"You're not one of those people who believes human beings came from worms, are you?"
(Oh, yes. I am, actually. )
"You aren't one of those people who believes in the Talking Snake Theory, are you?"
Darwinian Theory is so simple that it is a constant source of consternation that anyone bothers to claim that it is false. Here it is in a nutshell:
1. Every child of any organism is born different in some way from its parent(s) and siblings.
2. Sometimes life gets tough, for one reason or another, and not all offspring survive long enough to make their own offspring.
3. The ones that do survive make offspring that look more like the parents than the members of the previous generation who didn't reproduce.
4. After enough generations of being born different, the current crop of offspring in any lineage will not look much like the founding fathers and/or mothers mentioned in item 1.
There you go...That's all there is to it.
But....it gets complicated from there. Just as any conceivable number may be correctly written by combining only two symbols, one and zero, There is no life form yet encountered on this planet that is not formed under the direction of its own personal genetic code. Every living thing we know of on planet Earth has DNA.
A most obvious example of what is called "Natural Selection" is the race to fertilize an egg. We are all victims of this process. At some point prior to our birth, a race was held between a few million sperm with an egg as the finish line. The winner was crowned champion by being allowed to supply the missing chromosomes needed to produce a viable ovum, and TA DA, We began our unique existance, at some point, hopefully, ready to hold another race.
There are and have been gazillions of such races. Here is the story of some of them that includes the "worm" mentioned at the start of today's blatherings.
Enjoy.
Science Friday
Season's Greetings!
(anything wrong with that?)
Steve
