on evolution
You must understand that Earth is very likely more than 4 billion years old. There is a substantial amount of proof supporting this.
Life started on Earth. We’re not completely sure what caused it, some think that it was probably a comet or asteroid that crashed into another planet containing life before hitting Earth and delivering some micro-organisms here. Others think that it may have just been that Earth already had all of the vital ingredients for life, and that they combined and started life purely by chance.
These first organisms thrived, until they had produced so much waste (oxygen) that they couldn’t tolerate it anymore. Now, when organisms reproduce, mutations often occur in the offspring. The reasons are generally environmental, but can be caused by many things. This organism will either:
- die due to a negative mutation that impacted its ability to survive
- live through its life and reproduce, passing on this mutation, due to a neutral mutation
- thrive and reproduce many times and frequently due to a positive mutation
2 out of 3 mutated lifeforms will live on based on this logic. Of course, there is a certain degree of variability here, but that’s the basic logic.
Now when the organisms have produced so much waste that they can no longer survive, it can happen that not all of them will die. Different mutations may inflict their ability to survive—whether negative or positive. These mutations may not have had any effect on them before the change happened! But now, these organisms that carried a certain set of mutations have survived, and will live on, and reproduce.
The same process carries on, over and over, as creatures bring themselves to their own defeat. This, of course, happens over hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years!
This also predicts that we will likely come to our own demise. Intelligence is just a trait, only our methods are different from the empires before us—whether the micro-organisms, the sea creatures, the reptiles, or the mammals—but not our survival and inevitably, defeat.
That concludes my post, and, as always, if I’m wrong about something, please help me by pointing it out.
