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The majority of Earth's history was spent in a state that contained simple single-celled organisms but no eukaryotes. Once eukaryotes showed up, everything chan
by goodside 16y ago
The majority of Earth's history was spent in a state that contained simple single-celled organisms but no eukaryotes. Once eukaryotes showed up, everything changed rather abruptly. This is strong evidence against the idea that other alternatives would have arisen had we not been here to compete.
- dnautics 16y agoWhy? There's a whole kingdom of really bizzare life, called Archae. Also, the notion that prokarya are simple and uncomplex is totally bunk. There's a whole genus of prokarya - actinomycetes - that have such a complex lifecycle, and stage through single-celled spores, and multicellular superstructured colonies, that for many many years, scientists thought they were fungi.
- goodside 16y ago"Simple" is quantifiable as how much information-theoretic complexity a population's selection pressure can sustain against mutational entropy to allow for relatively permanent (on non-evolutionary time scales) adaptations. It's not a measure of how much an organism makes us say "Gee whiz!" This is what I was referring to.