10,000 years ago, we acquired a morphological innovation.
Vern Bender
Earth life forms emerged about 3.85 million years ago, about ten billion years after the Big Bang. Scientists’ best estimate is that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Earth’s core formation is roughly 4.5 to 4.6 billion years old. The precise date when Homo sapiens emerged is at the center of a scientific dispute, with some researchers sticking to the theory that it was 200,000 years ago. Some scientists say that human ancestors anatomically similar to modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) arose at this time. Genetics and Fossils Show Homo sapiens became the Only Surviving Human Species. Our human species appeared abruptly as a morphological innovation about 10,000 years ago. Language skills suddenly appeared in the history of human evolution. The mind preceded language use. This is evidence of the ability to apply an open-ended generative property of language in human cognition. Moral intelligence is the capacity to understand right from wrong. It is a distinct form of intelligence independent of emotional and cognitive intelligence.
Human intelligence is the intellectual capability of humans, which is marked by complex cognitive feats and high levels of motivation and self-awareness. (I think, therefore, I am). Analytic intelligence comprises the mental processes through which intelligence is expressed. Creative intelligence is when an individual is confronted with a unique challenge or automatizing the performance of a task. Practical intelligence is sociocultural and involves adaptation to shaping the environment to fit in context. Intelligence comprises distinct cognitive systems, each with its own capacity and independent of other components. There is a relationship between motivational intelligence, international experiences, and leadership. Motivational intelligence encompasses understanding motivations, such as achievement, affiliation, and power. The rationality of the mind cannot be explained.
Darwin had zero comment on the origin of life. Math takes Darwin’s Theory down. A blind, automatic process responsible for the existence and all life variations can’t happen in trillions and trillions of years; it just can’t happen. Do the math. The process of blind natural selection and gradual mutations can never produce the results we see everywhere we look. You can’t produce cell results with many slight, incremental modifications. All machine parts must be operational and syncretized at the outset. This is top-down causation, not bottom-up causation.
Cellular biology contains irreducible machine complexity. Coding does that, not trillions of blind attempts. Each cell becomes operational by several irreducibly complex machines. They are made up of protein molecules. Some act as propellers. Others function as trucks to move things around. Each cell has a coded electrical apparatus—everything operates on coded information.
Science can’t prove a negative. Random pieces can’t be cobbled together to get a functioning machine. Somebody has to design the pieces before they are assembled. Random can neither predict nor create a functional piece of machinery. Each cell contains a thirty-part rotary engine. These parts are made of thirty proteins; they work together in an integrated fashion. They come out of the cell’s toolbox. These parts work in a three-dimensional environment. These assembled machines that process information. Generatic information is required to build each protein. These proteins make the parts of these molecular machines. Some machines function as ezines. These machines process information at high rates of speed. Each protein requires a long stretch of specific, coded, generic information to function correctly. A mutation-selection mechanism would be useless, even if randomness could build one. It also couldn’t generate new biological information. A random process couldn’t produce a helpful linguist language.
The human genome is the longest word ever discovered. Our genome is written in a four-letter chemical language. Each instruction is issued in the correct order and length. Our computer coding does the same thing. Proteins need folding to function correctly. Their 3-D structure determines their function. The physical code determines the amino acid sequence that dictates a protein’s native structure—predicting protein structures from their sequences is difficult. Proteins form when amino acids connect in a chain. And that chain folds into a 3D structure.
There are 20,000 to over 100,000 unique types of proteins within a typical human cell. There are 22 different types of amino acids, and their ordering determines how the protein chain will fold upon itself. A protein starts in the cell as a long chain of 300 building blocks called amino acids. These complex structures allow proteins to perform their diverse jobs in the cell. When embedded in a cell membrane, proteins create a tunnel that will enable traffic into and out of cells. By folding into distinct shapes, proteins can perform very different roles despite being composed of the same basic building blocks. Cells are accustomed to coping with misfolded proteins and have several systems to refold or destroy aberrant protein formations. Chaperone proteins jump in to fix things. Another set defense is the proteasome, a group of proteins.
Epigenetics is the study of the chemical modification of specific genes. The process doesn’t alter the underlying DNA activity. It’s like a layer of instructions that sits on your genetic code and influences how genes are turned on or off.
The molecular biological revolution started with the cracking of the genome code in 1953. The structure and the language were discovered in 1953—the nuclide bases function as chemical alphabet characters.
Life on Earth started 385 million years ago. This was 50 million years after a rigorous meteorite bombardment had ended—the chemical conditions on the surface were now right for the complexity of cells to begin.
