I’ve recently been realizing how, when we look at all the life adapted for air or land, how obvious it is that all are actually just water animals adapted for land. Look at trees, for instance. The way they branch out from a center trunk to fan out and collect sunlight makes it obvious they are really water life adapted for land. Also, look at humans. We are baisically fish adapted to walk on land and get oxygen through the air (I don’t mean taxonomically.), big sacks designed to store water within ourselves.
Okay, I got to thinking about why life came out of the ocean, and it hit me. Could life have come out of the water and onto land without the tidal forces the moon contributes? I tend to think no, because otherwise, non-mobile plants couldn’t have become adapted to temporary air exposure during low tide and moved out of the water. And without plants, there would be no way to start a food chain above water.
Oh yes, another thing: can we leave God(s) out of this discussion? Thanks.
Well, Venus has no moon, and there’s evidently plenty of life there. You should hear my sister-in-law talk–never a dull moment, she says, bingo twice a week, always yammering on at us, “Why don’t you move, for heaven’s sake, we can get you a nice condo overlooking the ammonia lake…”
Good luck with the non-God agenda, babe. So this is going to be an official Evolutionists Only thread? Isn’t that in clear violation of federal anti-discrimination guidelines? [joke]
I had heard the theory before but I was not aware that it was Isaac Asimov who had originated it. Did he really? Or is the book just his summing-up of a theory that was already floating around during the 60’s?
There was an article in the British magazine New Scientist describing a theory which states that INTELLIGENT life on Earth may be the result of the moon.
I cannot, though, remember what the theory said. I do remember reading and thinking, “hmmm, that makes sense.”
It’s indisputable that lunar tidal forces have influenced evolution, and that an earth without a moon would sport different flora and fauna. I don’t think that there is enough evidence to suggest that life would never have colonized the land masses without them as Asimov implies though. Tides may have facilitated the landward expansion, but that isn’t the same as saying that the lack of tides would preclude that expansion.
Tide pools are thought by some to be the most likely place for the birth of life itself, as they would tend to be collecting places for complex molecules, although others contend that life was equally likely to have arisen around thermal vents deep in the ocean. Either way, both ideas are pretty difficult to prove.
There is no question that the moon had an influence on the evolutionary process. So did many other things, such as continental drift, climate, volcanic activity and so on.
But to state that the the moon was the driving force behind adaption to land sounds like a just-so story to me. I’m sure that there were many other factors at work.
There is also no question that life would be very different if the moon was smaller, or bigger, or further away, or absent altogether.
The evolutionary history of the world is so complicated that even a small change in the distant past would have a profound effect on the present.
Stephen Jay Gould goes so far as to say that even if the whole drama were replayed with identical conditions, the results would be dramatically different every time.
If it is at all physically possible, life will expand into new niches. Consider the bacteria that they find in mile-deep rocks: There were no tides forcing them underground. They went because nothing else had, first, so there would be no competition there. Granted, though, that the presence of tides probably sped things up a bit.
And Duck Duck, doesn’t the ammonia neutralize the sulfuric acid?
Just so you guys know, life as we know it would undoubtedly be different without the moon. Afterall, if we didn’t have the moon it wouldn’t be “life as we know it,” would it?
Right, the rest of you can debate your nether facts…I don’t know enough about that period to really contribute.
Certainly, if the Moon were taken away, (or any of a bajillion other factors were changed), life on Earth wouldn’t be quite the same, and just how different it was would depend on the magnitude of the change. Usually, though, it’d still be what we would call “life as we know it”. As it’s usually used, that’s a broad statement that the life in question has its structure based on proteins and amino acids, that nucleic acids are used to transmit genetic information, etc. For purposes of the OP, what seems to be at issue here, is whether life would have ever settled the dry land without the moon, also an interesting question. In either case, we could have completely different lifeforms, but still satisfying our working definition of “as we know it”.
