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0 pointsest317y ago0 comments

Evolution is a process rooted in randomness. The more faces a dice has, the longer you need to throw it to get the highest number. Or, reversely: the longer you have to throw your dice to get the highest number, the more faces it generally has.

It took "only" < 400 million years for life to develop, meaning unicellular life, but it took 3 billion years for multicellular life to develop. If we apply this basic rule, multicellular life seems the hard thing. Of course though, statistics wise this is pretty crappy ground to stand on because we only have one sample :).

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3 comments · 3 top-level

gus_massa7y ago

The hard part is (probably) the transition from Prokaryotes to Eukaryotes. The transition from unicelular Eukaryotes to multicelular Eukaryotes is (probably) easy [1] .

Edit: [1] From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism#Occurre...

> Multicellularity has evolved independently at least 46 times in eukaryotes, and also in some prokaryotes, [...] . However, complex multicellular organisms evolved only in six eukaryotic groups [...]

MRD857y ago

One sample is hard to read because even low odds can happen. Picture the following statement: "The chance of life forming anywhere in the universe over a 100 billion year period is equal to 1 in Graham's number".

If this statement is true then it is incredibly unlikely life forms in our universe at our current stage exist. Low odds can occur and the only reason anyone is here to observe them is because they did occur. Since we only know of life forming once we cannot make assumptions about the odds of it happening.

perl4ever7y ago

"It took "only" < 400 million years for life to develop"

Yes, that's what people assume, but the universe existed for billions of years before that, so what if life might have used all that time to evolve before it landed on Earth deep inside some rocks?

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