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-------------------------- 2446 - EVOLUTION - producing amazing diversity ?
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- Here are some of the amazing life forms living with us today:
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- Octopus genes are more advanced than any other order of animals on Earth. One of the groups of genes that they exhibit codes for the development of their amazing distributed nervous system. Octopods possess regenerative and camouflage capabilities, and are among the smartest animals on the planet.
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- There are species of single-celled organisms called Archaea that survive in environments so harsh they would melt the flesh from your bones in seconds. They live in super-alkaline lakes, in the ultra-high pressure of the Mariana trench, alongside nearly deep-fryer temperature hydrothermal vents, and can even survive high doses of gamma radiation. These are not bacteria, and may be the earliest form of prokaryotic life on Earth.
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- Tardigrades, or water bears, can survive in the harsh cold and pure vacuum of space, and can put themselves in a dormant state in which their metabolism reduces to 0.01% of normal, allowing them to live to nearly 30 years in more moderate conditions, essentially extending their expected lifespan of only a few months by 300 times.
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- There are four species of Hyena, that powerful and hardy scavenger that lurks in the African savannah. Though they have physical and behavioral characteristics of both cats and dogs, they are neither. Hyenas belong to their own family, Hyenadae, and they evolved and thrived because they fit a particular niche in their ecosystem.
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- Marsupials were once the dominant mammalian order on the planet. Like other mammals, they give birth, but the young are undeveloped and spend most of their time outside of the mother’s body suckling and growing in a pouch.
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- There is a species of jellyfish that, when reaching a point of being too old, injured or sick, reverts back into its “childlike” polyp state and then regrows, creating a cycle of near immortality.
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- We humans are all descendants of the very first living cells that appeared sometime between 3.8 and 4.3 billion years ago. Since then, life has been branching out in innumerable different directions, constantly testing the boundaries of its environments to see what forms can thrive and what forms are insufficient. Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” has been at play for billions of years.
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- Scientists estimate that there may be as many as 8,700,000 species currently alive on Earth today. We’re only sure of roughly 1,200,000 of those, which are catalogued. It’s taken the work of many generations of explorers and biologists to find and record them, but that’s where we are now. The work is never-ending.
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- We discover, on average, about 50 new species every day, based on the 18,000 found in 2016.
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- 150 species go extinct every day in our modern world, which may be 1,000 times the natural rate.
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- This means that we are losing species 3 times faster than we are finding them.
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- This means that by this time next year, 36,000 types of living things will have gone extinct before we get a chance to witness their existence.
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- The fossil record as we know it comes almost entirely from evidence found in sedimentary rock, which generally is only found very near the surface of the planet. Over the huge expanse of geologic time, billions of years, via plate tectonics, volcanism and asteroid impacts, most of those deposits that have ever existed have been subsumed into much deeper layers of the planet. We will, likely, never have teams of paleontologists searching for fossils twenty miles below the surface.
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- When you consider the countless potential species of microscopic organisms, which multiply so quickly and have such short generations, there have likely existed many billions of species on Earth since the dawn of life.
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- All of life as we currently know it, everything we see living around us today, represents at most half a billion years of evolution. Every recognizable form of life, from flowers to insects to dinosaurs to deer, evolved in less than 1/8th of the time life has been on Earth.
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- So much time is unaccounted for, so much evolution, that there may have been enough time for multiple entire other complete evolutionary trees to develop before being totally wiped clean from the face of the planet.
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- Earth belonged to living things for so long that there may have been advanced, even intelligent, species to come along billions of years ago. It’s just been so long, with so many geologic changes along the way, that any evidence of their time here could never be uncovered.
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- Neanderthals only existed for a few hundred thousand years before being put out of business by modern humans, Homo sapiens. All of the genus Homo has only been around for roughly 2,500,000 years.
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- Apes, as whole, have only existed for 15,000,000 years, while modern sharks have managed to thrive for more than ten times that amount of time.
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- Homo sapiens is the latest branch in a singular limb of the evolutionary tree. We have caused the extinction of many other of our fellow species, and continue to do so, at an alarming rate.
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- If we make it past our current two minutes to midnight setting on the Doomsday Clock, then we may be the ancestors to numerous other species that progress through oncoming millions, maybe even billions, of years remaining until the Earth is swallowed up when our dear Sun becomes a red giant.
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- Other Reviews available:
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- 2268 - Learning from the evolution of plants and animals.
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- 2162 - Evolution, what has God got to do with it? How could all this possibly happen by accident? The most incomprehensible thing is that you and me are here trying to comprehend it.
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- 2106 - How did I get here? We are here for a purpose. One purpose is to try and understand all of this.
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- 2038 - Evolution and supernovae.
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- 2037 - Could Dark Matter have been involved with evolution?
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- 1808 - Calendar of the Universe since the beginning of time. 17 pages long.
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- September 27, 2019 2446
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--------------------- Friday, September 27, 2019 --------------------
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