Re: database of historical events, people and literature of antiquity?

"Joe Bernstein" <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:e1ur3d$s4f$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In article <IKp0g.7952$vy1.2171@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
mountain man <hobbit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

....[trimmed this out separately]...

Took a look around, thanks. The article on (really) ancient time
spans interested me a little. I think you can make an entry for
this HADEAN EON for around 3800, if this means 3.8 billion
years ago, for the emergence of primitive (pre-cellular) life.

Sorry, but I'm not sure I understand.

I know there's Hadean stuff that strongly suggests life already
in existence, but I thought the Archaean was where we first
have direct evidence; and I don't see how we're going to find
evidence of "pre-cellular" life since most of our strategies for
identifying palaeontological life assume cellular forms.

So either you're being ungrammatical in some way, or you have
info I don't, or you're wrong. Since the second possibility
interests me, could you please elaborate?


Hopefully its the 2nd possibility then ... ;-)


It involves the work of Margulis, who is here quoted described
by Capra in an article I prepared some time back:


=========[article]=============

In the year of 1982, Fritjof Capra published a second book
entitled " The Turning Point" - Science, Society, and the rising
culture. A compelling vision of a new reality. A reconciliation
of science and the human spirit for a future that will work.
In this second work he expressed a development of these
earlier ideas, and in which the work of Lynn Margulis
receives mention in a section entitled "The Systems
View of Life" - (Page 288).


In classical science nature was seen as a mechanical system
composed of basic building blocks. In accordance with this
view, Darwin proposed a theory of evolution in which the unit
of survival was the species, the subspecies, or some other
building block of the biological world. But a century later it
has become quite clear that the unit of survival is not any of
these entities. What survives is the organism-in-its-environment.
An organism that thinks only in themes of its own survival will
invariably destroy its environment and, as we are learning
from bitter experience, will thus destroy itself.

From the systems point of view the unit of survival is not at
entity at all, but rather a pattern of organisation adopted by
an organism in its interactions with its environment; or, as
neurologist Robert Livingston has expressed it, the
evolutionary selection process acts on the basis of behaviour.

In the history of life on earth, the coevolution of , microcosm
and macrocosm is of particular importance. Conventional
accounts of the origin of life usually describe the build-up
of higher life forms in microevolution and neglect the
macroevolutionary aspects. But these two are complementary
aspects of the same evolutionary process, as Jantsch has
emphasised.

From one perspective microscopic life creates
the macroscopic conditions for its further evolution; from the
other perspective the macroscopic biosphere creates its own
microscopic life. The unfolding of complexity arises not from
adaptation of organisms to a given environment but rather
from the coevolution of organism and environment at all
systems levels.

When the earliest life forms appeared on earth around four
billion years ago-half a billion years after the formation of
the planet-they were single-celled organisms without a
cell nucleus that looked rather like some of today's bacteria.
These so-called prokaryotes lived without oxygen, since
there was little or no free oxygen in the atmosphere. But
almost as soon as the microorganisms originated they
began to modify their environment and create the
macroscopic conditions for the further evolution of life.

For the next two billion years some prokaryotes produced
oxygen through photosynthesis, until it reached its present
levels of concentration in the earth's atmosphere. Thus the
stage was set for the emergence of more complex,
oxygen-breathing cells that would be capable of forming
cell tissues and multicellular organisms. The next important
evolutionary step was the emergence of eukaryotes,
single-celled organisms with a nucleus contained the
organism's genetic material in its chromosomes. It was
these cells that later on formed multicellular organisms.

According to Lynn Margulis, co-author of the Gaia
hypothesis, eukaryotic cells originated in a symbiosis
between several prokaryotes that continued to live on as
organelles within the new type of cell. We have mentioned
the two kinds of organelles-mitochondria and chloroplasts
-that regulate the complementary respiration requirements
of animals and plants. These are nothing but the former
prokaryotes, which still continue to manage the energy
household of the planetary Gaia system, as they have done
for the past four billion years.

In the further evolution of life, two steps enormously
accelerated the evolutionary process and produced an
abundance of new forms.


The first was the development of sexual reproduction,
which introduced extraordinary genetic variety.
The second step was the emergence of consciousness,
which made it possible to replace the genetic mechanisms
of evolution with more efficient social mechanisms, based
upon conceptual thought and symbolic language.

While the research work of Lynn Margulis in the area of
cell evolution was gradually being accepted, her collaboration
with Dr James Lovelock in the formulation of the Gaia
Hypothesis was often viewed in a critical manner.

Neverthess, such an environment did not seem to daunt her
scientific progress in many areas, neither did it hinder her
publication and joint publication of a number of articles,
reviews and books in the interim period of the 1970's and
1980's in which debate on the Gaia Hypothesis raged
within scientific circles and - indeed moreso -
outside of these.
=========[/article]=============
http://www.mountainman.com.au/gaia_lyn.html


Stromatolites are rock-like structures that were
built by a type of blue-green algae called
cyanobacteria:

http://physics.weber.edu/carroll/Wonder/oldest_life.htm

Hope this helps.

I will separately respond to the history database
issues at a later time, as I view many things as
interesting.


Best wishes,



Pete Brown
www.mountainman.com.au



.

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