[ExI] Maximum biological lifespan

Sat Aug 13 17:34:31 UTC 2016

On Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 8:10 AM, David Lubkin <lubkin at unreasonable.com>
wrote:

>

> 
> Who says it has to be animal?
> It seems to me there could be a planet where there only has ever been one
> organism of one species.

But if there is only one species there are going to be lots of
Evolutionary niches that are empty, and
 DNA copying is never going to be perfect
 so
there
will be
 mutations
 that can fill that vacuum. O
ne mutation would be the ability to get nourishment from dead plants, no
need for you to go to the bother of photosynthesis, the dead plant has
already done that for you so the first new species is created, a fungus.
Another mutant could start eating living plants and the first herbivore is
born. One of the herbivores could have a mutation that cause its teeth to
be a little sharper than average and when it looks at one of its fellow
herbivores it starts to look delicious, and the first carnivore is born.
And so it goes.  

> 
> Or, the biosphere had an evolution much like ours until a combination of
> external events killed off enough other life for one species to supplant
> all others.

The environmental conditions 
on any planet are never going to be identical from the poles to the
equator, so the biosphere isn't going to be identical either. 

John K Clark

>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20160813/97224eee/attachment.html>