Greta wrote: ↑December 19th, 2020, 3:39 pm
Simon, I ignore what you say because you keep missing the point and then you ignore me when I explain the point again.
My point, again, is that the GOE made the evolution of today's organisms possible. You reckoned that is controversial and have gone off at me for pages about it, but it's not controversial at all.
My suggestion that humans may be doing the same as the cyanobacteria - effectively clearing the decks for a new kind of evolution - is obviously speculative (and I am not the only one to wonder about this, eg. Kurtzweil et al). There are times when one must move beyond mere regurgitation and conduct one's own meta analyses and see whose models make the most sense.
There is no future for life on Earth anyway. It has been going for about four billion years and, due to the Sun's ageing process, it is said that in just one billion years the oceans will boil away. That's 100C. Apparently a rise of 10C would be catastrophic, so we can assume that the biosphere has completed the vast majority of its lifespan.
The only intelligent life to survive what is coming will be the intelligent life we create or evolve into. Already, human creations have more mass than all life on Earth. It doesn't suit me because I like animals, and I would much prefer a "soft landing" with climate change and I have no respect for the vested interests standing in the way of transitioning to renewable energy and more effective recycling.
But, unlike many, I'm interested in only presenting scenarios that I like, but to understand reality, including the parts that don't suit me.
You keep moving the goalposts of your point! Your comparison og humankind with cyanobacteria was that both are responsible for mass extinction events - now "clearing the decks" and that with cyanobacteria it is indisputable ie a matter of the record and that wasn't even controversial, only the details.
Try this from prof. Nick Lane from his book "The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?"
The easiest explanation for the deep differences between bacteria and eukaryotes is competition. Once the first true eukaryotes had evolved, the argument goes, they were so competitive that they dominated the niche of morphological complexity. Nothing else could compete. Any bacteria that "tried" to invade this eukaryotic niche were given short shrift by the sophisticated cells that already lived there. To use the parlance, they were outcompeted to extinction. We are all familiar with the mass extinctions of dinosaurs and other large plants and animals, so this explanation seems perfectly reasonable. The small, furry anc estors of modern mammals were held in check by the dinosaurs for millions of years, only radiating into modern groupos after the dinosaurs' demise. Yet there are some good reasons to question this comfortable but deceptive idea. Microbes are not equivalent to large animals: their population sizes are enormously larger, and they pass around useful genes (such as those for antibiotic resistance) by lateral gene transfer, making them very much less vulnerable to extinction. There is no hint of any microbial extinction, even in the aftermath of the Great Oxidation Event. The 'oxygen holocaust', which supposedly wiped out most anaerobic cells, can't be traced at all: there is no evidence from either phylogenetics or geochemistry that such an extinction ever took place. On the contrary, anaerobes prospered.
More significantly, there is very strong evidence that the intermediates were not, in fact, outcompeted to extinction by more sophisticated eukaryotes. They still exist. We met them already - the 'archezoa', that large group of primative eukaryotes that were once mistaken for a missing link. they are not true evolutionary intermediates, but they're real ecological intermediates. they occupy the same niche. An evolutionary intermediate is a missing link - a fish with legs, such as Tiktaalik, or a dinosaur with feathers and wings, such as Archaeopteryx. an ecological intermediate is not a true missing link but it proves that a certain niche, a way of life, is viable. a flying squirrel is not closely related to other flying vertebrates such as bats or birds, but it demonstrates that gliding flight between trees is possible without fully fledged wings. That means it's not pure make-believe to suggest that powered flight could have started that way. And that is the real significance of the archezoa - they are ecological intermediates, which prove that a certain way of life is viable.
Kurtzweil is not an evolutionary scientist i contrast to Nick Lane, but a futurist working for Google. Meta analysis is a buzz word and a lot of the time not worth much, just look at MGM for evidence of that. You present yourself as progressive and open minded interested in reality, when in fact you have presented fix ideas you are unwilling to have challenged. Even when you know you are wrong you won't admit it until you get an admission from me in a trade off! Now I've presented you for a prof in evolutionary biochemistry saying there was no mass extinction, are you going to admit it isn't a matter of record or cling to your" reality"?
I have appealed multiple times for you to consider the time perspective and now you speak of a billion years into the future without considering the exponential development of life. We've already sent artifacts into interstellar space that will survive the predicted end of life on earth. We could migrate outwards to the outer reaches of the solar system in tact with the growing sun, maybe even taking the earth with us! Whatever we are not comparable to bacteria as just another dominant lifeform in a long rack. We have knowledge and it is growing exponentially and passed on through the generations. We are capable of playing out different scenarios and planning ahead, we're even capable of managing our own evolution. We have technology etc etc...
No once more you skipped the details and read what you wanted to, our creations don't have more mass than all life on earth, it's all dried out terrestial life, big difference considering water makes up the vast majority of living organisms. You think climate change is a soft landing? What about getting hit by a giant rock from space that caused the last mass extinction event among all the other calamities we living organisms have been through the last billion years, that all has to be included right? Can't you see you're cheating with the cards?