Thursday, August 18, 2011

The Beauty of Evolution. Is it over?

It's clear here where evolution went wrong. But it's an evolution that took place nonetheless. But the bigger picture here is Darwin's phenomenon. Deriving from ideas of Lamarck and Malthus, the "struggle for existence" where favorable variations would prevail seem not so favorable today. Anyways, let's not forget Mendel and his inheritable genes -though all these great minds together brought us today the theory that makes this Earth go round, and our science textbooks. The change in time in one or more inherited traits. Now I am not sure if apes used computers, but I'll accept our 98% common DNA.

Now evolution isn't a simple theory, and as it isn't simple, it comes with a lot of complicated assets: variation, mutation, sex and recombination, gene flow. So what do you really need to know (that is if you haven't learned about this enough through out your years in school and are NOT a science student)?
Let's look at the timeline so you can see just how young and naive we are:



  • 4,600,000,000 years ago: the Earth forms and is bombarded by meteorites and comets.
  • 3,800,000,000 years ago: the precursors of DNA form. 
  • 3,500,000,000 years ago: unicellular life evolves.
  • 555,000,000 years ago: Multi-cellular marine organisms.
  • 500,000,000 years ago: fish-life vertebrate form, and invertebrate.
  • 450,000,000 years ago: Arthropods move onto land, forming spiders, scorpions, mites and millipedes. 
  • 420,000,000 years ago: land plants evolve drastically changing the Earth's landscapes and forming new habitats.
  • 360,000,000 years ago: Four-limbed vertebrates move onto land as habitats and forests grow; reef systems.
  • 250,000,000 years ago: Pangea forms.
  • 248,000,000 years ago: Over 90% of Earth's marine life and 70% of Earth's terrestrial life goes extinct during the Earth's largest mass extinction.
  • 225,000,000 years ago: Dinosaurs and mammals evolve. Pangea begins to break apart.
  • 130,000,000 years ago: Earliest flowers evolve as the continents form. Dinosaurs dominate; bony fish diversify. 
  • 65,000,000 years ago: Dinosaurs go extinct. (massive asteroid - of course this is debated like everything else)
  • 4,000,000 years ago: Early hominid "Lucy" lives, the ice age begins and many large mammals go extinct. 
  • 130,000 years ago: Anatomically modern humans evolve. Seventy thousand years later their descendants create cave-paintings and show the first sign of consciousnesses.

So after this long the question now remains, is human evolution finally over?

Has our species reached its biological pinnacle? Some believe that this is our present-day Utopia, that it won't get much better than this. Others believe that mankind is still being influenced by the evolutionary forces that created this pyramid of species that inhabited the planet more than 3 million years ago. Some see growing neurotic geniuses, some see a dumbfound standstill.
How will you evolve?

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