I’m watching a “Sixty Minutes” CBS segment on scientist studying life uncovered in a South African gold mine:
Guided only by the light of their helmet lamps, the scientists walk miles through a vast maze of tunnels, before taking a chairlift even deeper into the Earth. Here, almost two miles underground, they find rock that was formed three billion years ago. Borgonie and his team collect samples of water trapped in the ancient rocks, untouched by humans.
In 2011, they made a break-through discovery: Never-before-seen worms were found living in a pocket of water 5,000 years old. The worms were living without sunlight in unbearable heat. Until that point, no one thought animals could exist that deep in the planet’s crust.
This topic brings to mind a famous line from Jurassic Park: “Life finds a way.”
It was interesting. But I didn’t think it all that surprising. The scientists expected to find life there, though they didn’t know what form of life.
It is easy to understand this in terms of evolution. It is not so easy under ID assumptions, and any ID explanation probably gets down to talk of God working in mysterious ways.
Agreed. And it is magnificent—because evolutionary processes explain so much, and they explain more with each passing year.
I expected bacteria at that depth but hadn’t considered worms and arthropods. (Yet, I couldn’t think of any physiological reasons to rule them out. My intuition was undeveloped.)