Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 486

Rob Sheldon: The real reason there is a crisis in cosmology

Big Bang/NASA

Last week, we pointed to an item in Scientific American grappling with the current crisis in cosmology.Rob Sheldon, our obliging physics color commentator, offers some thoughts on that:

“Bjorn Ekeberg and I are on the same page.” he says:

The edifice of the Big Bang has some serious cracks in it. It isn’t that physics models have to be perfect, but this one is so essential to the entire field, there’s a feeling of the ground shifting under the cosmologists feet. You might even say that cosmology wasn’t a field of physics until this model came along.

Compounding the problem is hubris. (Please don’t misunderstand what I say, I’m just the King’s Fool for space science.) Europeans have America envy–the Americans are so much better funded, they get to do everything first–first to the Moon, lasers, computers, biotech, etc. When the European Space Agency is planning a mission, it’s hard for the slower-moving wheels of European parliaments to beat the US to a discovery. Consequently, they like to repeat a US mission but do it better–a better flyby of a comet (Halley, ROSETTA) a better cosmic microwave background telescope (Planck), etc.

And after a spectacular mission, they can then take their time analyzing the data (since there won’t be another for so long). Bit by dribbled bit, the data from Planck has been analyzed so thoroughly and squeezed so hard they’ve gotten blood from this turnip. (Yes, I spent 3 years in Switzerland with the ROSETTA team.) That’s what the 6-digit accuracy on the Big Bang model is all about, which the Europeans proudly call “precision cosmology.”

So not only is the Big Bang model the foundation of the field of cosmology, but the model has been invested with centuries of scientist-man-years, a cultural treasure like the pyramids of Egypt. It gives ESA bragging rights. To suggest that the theory is suffering the fate of Ozymandias:

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone//Stand in the desert…
Near them, on the sand//Half sunk a shattered visage lies… ”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

is not something taken lightly, certainly not by most cosmologists.

Well, how can we tell whether the investment is wasted or not? Surely there is still something valuable, something progressive to be said for sticking with the model?

Ekeberg, being the careful philosopher, knows on which side his bread is buttered. Here’s his take on Ozymandias:

Each new discrepancy between observation and theory can of course in and of itself be considered an exciting promise of more research, a progressive refinement toward the truth. But when it adds up, it could also suggest a more confounding problem that is not resolved by tweaking parameters or adding new variables.

Bjørn Ekeberg, “Cosmology Has Some Big Problems” at Scientific American

Let me say what Bjorn can’t–the discrepancies are a consequence of bad metaphysics (like the reason Einstein added the cosmological constant to the model) and are irreparable.

Either the universe has a beginning, or it doesn’t, and if it has a beginning we are not going to escape it with bouncing or multiverses or inflation or wormholes. We must accept the metaphysical consequences of a beginning and move on. Nearly everything that has failed about the Big Bang model has been added because of bad metaphysics, a refusal to accept the consequences of a beginning.

The remaining pieces of the Big Bang model that are failing and which can’t be attributed to bad metaphysics were added from sheer laziness (or to say it more generously) from the limitations of paper-and-pencil calculations and primitive computers. We now have both better mathematical tools and better computers, so neither of these excuses work any longer. Therefore there is no reason to assume isotropic, homogeneous, non-magnetic solutions are the only valid ones.

I am reminded of something I heard from David Eubank, the founder of the Free Burma Rangers who said: “The reason we don’t do the right thing, is often because of pride and laziness; we don’t want to be embarrassed, and we don’t want to give up our comfort.” It is time for cosmologists to be both courageous and brave.

And this is where I part ways with Ekeberg. He has only suggested that the model is wrong, he has not suggested how it can be repaired. He hints at some of the options: Do we add “new physics”, “new particles”, or abandon “old physics”? His comment about adding floors to the model is similar to “new physics” so that he appears not to favor that option. But the alternative, which also appears to be Sabine Hossenfelder’s solution, is to abandon “old physics” and modify the Newtonian gravity paradigm, an approach known as MOND. While only a few have advocated MOND, the response from the community has been pretty vicious.

