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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Fun fact: every species on earth has been evolving for the same amount of time. Assuming that life wasn't spontaneously generated multiple times on planet Earth, which seems relatively unlikely.
For some reason, I feel oddly defensive about the whale being insulted. Suck on that you stupid marine biologist, you should understand evolution more better.
I mean if we assume that whales and us have been evolving for the same amount of time, it sounds like a skill issue on whales' part
Well, maybe he refers to the branch with the greatest common ancestor of us and whales. So our branch of evolution can have mating calls 100KM rather than their branch with measly 80KM
Yeah I guess, but that doesn't really help. Humans already killed most of the whales so rubbing in our technological superiority is quite gauche.
You never know if whales are going to get revenge for this kind of stuff someday ๐
The revolution has begun, brother. Join the deep dive brotherhood today!
Unless the nuclear war and global warming kill off 99.999% of us, making our infrastructure unsustainable, then our mating call goes back down to a fraction of a kilometer. Whales: 1, humans: 0.
Why does it seem unlikely life appeared more than once? My understanding was that when life started, the conditions were optimal for complex molecules to form (warm water, lots of organic compounds) so around that time (give or take half a billion year) it may have happened, but in very similar ways.
All known lofe on Earth uses the same base "toolset" to keep it simple while genetic analysis shows all known life is at least distantly related. While it isn't impossible that life developed multiple times on Earth, any other lineages were unable to compete and died off quickly.
It should also be noted how dramatically easier it is for existing life forms to hog all the available resources than it is for said resources to go through biogenesis. This is why scientists are unable to create life forms in labs, because no matter how sterile we try to make the conditions, some microbe finds a way in and thrives on the resoirce dense media that scientists are trying to recreate life with.
Biogenesis is crazy hard. Once that first lifeform appears it absorbs pretty much all available resources and takes over from there. All those conplex molecules just floating around get incorporated into the life form that appears first. Those primordial seas were constantly churning things about so life would have quickly spread across the ocean once it formed.
But that applies to life as we know it today right? The first life forms couldn't have taken over the earth instantly, they weren't battle hardened bacteria, but very simples beings, not far from overly complex proteins. Probably took at least some million years for a microbe to spread around the earth, just from the sheer size of it. So in that time, life could originate from other similar primordial soups.
Once they get going they reproduce like crazy. And there wouldn't have been any competition for that first life form, so is growth would only be hindered by how many nutrients were available. Churning oceans and storms would have spread that first life form would only needaybe a couple ~~centuries~~ millenia to spread across the Earth, while that leap from self replicateling macromolecules to actual life form would have simultaneously been way harder tham you think.
It just took some crabs a bit longer to get there.