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Dark foliage
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 |
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