Deep sea teeming with life, scientists find

Tiny single-celled organisms, many of them previously unknown, have been discovered beneath 11 kilometres of water in the deepest part of the ocean. A sample of sediment collected from the Challenger Deep southwest of Guam in the Pacific Ocean Islands yielded several hundred foraminifera, a type of plankton that is usually abundant near the ocean surface.

“On the species level, all the species we found from the Challenger Deep are quite new,” researcher Hiroshi Kitazato said via e-mail.

View: Full Article | Source: The Globe and Mail

Life will always surprise us and beat the odds time after time. The deep sea will hold more life than we can possibly imagine!

Life will always surprise us and beat the odds time after time. The deep sea will hold more life than we can possibly imagine!

476218[/snapback]

This is why I can't buy the Creationist claim that earthly life is too complex to have come about without a god. Life is incredibly tenacious. The power of natural selection working over billions of years is more than enough to have brought about all of the critters, and the humans, we keep finding.

One of the favorite tools of the Creationists is the claim that the eyeball is too complex to have popped into existence fully formed. That's true; it is. No one says the eyeball did appear fully formed. I can easily envision that a patch of nerves near the skin of an ancient critter could have sensed light. Lots of primitive critters today can detect light in this way and either move toward it or away from it as it suits them. If a depression in the skin over the patch of nerves formed a "bowl", the patch of nerves would be able to tell the direction of the light source as well as its intensity, and the critters with "bowls" over their patches of light-sensitive nerves would be able to find food and mates and avoid predators better than those that didn't have the bowls and would outcompete them. Perhaps later, skin formed over the bowl. Later still, the skin over the bowl got thicker in the middle and started focusing light into the bowl, etc. etc. Life and natural selection are incredibly powerful. Just because we can't see or reproduce every step of evolution doesn't mean evolution didn't happen.