My solution is none of those things. Rather, I argue we need to abandon all the bad metaphysics that motivated the add-ons to the model. That would be inflation, isotropy, homogeneity, dark energy, “dark matter” in its “new particle” expression, and of course, non-magnetic “gas”. Once all these barnacles are off the model, we can then embrace the difficulties of a fully kinetic plasma (ie. not MHD), a fully 3-D model, and cast about for formulations that can effectively explain the data.

What gets me excited, is that my preliminary research shows that we have some excellent candidate models with nothing more exotic than extremely large magnetic fields. Some would hold that any magnetic field at all is exotic, but I reply that at least we have lots of evidence of astrophysical objects with large magnetic fields, making this assumption far more empirical than “new particles” or “MOND”. In other words, all we need is courage and bravery, willing to face the criticism and the difficulties of non-homogeneous, anisotropic, 3-D models.

What we don’t need, however, is some sort of metaphysical justification for abandoning empirical physics or believing in 5 dimensions and invisible particles. It isn’t our faith in the philosophy of science that needs repair, but our former gullibility that let scientists slip in bad metaphysics.

The hard work of the Planck team is not wasted, because the repairs to the model will make it even more physical, and therefore not just “precise” but also “accurate”. The ground may be shifting in cosmology, but it is finding its true foundation.

Rob Sheldon is author of Genesis: The Long Ascent

See also: At Scientific American: Understanding the cosmology crisis All that said, faith in mathematics is better than faith in a lucky rabbit’s foot because the mathematics might make sense someday.

Rob Sheldon: Here’s why physicists are surprised by the universe’s increased expansion rate The two methods differ in that one is “direct” and the other “indirect”. Clearly one or both of them is making a mistake. Since it is hard to find (and people have looked) a reason why the direct method is failing, the feeling is that the indirect method must have a mistake in its model.

and

The Big Bang: Put simply,the facts are wrong.

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Michael Egnor: Jerry Coyne confirms a hypothesis about secular religion

Michael Egnor

Serious news can wait as bit; let’s have some more entertainment. Remember when Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne was insisting that secular humanism is not a religion? His “archenemy” (his term) Michael Egnor took this on:

At Why Evolution Is True, biologist Jerry Coyne has a post about a Quillette article on whether secular humanism is a religion. John Staddon, an emeritus professor of biology and psychology at Duke and the author of the Quillette article, says yes, and Coyne disagrees…

Staddon’s piece is topical, well written, and carefully reasoned. Coyne is of course free to disagree with Staddon’s conclusions. But he does not merely disagree. Coyne rants that Staddon’s essay should never have been published. In other words, he responds to the observation that atheism is censoriously thuggish by… being a censorious thug.

That’s a perk to the article. Staddon wrote a good article, and he got atheist Jerry Coyne to confirm his hypothesis. It would be funny, but for the display of hate and malice.
Michael Egnor, “Evolutionist Seethes as Duke Professor Analyzes Secular “Religion”” at Evolution News and Science Today:

But it got people reading…

Hey, serious stuff again tomorrow!

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See also: Jerry Coyne insists that secular humanism is not a religion

and

Jerry Coyne vents his views on David Klinghoffer He tells readers, “The “Darwinian Perspective,” or at least the atheistic one, hadn’t at all proved terribly corrosive. Indeed, people found it liberating.” ENST editor Klinghoffer disagrees with that.

