Origin of Life: early land life in algae fossil (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, March 27, 2020, 12:11 (1703 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: The first green plants to find their way out of the water were not the soaring trees or even the little shrubs of our present world. They were most likely soft and mossy, with shallow roots and few of the adaptations they would later evolve to survive and thrive on dry land.

DAVID: All types of life started in the seas. When continents poked up into dry land, life got there some how. And the animals arrived and ate the plants and other animals. Life appeared 3.6-8 by ago and this development took a long time to happen.

The quote encapsulates what I see as the history of evolution – whether initiated by God or not. In terms of its advancement, it is a constant process of organisms surviving and thriving as they learn to cope with or exploit new conditions. If, very broadly speaking, we take “surviving” to mean staying the same and “exploiting” to mean making changes, we can see the logic of advancement, with each new wave of innovations building on what already existed, and expanding the range as environments change. In this context I think it’s crucial to keep in mind your comment that it took a long time. We often take for granted the figures, without considering what they entail. Not just centuries, not just thousands, not just millions, but thousands of millions of years, and millions of millions of generations of organisms. The time is so long that we can’t really imagine it, or the colossal variety of life forms which exist even now but existed up to 99% more in the course of those billions of years. I shan’t comment on its relevance to your theory, except to say that the mind boggles at the colossal range of life forms that have come and gone over this vast period of time. Thank you for yet another extremely interesting development in our understanding of life’s history.