3 ms·
It’s crazy how life just kept building and building on itself. I feel like there were so many opportunities for life to hit a ceiling and never evolve past X st
by mentos 8y ago
It’s crazy how life just kept building and building on itself. I feel like there were so many opportunities for life to hit a ceiling and never evolve past X stage but yet somehow we broke out.
- ur-whale 8y agoGiven enough starting points, any local optimizer will eventually crawl out of local extrema.
- mcguire 8y agoIf I recall correctly, the division between prokaryotes and eukaryotes took billions of years. Multicellular life was another big step. Everything after that is easy. I remind myself that every morning. :-)
- Emma_Goldman 8y agoI've heard this said many times and believed it, but read to day that the leap from single-cell to multi-cellular organisms happened a dozen or so times independent of each other. That makes it an order of magnitude less improbable, if true.
- gus_massa 8y agoYep, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism#Occurrence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism#Occurre... > [...] However, complex multicellular organisms evolved only in six eukaryotic groups: animals, fungi, brown algae, red algae, green algae, and land plants. It evolved repeatedly for Chloroplastida (green algae and land plants), once or twice for animals, once for brown algae, three times in the fungi (chytrids, ascomycetes and basidiomycetes) and perhaps several times for slime molds and red algae.
- Brockenstein 8y agoLots of things evolved multiple times independently. And while we make a big deal about multi-cellular life, there's still nothing so special about it that that is the one thing that could only have happened once...
- nindalf 8y agoThe environment kept changing too. Even if an organism evolved to a local maxima where it was the master of it's domain, the climate or geography could change. Or a giant meteor could fall on it's head. At that point, the maximas change.