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Jerry Coyne vents about David Klinghoffer

[image error]Jerry Coyne

Klinghoffer, editor of Evolution News and Science Today, said something recently that really set Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne off:

Intelligent Design (ID) advocate David Klinghoffer, an Orthodox Jew, spends a lot of time attacking me on the Discovery Institute Website Evolution News. It’s almost an obsessive animus, for he regularly trawls this site looking for ammunition. But I pay little attention to the man…

First of all, his criticisms of me have nothing to do with science, but are recycled tropes about how horrible atheism is. That’s because Klinghoffer and his ID cronies have no scientific ammunition against evolution, and so are reduced to ad hominems about evolutionists or criticisms of unbelief or moans about the destructive effects of accepting evolution. He also beefs endlessly about my “tone”. Sorry, but Liars for Moses—or Jesus—don’t deserve respect. Klinghoffer is irrelevant in any serious scientific discourse.Jerry Coyne, “An ID advocate, lacking scientific arguments, claims that atheism saps life of meaning” at Why Evolution Is True

Coyne is referring to this post: “Good Question for the Next Darwinist You Meet.”

One wonders how Coyne knows all this about Klinghoffer if he pays “very little attention to the man” (he seems to know more than we do). But never mind.

He tells readers, “The “Darwinian Perspective,” or at least the atheistic one, hadn’t at all proved terribly corrosive. Indeed, people found it liberating.”

Hmmm. When someone tells us that people find their perspective liberating, we tend to wonder, which people find it so? Sometimes circular but always informative.

Coyne is the sort of person that, if he didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him. See, for example,

Jerry Coyne insists that secular humanism is not a religion

See also: Jerry Coyne on hwo mathematician John Lennox embarrasses himself

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has become Jerry Coyne’s “archenemy”

and

Jerry Coyne discovers the lack of intellectual freedom on campus

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New OOL book: Life rests on physics but can’t be derived from it

In a review of Stuart A Kauffman’s A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life Stuart A. Kauffman Oxford University Press (2019), we learn, after an outline of his theories on the origin of life is offered,

Because of this, Kauffman provocatively concludes, there is no mathematical law that could describe the evolving diversity and abundance of life in the biosphere. He writes: “we do not know the relevant variables prior to their emergence in evolution.” At best, he argues, any ‘laws of life’ that do exist will describe statistical distributions of aspects of that evolution. For instance, they might predict the distribution of extinctions. Life’s emergence might rest on the foundations of physics, “but it is not derivable from them”, Kauffman argues.

If biology cannot be reduced to physics, however, is it “beyond physics”, as Kauffman claims? Sara Imari Walker, “The new physics needed to probe the origins of life” at Nature

Walker disagrees with this view, of course, but the problem is, physics and whether biology can be derived from it might depend on which piece you are holding.

See also: At Scientific American: Understanding the cosmology crisis All that said, faith in mathematics is better than faith in a lucky rabbit’s foot because the mathematics might make sense someday.

and

Rob Sheldon: Here’s why physicists are surprised by the universe’s increased expansion rate The two methods differ in that one is “direct” and the other “indirect”. Clearly one or both of them is making a mistake. Since it is hard to find (and people have looked) a reason why the direct method is failing, the feeling is that the indirect method must have a mistake in its model.

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Why Evolution is Different

I have redone my video “Why Evolution is Different,” the new 22 minute version is embedded below. I apologize for the self-promotion, but what can I say? I think it’s the best thing I’ve written on ID (and maybe the last thing) and summarizes everything I’ve learned in 35 years (I can possibly claim to have authored one of the first “peer-reviewed” ID writings in 1985) so I want to share. It consists of two main parts 1) Why evolution is different—so different it requires a very different type of explanation, and 2) Why similarities do not prove the absence of design. The second part begins at about 13:00.

If you’re looking for something that shows off a profound knowledge of the details of biochemistry, this is not what you are looking for. I have always just tried to step back and look at the overall picture, using a little common sense, I think that is really all you need to do. (If you have already seen the earlier version: the new parts start at 11:00 and 18:40, though minor improvements have been made throughout.) I hope you enjoy it.

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New theory of the Moon’s formation addresses huge discrepancy

magma leaving the early Earth/ Hosono, Karato, Makino, and Saitoh

From ScienceDaily:

Many theorists believe a Mars-sized object slammed into the early Earth, and material dislodged from that collision formed the basis of the moon. When this idea was tested in computer simulations, it turned out that the moon would be made primarily from the impacting object. Yet the opposite is true; we know from analyzing rocks brought back from Apollo missions that the moon consists mainly of material from Earth.

