Great Oxidation Myth Creates Absurdities
A falsified zombie scenario known as the
GOE is not a solution to evolutionary
problems. It is a problem itself.
Once upon a time, 2.4 billion Darwin Years ago (give or take 100 million), oxygen levels in the oceans were very low. Slowly, bacteria and algae found ways to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen escaped, but the oxygen accumulated in the oceans and the atmosphere. This dramatic turn of events is called the Great Oxidation Event (GOE, also called the Great Oxygenation Event). As oxygen became available, microbes found it useful for more efficient metabolism. Millions of years later, when oxygen reached near modern levels, an explosion of life resulted! Oxygen kickstarted the evolution of complex body plans. Then larger animals were able to live on land, and eventually the oxygen-enriched atmosphere led to the emergence of human brains that figured all this out.
Sound familiar? This useful scenario has died and come back to life repeatedly (8 March 2021) after being dealt a death blow as far back as 2013 (2 Sept 2013). That was after it was “dethroned” in 2009 (17 April 2009). It should be called, therefore, the Great Oxidation Myth (GOM), repeated uncritically by evolutionists (see 16 March 2017). Articles and papers this month show again that this Zombie Science is back up, denying it was ever dead. But as we will argue, The GOM creates more problems than it supposedly solves.
What the geologic record reveals about how the oceans were oxygenated (University of Utah, 12 June 2024). Chadlin Ostrander gets his 15 minutes of fame in a press release photo. He performed divination on shale rocks, announcing that stable isotopes of thallium have spoken to him about the rise of oxygen in the rocks. But it’s complicated. It wasn’t a smooth rise. The spirit of the shales told him that, contrary to earlier beliefs about the GOE, oxygen went up and down on a teeter totter for some 200 million Darwin Years! Imagine that! Isn’t it better to have multiple GOE zombies walking around than just one?
For the first half of Earth’s existence, its atmosphere and oceans were largely devoid of O2. This gas was being produced by cyanobacteria in the ocean before the GOE, it seems, but in these early days the O2 was rapidly destroyed in reactions with exposed minerals and volcanic gasses. Poulton, Bekker and colleagues discovered that the rare sulfur isotope signatures disappear but then reappear, suggesting multiple O2 rises and falls in the atmosphere during the GOE. This was no single ‘event.’
“Earth wasn’t ready to be oxygenated when oxygen starts to be produced. Earth needed time to evolve biologically, geologically and chemically to be conducive to oxygenation,” Ostrander said. “It’s like a teeter totter. You have oxygen production, but you have so much oxygen destruction, nothing’s happening. We’re still trying to figure out when we’ve completely tipped the scales and Earth could not go backwards to an anoxic atmosphere.”
Algae to Earth: ‘We’re not ready! We need more time to evolve! The Stuff Happens Law is too slow!’ The Earth and cyanobacteria rode their teeter totter for 200 million more Darwin Years. Finally, the microbes were ready to evolve, and Earth allowed oxygen to accumulate so that something could happen. And happen it did! Almost 20 new complex body plans emerged without transitional forms in the geological blink of an eye.
Onset of coupled atmosphere–ocean oxygenation 2.3 billion years ago (Ostrander et al., Nature, 12 June 2024). This is Chadlin Ostrander’s paper with six other accomplices. The new message is in the first sentence: “The initial rise of molecular oxygen (O2) shortly after the Archaean–Proterozoic transition 2.5 billion years ago was more complex than the single step-change once envisioned.” Question: who once envisioned that scenario? Answer: Darwinian evolutionists! Creationists believe that God created the Earth habitable with a working atmosphere from the start. Evolutionists dismiss that as an absurd idea.
But will Ostrander’s new teeter-totter version replace the old GOM in textbooks? Give that a few more million years. For now, recognize that the GOM is highly dependent on Deep Time. Hold onto that thought.
Discovery of microfossil in China from the 518-million-year-old Qingjiang biota sheds light on adaptive evolution (Science China Press via Phys.org, 12 June 2024). This press release also mentions shale, and depends on the Great Oxidation Event. The zombie GOM has been sighted walking around China. It made its appearance in a microfossil of a kind of sulfate-reducing bacterium appearing as “a long filament comprising hundreds of rod-shaped cells.” They think it’s related to the now-famous cable bacteria that surprised scientists in 2016 (Evolution News).
The discovery of this remarkable microfossil sheds light on the evolution of sulfate-reducing bacteria and cable bacteria. Phylogenomic and molecular clock analyses confirm an independent origin of multicellularity of Desulfonema and cable bacteria within the phylum Desulfobacterota.
More importantly, these molecular biological analyses infer that Desulfobacterota, encompassing majorities of sulfate-reducing taxa, diverged ~2.4 billion years ago during the Paleoproterozoic Great Oxygenation Event (GOE), while cable bacteria diverged ~0.56 billion years ago during or after Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event.
But as fascinating as the fossil may be, its existence as far back as 2.4 billion Darwin Years, on which the GOM depends, creates an absurdity. Consider what evolutionists must believe if sulfate-reducing bacteria evolved 2.4 billion years ago. These bacteria divide approximately 4 times an hour. How many cell divisions must have occurred in 2.4 billion years for a bacterium that divides every 15 minutes? The answer: about 84 trillion cell divisions!*
Is this credible, given the inevitability of mutations? We know that dozens (maybe hundreds) of mutations are passed down from human parents to children every generation. For these bacteria to have survived for 2.4 billion years and still be identifiable after 84 trillion generations, they would have had to have nearly perfect copying of their genomes every cell division. Maybe they could do that for a few thousand years, but hundreds of trillions?
Not even Richard Lenski’s 34-year Long Term Evolution Experiment has a copy record that good: “in the 50,000-generation LTEE clones, 144 nonsynonymous mutations occurred in 102 panorthologous genes.” At that rate, the GOE bacteria would have accumulated 12 billion mutations in 2.4 billion years. If we assume 4 million bases in a sulfate-reducing bacterium (on the high side), there would have been 3,000 mutations per base pair during the time it supposedly “diverged during the GOE,” rendering the species completely unrecognizable if not extinct.
Like we say, Deep Time is not the solution to evolutionary problems. Deep Time is the problem.
Comments
Good update for many of us who don’t normally follow the GOE-GOM story. Like many other of their stories its a doosey.