Timothy Birdnow

Here's a question for all you evolutionary biologists. Scientists now believe the first plant life appeared on the scene about 700 million years ago. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/february/plant-life-on-earth-is-much-older-than-we-thought.html But animal life appeared about 800 million years ago. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17453-timeline-the-evolution-of-life/

This seems counter-intuitive, but it's not exactly; plant life - chlorophyll producing life forms - were NOT the oldest life forms on Earth. There were anaerobic life forms before them (such as botulism or gangrene) and of course fungi and other chemsynthesis- using things. Theoretically animals could have eaten the non-plant life.

But what would they breathe? It was the rise of chlorpohyll using plants that made the Earth's atmosphere so highly oxygenated.

So we have to assume the plants came first, and that those plants had to predate animals by a considerable amount.

Animals are essentially parasiges. They move faster than plants, and can generally think better (Joe Biden excepted). But they derive almost all of their energy from the consumption of plants (or the occasional mushroom). Plants can live without animals (although animal wastes help them, as do other acts by animals - such as bees moving pollen about.) Animals cannot live without plants.

We are all predators. It's just some animals predate on the slow moving plant life while others feed on the things that eat the plants.

(It surely is a dog-eat-dog world. The key is to not wind up on a bun slathered in mustard.)

The point? What kind of environmental pressure and random mutation would lead to the rise of animal life? And so soon after plant life arose.

One would think plant life would thrive for a long, long time before animal life arose. Plants were the pinnacle of Nature. They requires only sun and water and a few minerals from whatever chunk of ground they managed to colonize. Supremely well adapted to the Earth's environment, they had no reason to develop legs. Especially the early Earth was ideal for such life forms. And when in a Golden Age one has little reason to change. Certainly becoming an animal was not as beneficial as being able to make your own food from sunlight and water.

There just was no environmental pressure worth making the switch. Animals often struggle to find food, and plants learned early on to poison the pesky animal life. And the plants that didn't poison them USED them to spread. Seeds in animal waste could colonize other areas.

How did all this happen via Natural Selection?

I would add that most of the non-chlorophyll life is gone today. It couldn't compete with the plants. But then neither should the animals have been capable of so doing.

Being a plant is great if you don't mind the boredom! Everything just comes right to you! (Sort of like being a Democrat; you don't have to think or hold a job.)

It seems to me animal life could only have gotten going as a result of a huge catastrophe'. When plant life was struggling over a long period a creature that could simply uproot and move became viable enough to make it worth dumping the ability to make your own food.

Animals should have come WAY after plants.

Or not at all.

To me this is another problem with Darwinian-style evolution. There seems to be no good answer to this. Darwin believed species evolved based on niches in the environment being filled by random mutants. If there is food high in the trees then Supersaurus would grow long necks to reach it, because mutants with longer necks would live and their shorter cousins die out. Same for giraffes today, which are basically long-necked horses. But it is RANDOM, so evolution is necessarily slow, particularly inf the environment isn't undergoing rapid change. That's why Darwin believed whole fossil records would be found showing the change from one species to the next. That is not something anyone has found. What many Darwinists claim are complete fossil records show only one species moving in a direction then another species moving from that direction; there is no 'missing link' between them. This is a common problem in paleontology and it was what made Stephen Jay Gould theorize "punctuated equilibrium" which said species suddenly changed form. Of course Gould had no evidence for that and eventually even he had to let the theory go. So we are back to the same problems with Darwin that we always had.

Modern thinking is more subtle. Now it is believed that species share DNA, especially through viral infections, and that this leads to the evolution of species in no small part. But how does a virus change a species for the better? Viruses are primarily parasites that take over the machinery inside the cells and use it to produce more of themselves.

But that is epigenetics. The idea is once a trait is in the cell it remains so as "junk DNA" and can occasionally be expressed.

Case in point; Phorusrhacids aka the Terror Bird. This eight foot tall monster existed in the Carribean and South America area during the Cenozoic. They flourished between 51 million years ago and became extinct about ten thousand years ago - well into the era of humanity. (The first humans arrived in the Americas 25,000 years ago, so they may have encountered Terror Birds.) At any rate, this is past the age of the Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, like Terror Birds, were, well, birds. Big, nasty predatory birds, but relatives of Tweety (Silvester would have REALLY had something to worry about back then!)

What the Terror Birds represented was the re-expression of the old Dinosaur genes. They were throwbacks to the Cretaceus, which ended 66 million years ago and saw the total extinction of the dinosaurs.

So epigenetics argues that species can re-express dormant genes when environmental conditions are right, which they argue explains the sudden jumps in evolution in the fossil record.

Perhaps. But so often we see traits never seen before just appear out of the blue. And certainly the rise of animal life so shortly after the chlorophyll-using plant life is one such. I don't think Darwinian-style evolutionary theory explains it very well. At least I find it hard to swallow.

But then I'm one of those animals that took to swallowing plats millions of years ago, or so they tell me.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:37 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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