A new study published April 29 in Nature Geoscience, co-authored by Yale geophysicist Shun-ichiro Karato, offers an explanation.

The key, Karato says, is that the early, proto-Earth — about 50 million years after the formation of the Sun — was covered by a sea of hot magma, while the impacting object was likely made of solid material. Karato and his collaborators set out to test a new model, based on the collision of a proto-Earth covered with an ocean of magma and a solid impacting object.

The model showed that after the collision, the magma is heated much more than solids from the impacting object. The magma then expands in volume and goes into orbit to form the moon, the researchers say. This explains why there is much more Earth material in the moon’s makeup. Previous models did not account for the different degree of heating between the proto-Earth silicate and the impactor. Paper. paywall – Natsuki Hosono, Shun-ichiro Karato, Junichiro Makino, Takayuki R. Saitoh. Terrestrial magma ocean origin of the Moon. Nature Geoscience, April 29, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-019-0354-2 More.

According to the new theory, 80% of the Moon’s material is proto-Earth. Probably too hot to hope to find fossils there if life got started on Earth as soon as sme research suggests, but we’ll see.

Note: There are many theories of the Moon’s origin. See below items the vid.

Before you go: Hugh Ross: The fine-tuning that enabled our life-friendly moon creates discomfort Was it yesterday that we noted particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s view that fine-tuning is “a waste of time”? Not so fast. If the evidence points to fine-tuning and the only alternative is the crackpot cosmology she deplores, it’s not so much a waste of time as a philosophically unacceptable conclusion. Put another way, it comes down to fine-tuning, nonsense, or nothing.

Moon formed from smashed moonlets?

Scientists finally know how old Moon is What’s surprising, really, is how little we know about the moon in general.

And various current theories:

Another moon origin theory: Epic crash

How the Moon Formed: 5 Wild Lunar Theories (Mike Wall at Space.com, 2014)

Our moon formed in collision with embryo planet?

and

Origin of the moon still shrouded in mystery

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Doubt cast on new “exomoon” Rob Sheldon explains

artist’s impression of exomoon/Dan Durda

Remember the first known exomoon (moon orbiting an exoplanet)? We wrote about it The apparent discovery (which shouldn’t surprise anyone in principle) has come under fire:

Two different groups of researchers took another look at data to search for a telltale dip in starlight that could suggest a moon was passing in front of the star Kepler 1625. Their conflicting results raise questions about whether the exomoon exists.

“When I reanalyzed the data, I don’t see that moonlike dip at all,” says Laura Kreidberg, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. She and colleagues reported the results in a paper posted at arXiv.org on April 25.

In a separate study, astronomer René Heller of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, and colleagues found inconsistent signs of a moon. The researchers analyzed the same data as Kreidberg, gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope, plus data from Kepler, the now-retired exoplanet-hunting space telescope. Both of those telescopes were used to bolster the initial case for the exomoon. But, Heller’s team writes in a paper published April 17 in Astronomy & Astrophysics, “careful consideration of its statistical evidence leads us to believe that this is not a secure exomoon detection.”Lisa Grossman, “Skepticism grows over whether the first known exomoon exists” at ScienceNews

We asked our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon how to understand this on-again off-again faroff moon. He says,

This brief article captures the essence of “unrepeatability” for physics papers. We all know the problem of repeatability in psychology and biology, but it exists for physics too. The most famous discussion of this was by Irving Langmuir in his 1953 paper “Pathological Science“.

It works like this.
a) You want to be famous.
b) You pick a hard thing to measure.
c) You see something in the data that might could* make you famous.
d) You ignore any criticism and rush to press.
e) When later, the paper is disproved, you blame it on your data.
f) You are no worse off than when you started, and a whole lot more famous. Maybe even funded to improve the data.

