Parallel Evolution

I’m no biologist but it does seem obvious that animals did not evolve from plants ... nor mammals from reptiles. Most probably, life began on Earth not just in one spot at just one point in time ... a Garden of Eden so to speak. Rather, to me, there were likely millions of Edens over possibly millions of years which produced many multiple varieties of life ... many with some similarities ... many of which died out ... but many of which then evolved separately, ala Darwin, into the panoply of life we experience today.

Recent DNA studies combined with mathematical models suggest that all the animal and plant species that exist today, could not have evolved since the Earth cooled down using Darwin’s explanation alone. So perhaps my uneducated hypothesis, “parallel evolution,” may be one resolution  to this dilemma ... other than “intelligent design” that is. (This also suggest that the process of life’s creation is ... was? ... a lot more natural than previously thought.)

Perhaps?


STAND UP FOR AMERICA!

Settled Science

Einstein was a very bright fellow. He understood that science is never settled ... old theories will forever be replaced by newer, more informed ones. Therefore Galileo’s notion of gravity as a simple undiscriminating force of nature, later updated by Newton’s Law which included relative masses, could be debunked by calling it a “warp in the space-time continuum.” Sometime in the future, Einstein will be debunked by some upstart scientist ... an on and on into the indefinite future.

Is this wrong? Why can’t science be forever settled? Simple. Because we keep discovering new things. Darwin is being relegated to the dustbin of history by advances in DNA science. So is Freud by advances in brain science. And so will be other Nobel Prize winning scientist for as long as these Norwegians believe that we have found the ultimate answer to anything “scientific.” (Global warming?)

And this is not bad. It is the way science works ... and will continue to work. The thing that might worry me is what happens when scientists get it wrong. Did we really understand everything about nuclear fission before we tested that first A-bomb? I kind of doubt it ... but the best minds turned out to be right enough that we didn’t annihilate ourselves.

But there are many things about atomic energy production that we still don’t understand. Does this mean we should stop our quest for harnessing this fundamental energy source? Of course not! But we should insist that we not rush into (or away from) scientific conclusions based upon any uninformed political motivations.

Know what I mean?

Re: Evolution

Quetzalcoatlus

I sometimes wish I had been a biologist ... for there are so many questions that need to be answered about life here on Earth ... and possibly elsewhere. Yes, an enormous amount of information has been learned since the double helix was unwound in 1968, but so much more needs to be discovered. This blog entry will not answer any of these questions ... I am but a neophyte ... but it will nevertheless ask some..

A while back I wrote a piece about how Darwin was losing his luster ... see: God’s Darwin. Dear reader, please go to this blog entry and watch the video so that you might understand what I am trying to get to in this posting.

I somehow can’t buy Divine Intervention or even Musk’s supposition that we are living in a simulation created in a gigantic future quantum computer. Over the 4.6 billion years that the earth has been around natural forces have created our history and our present. We just need to discover how this occurred. And I’m convinced we will. It may take a few hundred years ... but I am certain we will come close.

Before we start, I suggest that you readers also spend a few hours filling in your knowledge base on evolution ... see: Waikato Lesson and DNA Facts ...

———————————————————————————————————

Now that your are an semi-expert, here are some questions that I have about how this all came about:

- Before the Earth had its thicker ozone layer to protect more fully organisms against cosmic rays, did this stronger radiation cause faster and more dramatic mutations?

- The origin of life is often assumed to be a singular event in a primordial soup sometime in the far distant past ... maybe even coming in on space dust. Have there been multiples of this event creating a panoply of primary life forms based upon different chemistries and different genetic structures ... most of which did not prevail? And are new primordial live forms still being created to this day?

- If this is true, then it seems possible that these multiple life-form starts are now distinguished by taxonomy’s higher-order classifications — domains, kingdoms and maybe even phylums? And, if this is the case, maybe something like Darwin’s natural-selection theories can take over from there?

God’s Darwin

Or Darwin’s God. David Gelernter, Yale computer science professor ... who was once targeted by the Unabomber ... has upset the evolutionary applecart by questioning Darwin’s explanation of how the many species, that we find here on Earth, came about ... basically being mathematically impossible.

Which, of course, introduces the idea of intelligent design ... which then borders us on the idea of God ... or, as Elon Musk prefers,  a giant computer simulation sometime in the future creating our current reality. Anyhow, if you are interested in this subject, watch the discussion held by the Hoover Institute between Gelernter and Stephen Meyer, a believer in intelligent design. There is a third participant, a philosopher, who seems a poser NO-OP. Anyhow, watch it ... it will get your gray matter juices flowing: Understanding Intelligent Design ... Kinda.

Afterward: Not covered in this discussion and what I am inclined to believe is something called “punctuated equilibrium” ... wherein rapid evolutionary changes take place in animals based upon the details of environmental pressures.