Saturday, April 30, 2016

THE VALUE OF WATER, PART 3--LIFE

A common saying is: "you never miss the water until the well goes dry." The plain fact is that life today--all life--would not exist without water. Earth would be barren rock.

Humans, of course, are mainly composed of water. So, water certainly is essential for human life. However, humans also need food to sustain life. Without water, there would be no food. Water is essential to grow crops and to sustain livestock. No water, then no grains, fruit, vegetables, poultry, meat and fish.

Humans cleanse with water. We wash our bodies, our food, our clothes, our dishes, our cars, our houses,etc. with water. Without water, cleansing essentially would not be possible.

Manufacturing is dependent upon water. Our products have some connection with water either in the process of production or in the ingredients. Without water, this would not be possible.

Water is a primary protection against fires. Further, our recreation depends upon water. One cannot swim, fish, go boating without water.

One is reminded that W.H. Auden put it this way: "Thousands have lived without love, not one without water." So, what is the value of water? Essentially, water equals the value of life on Earth. Our planet seems to have been specially deigned for life. The earth, and all living things on it, are fortunate to have water--in all its forms and in all its quantities and locations--sufficient to sustain life as we know it. In that reality, the value of water in invaluable, an unmeasurable, boundless treasure.

Such a conclusion, however, has consequences for humans charged with responsibility to protect water resources so that their value is not diminished by waste, misuse, and ignorance. If we do not show love for our water, we may be treading on life without it.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

THE VALUE OF WATER, PART 2--ORIGINS OF LIFE

The story of life is the story of water. As discussed in my recent postings, scientists have derived differing hypotheses as to the origin of water on Earth. They range from ice-bearing asteroids and meteors colliding with Earth to water-bearing cosmic dust particles binding together to form the Earth. However, there does not appear to be any cogent evidence to support these assertions. In point of fact, no one really knows how water was delivered to Earth.

Nevertheless, the fact is that there is water on Earth, in aquifers below the surface; in oceans, lakes, rivers, ponds and puddles on the surface; and in clouds above the surface. And, this water is in all its various forms and states.

So, what does this water mean for us? In the first instance, it appears that animal life on earth originated in water--in seas and oceans. How this happened, again, no one knows for sure. One hypothesis is that life came from rocks. Water, as a solvent, over time eroded certain minerals from rocks, resulting in chemical formation of amino acids from the mineral mix, which in turn resulted eventually in formation of living organisms.

Assertions of chemical evolution, however, were criticized in the book "The Mystery of Life's Origin" by Thaxton, Bradley and Olsen. "They showed that attempts to explain the origin of the first living cell from simpler nonliving chemicals had failed and that these theories had specifically failed to explain the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life." (Meyer, "Darwin's Doubt", 2013, p. 341) In other words, chemistry alone could not produce information in DNA leading to life.

The oldest period in Earth history is called pre-Cambrian, perhaps a little over 4 billion years ago. The first forms of life appeared in the pre-Cambrian period, according to fossil records. They appeared in water, in seas and oceans. They were one-celled organisms and sponges, simple soft tissue organisms having few cell types.

After the pre-Cambrian period, the following period was the Cambrian, which began about 540 million years ago. The fossil record reveals that beginning about 530 million years ago, the "Cambrian Explosion" occurred. Literally, this was an explosion of a multitude of many different and complex animal forms in the seas and oceans. They include trilobites, jelly-fish like creatures, worm like things, shrimp like critters and shell bearing animals. Indeed some of the examples looked like something out of a 1950's science fiction movie. These Cambrian sea animals had sophisticated body plans, including such features as compound eyes, legs, outer skeleton, mouth, digestive system, stomach, reproductive organs, skin, wings and anus. In other words, these sea animals were characterized by features that we can expect to see in all forms of contemporary animal life.

The Cambrian Explosion appeared suddenly. There is no fossil record of any evolution or transition from the simple pre-Cambrian organisms to the complex body plans evidenced in the Cambrian fossils. Darwin's basic theory is that animals have evolved through the process of random mutations and natural selection. In his book "Darwin's Doubt", Meyer reviews Darwin's theory as well all of the off-shoots from that theory that have followed. Meyer concludes that Darwin and Neo-Darwin theories of evolution cannot explain how the genetic information and the novel proteins and systems to regulate expression of that information necessary to build the complex Cambrian body plans could arise. He concludes that the only supportable explanation for the source of the necessary genetic information to build the new body plans is "intelligent design."

The Earth is exceptional. It is designed for life. An important component of the design for life is water. And water was the environment for the beginning of animal life and its explosive Cambrian expansion into countless different and complex body plans. Clearly, water has had value.