Evolution and humans: Earth's environmental role (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, May 29, 2017, 00:17 (2734 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by David Turell, Monday, May 29, 2017, 00:30

A new book and essay on the role of energy development as the major pattern of the Earth's evolution as it prepared for humans, who require enormous amounts of energy to survive and prosper. The humans play a role in the evolution. It all fits my approach that God uses evolutionary processes at all levels, universe, arth, life.\:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/a-grand-unified-theory-for-life-on-...

"Humans bodies require a ridiculous and—for most of Earth’s history—improbable amount of energy to stay alive.

"Consider a human dropped into primordial soup 3.8 billions years ago, when life first began. They would have nothing to eat. Earth then had no plants, no animals, no oxygen even. Good luck scrounging up 1600 calories a day drinking pond- or sea water. So how did we get sources of concentrated energy (i.e. food) growing on trees and lumbering through grass? How did we end up with a planet that can support billions of energy-hungry, big-brained, warm-blooded, upright-walking humans?

"In “The Energy Expansions of Evolution,” an extraordinary new essay in Nature Ecology and Evolution, Olivia Judson sets out a theory of successive energy revolutions that purports to explain how our planet came to have such a diversity of environments that support such a rich array of life, from the cyanobacteria to daisies to humans.

"Judson divides the history of the life on Earth into five energetic epochs, a novel schema that you will not find in geology or biology textbooks. In order, the energetic epochs are: geochemical energy, sunlight, oxygen, flesh, and fire. Each epoch represents the unlocking of a new source of energy, coinciding with new organisms able to exploit that source and alter their planet. The previous sources of energy stay around, so environments and life on Earth become ever more diverse. Judson calls it a “step-wise construction of a life-planet system.”

"In the epoch of geochemical energy 3.7 billion years ago, the first living organisms “fed” on molecules like hydrogen and methane that formed in reaction between water and rocks. They wrung energy out of chemical bonds. It was not very efficient—the biosphere’s productivity then was an estimated a thousand to a million times less than it is today.

"Sunlight, of course, was shining on Earth all along. When microbes that can harness sunlight finally evolve, the productivity and diversity of the biosphere leveled up. One particular type of bacteria, called cyanobacteria, hits upon a way of harnessing the sun’s energy that makes oxygen (O2) as a byproduct, and with profound consequences: The planet gets an ozone (O3) layer that blocks UV radiation, new minerals through oxygen reactions, and an atmosphere full of highly reactive O2.

"Which brings us to the epoch of oxygen. Given an opportunity, oxygen will steal electrons from anything it finds. New oxygen-resistant organisms evolve with enzymes to protect them from oxygen. They have advantages too: Because oxygen is so reactive, it makes the metabolism of these organisms much more efficient. In some conditions, organisms can get 16 times as much energy out of a glucose molecule with the presence of oxygen than without.

"With more energy, you can have motion and so in the epoch of flesh, highly mobile animals become abundant. They can fly, swim, ran to catch prey. “Flesh” is source of concentrated energy, rich in fats and protein and carbon.

"Then one particular type of animal—those of the genus Homo—figure out fire. Fire lets us cook, which may have allowed us to get more nutrition out of the same food. It lets us forge labor-saving metal tools. It lets us create fertilizer through the Haber-Bosch process to grow food on industrial scales. It lets us burn fossils fuels for energy.

***

"At the very end, Judson speculates that other life-planet systems in the universe may have also evolved through a series of energy expansions. If we want to look for life, we shouldn't only look for planets look like present-day Earth—a point Rothschild  has been making for years. “When people talk about looking for an Earth-like planet, they say it’s got to have oxygen and I go, ‘Are you crazy?,’” she says. “If you were looking at Earth billions of years ago you wouldn’t have seen it.'”

Comment: Fits my ideas about God's use of evolutionary processes, in this instance the Earth. And those required calories for humans must cover a brain that demands 15-20% of the caloric consumption. Further it offers strong support for my insistence on the balance of nature as a crucial source of energy as diverse life was able to develop. Read her whole essay to see my meaning:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0138 Too long to review here. What is presented above is a good taste of it.