Hi Paullesq,
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paullesq writes:
From the primordial soup, the common ancestor to the branching out of the many species.
To the first piston engine, the first petrol car and the branching out of the many different cars we see on our roads today.
Although the means of selection in both cases are very different, that is that they operate in very different spheres on different material, the branching structure of evolution is evident in both examples.
At a superficial level this seems patently false. Innovations pass freely among the different car manufacturers, a rat's nest of interconnections rather than the branching structure of evolution.
But there is a smidgen of similarity, because genes are able to pass between species, though with nothing like the freedom that innovations pass between car manufacturers. While I wouldn't say that a gene being passed from an iguana to a human was impossible, it has to be ridiculously unlikely, but organisms pick up genes from other organisms all the time, usually from viruses. Viruses operate by substituting their own DNA for a cell's DNA, and when that process is incomplete a cell (usually a reproductive cell in species that do not reproduce through fission) can pick up a completely new region of DNA donated by the virus. We see the effects of this process distributed throughout DNA.
The common element between biological evolution and many other physical processes is selection. What they do not share is descent with modification, and that makes all the difference.
--Percy
™ Version 4.2
