Re: Intriguing new concept regarding human origins

Desertphile wrote:

1) Many organisms destroy their environments;

2) Other organisms move into those destroyed environments and live
perfectly happy and healthy

Example please? AFAIK, most if not all cases of organisms damaging
their environments are foreign species introduced by humans. Hardly
relevant to the more general case of life throughout Earth's history.

....

There was a time when Earth's environment was much different (reducing
atmosphere, no atmospheric oxygen), and yet trillions of organisms
enjoyed that environment (and shat out oxygen, thus polluting their
environments). Many other trillions of organisms basked (and basks) in
that *** (oxidating atmosphere).

Oxygen first appeared in our atmosphere about 2.2 billion years ago.
Although it was obviously a major change to atmospheric chemistry, it
didn't have any major effect on the dominant form of life at that time,
which was bacteria. Bacteria remained the dominant form of life until
just 600 million years ago, when there was a major glaciation
("Snowball Earth") and, I think, another major shift in atmospheric
composition. It was only then that the first animals, plants etc
started to appear. If you compare fossils from 3,500 milion years ago
to those from just before the Snowball Earth, they are virtually
identical. The switch to an oxygenated atmosphere 2.2 billion years ago
had a major impact as far as mineralogy is concerned, but little if any
discernable effect on life. So oxygen can't explain evolutions biggest
problem: the fact that there was no evolution for 3 billion years, at a
time when the dominant form of life was bacteria (which are organisms
that can mutate and evolve very rapidly in the laboratory).

-Hugh

.