Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyrotex
Again, I am not surprised at the "front loading". Remember, it took from 3 BYrA to .6 BYrA to achieve eukaryotic complexity, with all the cellular machinery that multi-celled plants and animals required BEFORE they could start evolving.
Call it 2.5+ BYr to evolve *just* the basic floor plan of the single cell.....[the] "structural elements" of the fantastically complex cell machinery.
Yes, there was a LOT of front loading going on. But that front loading took 4 or 5 times longer (~2.5+ BYr versus ~.6 BYr) then the development of ALL the body plans that ALL plants and animals have developed since.
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All true, and a good point. I still am surprised (and it seems somewhat counterintuitive) that after "carving into stone" so much of the standardized cell infrastructure, that we could generate such a remarkable diversity in body plans without significant alteration to the standardized machinery.
My opinion on this (completely unsubstantiated, of course) is that the tendency toward life (in fact toward the tree of life that we see) is intrinsic in the fundamental molecular structure of the basic molecules. That is, development of life is similar to the order created when solids crystallize. The difference is (of course) that crystallization happens rapidly, so we can test reproducibility.
I would hypothesize that if similar conditions arose again, we would get a very similar tree of life again, and arrive at a very similar "end point" again.
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