Now, why is this paper in that category? Because the noisy data is discovered by looking at “blips” in the light emitted from a distant star as the planet “transits” the disk of the star as seen from Earth. The “size” of the blip tells you its radius. From a double blip, the researchers estimated a “hot Jupiter” about 2 times wider than Jupiter at an orbit of 0.8AU around a 1.08 solar mass star, accompanied by a moon some 0.002 AU away (the distance of our Moon) but with a diameter is something like 2X that of Earth.

Well, what would happen if a super-Earth orbited a super-Jupiter at a distance of 200,000 miles?

Io is a much smaller moon than ours, and it orbits Jupiter at a distance ~16% larger than our moon. Yet the effect of Jupiter’s gravity on Io causes the largest volcanoes in the Solar System. In return, Io causes a beam of electrons that form a hot-spot in Jupiter’s atmosphere as well as aurora. So if we amp up Jupiter’s gravity 10 times, and increase the mass of the moon 1000 times, and put it 20% closer, what could possibly go wrong?

Among other things, the tidal force is proportional to the mass and inversely proportional to the cube of the distance. So the tidal force on this supposed moon is 40,000 bigger than Io’s. The heating rate is force * velocity, and the keplerian velocity is about 6 times faster, so we are up to 240,000 times more heating of this moon than Io. Fortunately, radiative cooling goes as the area times the fourth power of the temperature, and being 4 times larger than Io, corresponds to a temperature only 6 times hotter than Io. Io’s volcanoes are molten sulfur, which melts at a temperature 388K, and so very roughly we suggest that this putative moon should be only 2450 K. For comparison the surface of the sun is 5500 K. So they are suggesting is that they detected a moon with a dip in the light curve, but it should have been a bump in the light curve! (Before evaporating completely, of course, since only a few ceramics stay solid at 2450K.) And we haven’t even addressed the effect of tidal heating and ionospheric bombardment on the super-Jupiter, which should be emitting X-rays like a x-ray binary.

In other words, there are red flags all over this data, but the investigators are standing by their measurement.

This is what irreproducible papers look like in physics, and why the same crisis that afflicts other disciplines also afflicts physics.

*”might could” is a technical term especially used in Alabama.

Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent

—–

See also: Astronomers: First Possible Exomoon Is The Size Of Neptune, And Orbiting A “Jupiter”

and

Moonmoons

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Can the giant Medusa virus help explain the evolution of complex life?

Medusavirus/ Tokyo University of Science

From ScienceDaily:

A team of scientists led by virologist Masaharu Takemura at Tokyo University of Science and Hiroyuki Ogata at Kyoto University in Japan have discovered a giant virus that, much like the mythical monster Medusa, can turn almost amoeba to a stone-like cyst. Isolated from a hot spring in Japan and eponymously dubbed Medusavirus, this virus infects a species of amoeba known as Acanthamoeba castellanii and causes it to develop a hard, stony shell.

With the Medusavirus, scientists discovered that DNA replication occurred in the nucleus of the host amoeba and observed evidence of exchange of genetic information between the host and the virus as they coevolved. They also found that the giant virus harbors in its ancient genome some of the complex proteins that make up the building blocks of eukaryotic organisms such as animals, plants, and humans. Understanding the presence of these proteins in the virus’ genome may help scientists tackle some of the hardest questions about our origins. In fact, “genomics research of the giant virus indicates that there is likely a relationship between the Medusavirus and the origin of eukaryotic life,” says Professor Takemura from Tokyo University of Science.

So what’s the relationship?

