Jeff Layman wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
....
Evolution is undirected and has no 'final' target nor does it look to the
future as an engineer does, it can only work incrementally on choosing which
variation of structure or function is better suited to the environment the
organism is in at that time.

That's not quite true. If it is assumed that life started in the sea,
it should have stayed in that environment, but it didn't.

it is not an assumption, it is based upon the fossil
record found to date with the oldest specimens showing
that life did start in the seas.

the exact process and steps are not known completely
yet, but as time goes on we are getting more answers
and finer details of how it could be possible.


Some animals
changed (evolved?) to make use of land. Even more oddly, some changed
back (eg seals) to make lesser or greater use of their "old"
environment, whilst others, such as dolphins evolved (or should that be
regressed?!) to become totally dependent on their old marine environment.

the only thing required for any change in an
organism to continue is that organism procreates.
the causes/effects of selection, environment,
mutations, etc. may be completely orthogonal to
the simple fact of procreation.

how niches in the environment become occupied
is also orthogonal. the sea to land migration of
both plants and animals is pretty well understood
now. i don't think they are missing any
significant steps in those two processes.


i agree about understanding how life came about
and learning what you can about life is valuable
to a gardener. it's also just amazingly
interesting.

for one thing the possibilities are there
that life moved back and forth from the sea
to land from land to the sea several times
as different disasters happened. not every-
thing previously is wiped out, so different
creation phases coexist (and still do).

but in the past few hundred years life has
woken up and been able to start taking a
direct look at itself and the processes
invovled... all i can say now is watch out
it's gonna get very interesting.


songbird