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by avip 2413 days ago
In the grand scheme of things, things that work (s.a life) are an unexplainable outlier.
1 comments

Even for life one wonders. If you look at life's history. Life gets created, gets to the point where we pretty much have modern bacteria, single celled organisms. That took somewhere between 100 and 300 million years. They conquered the planet and ...

And then nothing. There was variation in the cells, sure, but not really all that much (also we can't really tell). As far as we can tell no multicellular life, no great advances, nothing, other than continued existence. No spreading further. No evolution towards more complexity. Muddling along at best. Total pause at worst.

900 million years of it. Maybe more.

Why ?

The next major step in evolution was sexual reproduction. That allows different advantageous mutations to be combined into a single organism. In other words, it allows features to evolve in parallel rather than relying on a single lineage to get everything right.
Agreed. For a ~2.5 billion years project, the deliverable is not that impressive.
But the fact that you're here, conversing on something worldwide is insane.