Cummins to Eyer, 4-07-98:
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BE:
-That's not my information.  The oldest fossils are 3.5 billion
-years old (of stromatolitic bacteria, found in Greenland).  There
-are one helluva lot of other fossils, such as fossils of
-trilobites (500-570 mya), etc.
>Stromatolitic bacteria (blue-green algea to anyone who speaks
>plain english) can still be found alive.
Algae, by definition, are plants of the Thallophyte group,
chlorophyll-bearing, which generally are found in water or moist
lands.  They are multicellular flora, certainly not older than
about 680 million years, and probably not older than the Cambrian
period.
Stromatolytic bacteria by definition are unicellular beings, the
earliest of which exhaled oxygen.  Their activity, from about 3.7
bya to about 1.8 bya, is most commonly believed to be the primary
reason why our atmosphere is oxygen-rich, unlike the original
atmosphere at terrestrial formation (4.6-3.0 bya), in which gases
such as methane predominated.
God did not give us oxygen to support life; on the contrary,
atmospheric oxygen in the quantity required by us depends on the
pre-existence of life.  Life came first.
It is not logically possible for any alga, as normally defined, to
be a bacterium.
Algae are INHERENTLY multicellular in nature.
Bob
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