Subject: [Homestead] Fine book by Richard Dawkins, University of Oxford biologist
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2004 21:58:54 -0500
ENTITLED '"THE ANCESTOR'S TALE: A PILGRIMAGE TO THE DAWN OF EVOLUTION"
The story of evolution and our place in it--plus the place of all other
creatures, past, present and future as dictated by DNA and Natural
Selection based on survival in a changing environment---no descendants
and you leave the gene pool.
Dawkins format is The Canterbury Tales---where he starts at the
detectable beginning of life and works backward in time through 40
ancestral convergences in The Tree Of Life---from bacteria to to the
present. Natural Selectron is not purposeful and has no designated end,
particularly the end recited by bible-thumping Narcissusts where they
are so wonderful that god-duh had them mind as the perfect life-form in
the short time-frame of Bishop Usher
A lot of book for $28.00. Published by Houghton Mifflin
ement
*Age of Universe Revised, Again*
*By Robert Roy Britt <mailto:rbritt AT hq.space.com>*
Senior Science Writer
posted: 11:22 am ET
03 January 2003
In a study published today in the journal /Science/, a team of
researchers says the universe is between 11.2 billion and 20 billion
years old.
Most estimates in recent years have ranged between 10 billion and 15
billion years. Last year, data supplied by the Hubble Space Telescope
led to an apparently refined estimate of 13 billion to 14 billion years.
The new calculations, by Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve
University and Brian Chaboyer at Dartmouth College, involved new
information about old star clusters in our galaxy and a better
understanding of how stars evolve. It was based on when stars are
thought to end the main sequence of their lives, a point at which
they've used up the hydrogen that fuels thermonuclear fusion and
therefore begin to dim.
The new appraisal comes with a 95 percent level of confidence, which
means the door is still open for further revision and that last year's
tighter Hubble estimate might prove on track.
The new estimates were made as part of a larger effort to understand how
the universe is structured, and they agree with an increasingly solid
case suggesting that 95 percent of the universe is controlled by
so-called dark energy. Scientists don't know what this mysterious force
is, or how it works, but they see evidence of it in the fact that the
universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.
Dark energy is sometimes described as applying a negative pressure to
the universe. While gravity holds individual galaxies together, dark
energy works to pull galaxies from each other at faster and faster rates.
Cosmologists, who speculate about the origin and operation of the
universe as a whole, know they have their work cut out for them even as
their understanding grows.
"We are living in a golden age of observational cosmology, where our
fundamental picture of the universe has been revolutionized in the last
decade," Krauss said. "At the same time, we are establishing the
essential features of the cosmos that will serve as the datum at the
basis for fundamental physics in the 21st century and beyond."
[Homestead] Fine book by Richard Dawkins, University of Oxford biologist,
tvoivozhd, 11/28/2004