Agnosticism / Atheism: Oldest Cells Found?

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Oldest Cells Found? Jan 5th 2012, 12:00 Scientists are gradually discovering more and more about the earliest forms of life on our planet. In Western Australia, Geologists have found fossils of what they think may be the oldest cells ever: 3.4 billion years. If the discovery is verified, and there's no reason to think that it won't be, it will be the best evidence ever found of the earliest life on Earth. Geologists Martin Brasier of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and David Wacey of the University of Western Australia in Crawley discovered the fossil cells between cemented sand grains from an ancient beach in Western Australia. The fossil cells were hollow, and some were clustered together in groups surrounded by what looked like a membrane. "The morphology is very cell-like," Brasier says. The cells were also patchily distributed in the sediment, just as modern bacteria tend to congregate near sources of food, the researchers reported online 21 August in Nature Geoscience. Source: Science, September 2, 2011 The cells probably used sulfur for fuel, according to the analysis of minerals near the fossils, which would be consistent with much of the current research on the likely origins of life. It's entirely possible that this beach in Western Australia was one of the original locations of our planets first life. If this was indeed one of the first locations of life, it's worth making special note of the fact that these cells were not spread around evenly but were clustered in places. They hadn't formed multi-cellular organisms yet, but they were gathering together for one reason or another. This suggests that "community" of some sort is almost an inherent part of life itself. Considering how many benefits there are to community, even a very loose and disorganized community, that wouldn't be the least bit surprising. It seems to me that the first cellular life forms would have had a much easier time surviving, reproducing, and thriving if they were collected together than if they were spread out and each entirely on their own.

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