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The detail of each part of our body make me think did evolution have enough time to produce all living things on earth? Any clue for this question?

by zakki 4y ago

traverseda 4y ago
It's really hard to understand just how much time there has been.
bavell 4y ago
Life/nature is certainly amazing and incredibly complex. Earth has been around for about 1/3 of the age of the universe though. You could flip your question and ask why it's taken so long.
mock-possum 4y ago
I mean how much time do you feel might reasonably be required for such systems to develop? Think about orders of magnitude: last year, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hadn’t yet begun. Ten years ago Obama was still president. Think of every single person that you know today - probably none of them were alive a hundred years ago. A thousand years ago the world was laughably low tech compared to today. Ten thousand years ago is already outside the domain of known/written history, iirc. Now go back another ten thousand. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. 200,000 years ago is the neighborhood where our distant ancestors started popping up in Africa - and they were hardly different from us, all those complicated structures were largely in place. That’s two hundred thousand years. How long do you think life had to get to that point? Mammals probably showed up two hundred million year ago. Think about that for a second. The time it took for us to get from trees in Africa to typing on the internet? That happened ONE THOUSAND TIMES OVER between first mammals and first man. How long before that? We’re already completely beyond the realm of human comprehension. You think two hundred million is a long time? Try ~4 billion years, of life continuously living, breeding, mutating, and surviving. That’s the answer to your question. It’s been so long that creatures we have never heard of and will never know of have had time to live, flourish, and die off, utterly forgotten other than the genetic equivalent of a footnote if they’re lucky! This is random genetic drift and selection / survival of the fittest played over and over and over for nearly as long as the earth itself has existed. We’ve had time.

The detail of each part of our body make me think did evolution have enough time to produce all living things on earth? Any clue for this question?

by zakki 4y ago

The detail of each part of our body make me think did evolution have enough time to produce all living things on earth? Any clue for this question?

traverseda 4y ago

It's really hard to understand just how much time there has been.

bavell 4y ago

Life/nature is certainly amazing and incredibly complex. Earth has been around for about 1/3 of the age of the universe though. You could flip your question and ask why it's taken so long.

mock-possum 4y ago

I mean how much time do you feel might reasonably be required for such systems to develop? Think about orders of magnitude: last year, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hadn’t yet begun. Ten years ago Obama was still president. Think of every single person that you know today - probably none of them were alive a hundred years ago. A thousand years ago the world was laughably low tech compared to today. Ten thousand years ago is already outside the domain of known/written history, iirc. Now go back another ten thousand. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. 200,000 years ago is the neighborhood where our distant ancestors started popping up in Africa - and they were hardly different from us, all those complicated structures were largely in place. That’s two hundred thousand years. How long do you think life had to get to that point? Mammals probably showed up two hundred million year ago. Think about that for a second. The time it took for us to get from trees in Africa to typing on the internet? That happened ONE THOUSAND TIMES OVER between first mammals and first man. How long before that? We’re already completely beyond the realm of human comprehension. You think two hundred million is a long time? Try ~4 billion years, of life continuously living, breeding, mutating, and surviving. That’s the answer to your question. It’s been so long that creatures we have never heard of and will never know of have had time to live, flourish, and die off, utterly forgotten other than the genetic equivalent of a footnote if they’re lucky! This is random genetic drift and selection / survival of the fittest played over and over and over for nearly as long as the earth itself has existed. We’ve had time.