Some of the oldest rocks in the world have some of the oldest signs of life.

Oldest fossils of life going back 3.5 billion years ago. It's cool and all but I was thinking and went off on a tangent. I think it's really cool that we have 3.5 billion year old rocks. Australia is about the only place with them because it's been a pretty consistent land mass over the history of Earth. With the amount of shifting and moving and subduction zones, it seems like sitting there unchanged for 3.5 billion years ~ 3,500,000,000 years is quite a feat. If anybody could do it, rocks could do it. Go rocks! Way to exist.

While really old fossils are cool, my suddenly being impressed by the feats of rocks warranted a blog post.

Why I don't think Evolution is at work with physical laws.

One tell-tale sign of evolution is the "wow that's brilliant" impression some evolved things have on us humans. Butterfly wings actually color based on small photonic crystals on the scales... wow that's brilliant.

The laws of physics? Gravity tugs spacetime, things keep moving, complexity breaks down, things tend to take the easy path, matter is high level energy, and they work together in pretty neat ways. There are interesting things to be sure. It is hard to look at a nebula the size a trillion suns and not be impressed, or ponder the idea that distance between galaxies is increasing but not moving away, or that when you consider the really really tiny things they kind of fuzz around... but there are no butterfly wings in space. Nothing that makes you say, "wow that's brilliant", planets traveling in ellipses how... quaint. It's huge and amazing! None of which suggests it's bootstrapping the successes of the past in order to fight against the slow breakdown of everything. Rather it just seems the universe has a lot of stuff to breakdown.

A clever reader might notice that I suggested what opponents to ID have suggested isn't the case, namely that you can see design in things. Though, not design but rather evolution, though I tend to lump them together. We can certainly tell when things are beyond the realm of just happening that way, and in the realm of complexity fighting tooth and nail against the 2nd law of thermodynamics (everything breaks down) whether it's our designs or the designs of nature, we have a great ability to spot such things (for evolutionary reasons I believe). The end results are the same, nothing in physics from particle physics to cosmology seems to trigger the part of my brain which says... that... that is a fantastic design.

The universe is not designed nor evolved. It just happened. I'll take it, no sense looking a gift horse in it's well-evolved mouth, but everything in physics seems to point toward the more simple with more complex interrelationships than we previous thought. I wouldn't be surprised to find out our universe consists of just one thing and it's opposite and everything we see or seem is but a novel interaction of varying degrees of this. In evolved systems it's always more roundabout, physical, complex, interesting, makeshift, macgyvered, and quirky than we previous thought and there are more and more exceptions to every rule. They are, in a very primal sense, two radically different beasts. One science is about things interacting in specific ways to the same effect, the other is about bootstrapping replicators having a field day either being the critter with the slightest edge, to edge out the competition, or edged out (edged even slightly if not out will be a moot point several generations later) for not happening on that next step forward.

Half the planets have rings.

Just an odd fact, nobody has told you. When we first found them around Saturn they were awesome, but now we know that half the planets have rings. Four of the Eight planets in this solar system have rings around them: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. We found Jupiter's rings rather recently and booted out Pluto because Pluto didn't clean his room or something.

My Very Exceptional Mother Just Served Us Nothing (Presently Eating).