seaweed

• generated free oxygen for early atmosphere

57:7.9Even in the later pe­ri­ods the con­tin­u­ing lava flows and the in­com­ing me­te­ors kept the oxy­gen of the air al­most com­pletely used up. Even the early de­posits of the soon ap­pear­ing prim­i­tive ocean con­tain no col­ored stones or shales. And for a long time af­ter this ocean ap­peared, there was vir­tu­ally no free oxy­gen in the at­mo­sphere; and it did not ap­pear in sig­nif­i­cant quan­ti­ties un­til it was later gen­er­ated by the sea­weeds and other forms of veg­etable life.

• seaweed

59:1.18The ma­rine life was much alike the world over and con­sisted of the sea­weeds, one-celled or­gan­isms, sim­ple sponges, trilo­bites, and other crus­taceans—shrimps, crabs, and lob­sters. Three thou­sand va­ri­eties of bra­chiopods ap­peared at the close of this pe­riod, only two hun­dred of which have sur­vived. These an­i­mals rep­re­sent a va­ri­ety of early life which has come down to the pres­ent time prac­ti­cally un­changed.

• man’s ascent from

65:2.1The story of man’s as­cent from sea­weed to the lord­ship of earthly cre­ation is in­deed a ro­mance of bi­o­logic strug­gle and mind sur­vival. Man’s pri­mor­dial an­ces­tors were lit­er­ally the slime and ooze of the ocean bed in the slug­gish and warm-wa­ter bays and la­goons of the vast shore lines of the an­cient in­land seas, those very wa­ters in which the Life Car­ri­ers es­tab­lished the three in­de­pen­dent life im­plan­ta­tions on Uran­tia.

• man’s ascent from

65:6.8Physics and chem­istry alone can­not ex­plain how a hu­man be­ing evolved out of the primeval pro­to­plasm of the early seas. The abil­ity to learn, mem­ory and dif­fer­en­tial re­sponse to en­vi­ron­ment, is the en­dow­ment of mind. The laws of physics are not re­spon­sive to train­ing; they are im­mutable and un­chang­ing. The re­ac­tions of chem­istry are not mod­i­fied by ed­u­ca­tion; they are uni­form and de­pend­able. Aside from the pres­ence of the Un­qual­i­fied Ab­so­lute, elec­tri­cal and chem­i­cal re­ac­tions are pre­dictable. But mind can profit from ex­pe­ri­ence, can learn from re­ac­tive habits of be­hav­ior in re­sponse to rep­e­ti­tion of stim­uli.