When the Medusavirus petrifies the amoeba, it does so by hijacking the cell directly from its nucleus. The virus transfers its DNA to initiate replication and uses its own DNA polymerase (enzyme that synthesizes DNA) and histones, but overall, it relies on the host to complete the process. The results of an evolutionary analysis done by the authors suggest that in the evolution tree, the Medusavirus DNA polymerase lies at the origin of the DNA polymerase found in eukaryotes. As one of the authors, Dr Genki Yoshikwa from Kyoto University, puts it, this could mean that our DNA polymerase “probably originated from Medusavirus or one of its relatives.” Paper.(open access) – Genki Yoshikawa, Romain Blanc-Mathieu, Chihong Song, Yoko Kayama, Tomohiro Mochizuki, Kazuyoshi Murata, Hiroyuki Ogata, Masaharu Takemura. Medusavirus, a Novel Large DNA Virus Discovered from Hot Spring Water. Journal of Virology, 2019; 93 (8) DOI: 10.1128/JVI.02130-18 More.

As described, the authors’ explanation doesn’t follow. The Medusavirus substituting its own DNA for that of the host is no different from the cuckoo substituting its own offspring for another bird’s in a nest. The fact that the strategy works does not necessarily demonstrate a hereditary relationship between the two species.

Could the complex proteins not have been acquired by horizontal gene transfer? How do we know that ginat viruses are not mostly an outcome of complex life rather than a precursor to it?

The giant viruses probably have a bridging role to play in the history of life but it is surely too soon for simple, easy summations.

See also: Before you go: One way viruses get spread “never should have evolved”

Reset! Different segs of virus genome can exist in different cells but work together

Viruses devolve. (PaV)

Virus expert highlights the conflict over whether viruses are alive In short, it is an open question. The question relates to the role viruses can play in evolution, among other things. Are they precursors of life, detritus of life, or something in between? Or all three? Keep the file open. 

Viruses invent their own genes? Then what is left of Darwinism?

Why viruses are not considered to be alive

Another stab at whether viruses are alive

Phil Sci journal: Special section on understanding viruses

Should NASA look for viruses in space? Actually, it’s not clear that RNA came first. Nor is it clear that viruses precede life. A good case can doubtless be made for viruses being part of the scrap heap of existing life. But no matter. If you think you can find viruses in space, boldly go.

Why “evolution” is changing? Consider viruses

The Scientist asks, Should giant viruses be the fourth domain of life? Eukaryotes, prokaryotes, archaea… and viruses?

Viruses are alive.

and

Are viruses nature’s perfect machine? Or alive?

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At Scientific American: Understanding the cosmology crisis

Philosopher of science Bjørn Ekeberg, author of Physics and the Invention of the Universe, reflects on recent discrepancies in the measurement of the universe’s expansion, the so-far-unsuccessful hunt for dark matter, and other research downers:

It’s perhaps worth stopping to ask why astrophysicists hypothesize dark matter to be everywhere in the universe? The answer lies in a peculiar feature of cosmological physics that is not often remarked. For a crucial function of theories such as dark matter, dark energy and inflation, which each in its own way is tied to the big bang paradigm, is not to describe known empirical phenomena but rather to maintain the mathematical coherence of the framework itself while accounting for discrepant observations. Fundamentally, they are names for something that must exist insofar as the framework is assumed to be universally valid.

Each new discrepancy between observation and theory can of course in and of itself be considered an exciting promise of more research, a progressive refinement toward the truth. But when it adds up, it could also suggest a more confounding problem that is not resolved by tweaking parameters or adding new variables. Bjørn Ekeberg, “Cosmology Has Some Big Problems” at Scientific American

Sometimes what we are looking for isn’t there because things don’t work the way we thought. Phlogiston and the ether are examples of that. They were reasonable ideas centuries ago but chemistry and physics don’t work the way proponents thought.

Are we there again?

The crux of today’s cosmological paradigm is that in order to maintain a mathematically unified theory valid for the entire universe, we must accept that 95 percent of our cosmos is furnished by completely unknown elements and forces for which we have no empirical evidence whatsoever. For a scientist to be confident of this picture requires an exceptional faith in the power of mathematical unification.

