Evolution and complexity

Firstly, the vast majority of the Earth's biomass continues to be relatively simple organisms. It's just that you don't tend to think about them. (Just stop and ponder, for a moment, how many individual bacteria there are on planet Earth. Whew!)And think about it this way. Imagine the first living thing. It's literally the simplest organism that could possibly still be considered alive. Actually, imagine a population of them. Now, imagine that one thing changes about a few of them.If that change was for the simpler, they all die, because they're no longer complex enough to be alive. If the change was for the complex, they live, and have advanced capabilities or something.When you're at the bottom of the barrel, there's no place to go but up.If you see a "trend" in evolution towards complexity, you're looking at it the wrong way. Complex, multicellular life is like a blip on the evolutionary radar. Most living things continue to be very simple indeed. It's just that it's easy for humans to forget about them. Then you need to look a little harder. I'd reccommend reading Gould's "Full House". It's a great explanation of thise very phenomenon. Why not? It's just a kind of chemistry. I'm inclined to think that it's inevitable, given enough time.

Portuguese Man-of-Wars (Men-of-war?) grow to huge sizes, and being jellyfish-like (if not true jellyfish), nobody would accuse them of great complexity.The largest known organism is a single soil fungus that, as I recall, covers some several square miles. If the environment changes in such a way that the new mutants are adapted to it and the old species is not, then the odds are %100.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 01-31-2004]

I guess I really don't see the relevance of information to biology. But that's just me, I guess. So I'm not really going to be the person you want to discuss information with...

Maybe you missed the part where I pointed out that isn't true. The Earth's biomass continues to be primarily comprised of simple organisms. Sure, there is plenty of complex life, but complexity is still the exception rather than the rule among living things on Earth.

Are you familiar with the term "normalized distribution" or perhaps "bell curve"?There's always outliers - extreme individuals, one out of a million average folks. And the number of individual organisms is orders of magnitude more than a million. I shudder to even contemplate the number.Complex life is a blip. Why does it need a particular explanation? There's certainly no trend towards complexity that I'm familiar with. Look at my first post in this thread, where I talk about it some more.

Life is just a kind of self-sustaining chemistry. I would hardly put in on the level of a fundamental force, seeing as how it's an emergent state of them.