducibly complex biological machines, in a system so complex our best engineers cannot understand it fully after years of study, “can evolve very fast.”  Such reasoning is hopeless.  What will philosophers of the future think of the reasoning power of evolutionists in 2013?  And to think that Nature accepted and printed this stuff, and all the secular science sites reproduced it uncritically – that does not bode well for the reasoning power of modern culture.  It’s what you get when you rule out of bounds anything but DODO.  The integrity of science – indeed, the integrity of reason itself – needs Darwin skeptics.  Tear down this wall!