In the end, the conundrum for cosmology is its reliance on the framework as a necessary presupposition for conducting research. For lack of a clear alternative, as astrophysicist Disney also notes, it is in a sense stuck with the paradigm. It seems more pragmatic to add new theoretical floors than to rethink the fundamentals. Bjørn Ekeberg, “Cosmology Has Some Big Problems” at Scientific American

All that said, faith in mathematics is better than faith in a lucky rabbit’s foot because the mathematics might make sense someday.

Note: Sabine Hossenfelder seems to be writing along these lines in Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.

See also: Rob Sheldon: Here’s why physicists are surprised by the universe’s increased expansion rate The two methods differ in that one is “direct” and the other “indirect”. Clearly one or both of them is making a mistake. Since it is hard to find (and people have looked) a reason why the direct method is failing, the feeling is that the indirect method must have a mistake in its model.

and

Discover: Even the best dark matter theories are crumbling

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Huge floating logs transported Jurassic life forms around the world?

Think of it as Noah’s bark. From New Scientist:

We have long known of preserved logs up to 14 metres long from the Jurassic period 200 to 145 million years ago. The logs are covered in crinoids, an animal related to starfish that has a central body with many long feathery arms. The logs also carry oysters.Michael Marshall, “Huge mega-rafts carried dinosaur-era animals on round-the-world trips” at New Scientist

From the Daily Mail:

The Cambridge scientists found that these primarily crinoid-covered colonies could have existed for more than a decade, after using mathematical modelling mapping to observe how they floated and were inhabited.

While some of these structures could have existed a decade, some even lasted up to 20 years, which is longer than the record for these structures found in modern seas and oceans today. Yuan Ren, “Enormous floating 45-foot long rafts carried feathery sea creatures to all corners of the globe during the era of the dinosaurs” at Daily Mail:

Both based on a recent open-access paper:

Abstract:Pseudoplanktonic crinoid megaraft colonies are an enigma of the Jurassic. They are among the largest in-situ invertebrate accumulations ever to exist in the Phanerozoic fossil record. These megaraft colonies and are thought to have developed as floating filter-feeding communities due to an exceptionally rich relatively predator free oceanic niche, high in the water column enabling them to reach high densities on these log rafts. However, this pseudoplanktonic hypothesis has never actually been quantitatively tested and some researchers have cast doubt that this mode of life was even possible. The ecological structure of the crinoid colony is resolved using spatial point process techniques and its longevity using moisture diffusion models. Using spatial analysis we found that the crinoids would have trailed preferentially positioned at the back of migrating structures in the regions of least resistance, consistent with a floating, not benthic ecology. Additionally, we found using a series of moisture diffusion models at different log densities and sizes that ecosystem collapse did not take place solely due to colonies becoming overladen as previously assumed. We have found that these crinoid colonies studied could have existed for greater than 10 years, even up to 20 years exceeding the life expectancy of modern documented megaraft systems with implications for the role of modern raft communities in the biotic colonisation of oceanic islands and intercontinental dispersal of marine and terrestrial species.

Significance statement Transoceanic rafting is the principle mechanism for the biotic colonisation of oceanic island ecosystems. However, no historic records exist of how long such biotic systems lasted. Here, we use a deep-time example from the Early Jurassic to test the viability of these pseudoplanktonic systems, resolving for the first time whether these systems were truly free floating planktonic and viable for long enough to allow its inhabitants to grow to maturity. Using spatial methods we show that these colonies have a comparable structure to modern marine pesudoplankton on maritime structures, whilst the application of methods normally used in commercial logging is used to demonstrate the viability of the system which was capable of lasting up to 20 years. – Aaron W. Hunter, David Casenovec, Emily G. Mitchell, and Celia Mayers, Reconstructing the ecology of a Jurassic pseudoplanktonic megaraft colony. Short title: A Jurassic megaraft ecosystem (open access) More.

It might explain some things. Let’s see what holes it plugs.

See also: Latest: Rodents Who Floated Across The Atlantic On Vegetation Rafts (2011)

Pumice rafts “floating laboratories” for early life.

Crocodiles swam to North America?

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