# Is evolution enough to explain he diversity of life?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [April 4, 2008, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003 "2008-04-04T23:10:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 20\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/21 "2008-04-05T01:36:59Z")

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I have no idea. 😛

It’s just that it’s always struck me in these threads vis-a-vis evolution that no one ever seems to talk about plant life and/or how it’s evolved.

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**Author:** ![WhyNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c77e96/32.png) [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 1:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/22 "2008-04-05T01:44:01Z")

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[QUOTE=Starving Artist]  
I have no idea. 😛

It’s just that it’s always struck me in these threads vis-a-vis evolution that no one ever seems to talk about plant life and/or how it’s evolved.  
[/QUOTE]

Oh! Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. Makes me think of Ellie in _Jurassic Park_, pointing out that plants have defenses and modes of attack and communication (through chemicals released in the soil or air, I’m not being woo-woo here) all of their own, and seeing growing formerly extinct plants blows her mind, but all anyone wants to talk about is the freakin’ dinosaurs! 😃

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**Author:** ![brazil84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8491ac/32.png) [@brazil84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brazil84)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/23 "2008-04-05T03:15:25Z")

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[QUOTE=Starving Artist]  
I have no idea. 😛

It’s just that it’s always struck me in these threads vis-a-vis evolution that no one ever seems to talk about plant life and/or how it’s evolved.  
[/QUOTE]

Many people have observed similarities between chlorophyll and hemoglobin and hypthesized that the similarities are due to plants and animals having a common ancestor.

Do plants have DNA and base pair coding similar to that of animals? I think so. If so, it again suggests a common ancestor.

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**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/24 "2008-04-05T04:04:21Z")

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[QUOTE=Dertulm]  
Let’s ignore the coincidence of life spontaneously arising so soon after the earth’s formation  
[/QUOTE]

I would not, 3.8 billions years ago there was more energy and building blocks around to start life.

> **[Abiogenesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life)**
>
> Abiogenesis or the origin of life (sometimes called biopoiesis) is the natural process by which life arises from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities on Earth was not a single event, but a process of increasing complexity involving the formation of a habitable planet, the prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emerg...

> [@](#):
>
> Origin of organic molecules
> 
> There are three sources of organic molecules on the early Earth:
> 
> 1. organic synthesis by other energy sources (such as ultraviolet light or electrical discharges) (eg.Miller’s experiments).
> 2. delivery by extraterrestrial objects (eg carbonaceous chondrites);
> 3. organic synthesis driven by impact shocks.
> 
> Recently estimates of these sources suggest that the heavy bombardment before 3.5 Gyr ago within the early atmosphere made available quantities of organics comparable to those produced by other energy sources

Add to that a world that was radioactive (a power source that I think it is mostly ignored when attempting to recreate conditions to test for possible origins of life) and with volcanoes and water coming in. Taking all that into account it would seem to me that life would not lose a chance to appear then.

Microscopic life that is, because only after the planet cooled down was that then multicellular organisms could develop.

[QUOTE=Dertulm]

1. Is it reasonable to conclude that all features of living creatures can be explained as the result of successive small changes, each one of which had to confer a selectable advantage?
2. Has there really been enough time to accommodate all of the necessary changes?  
[/QUOTE]

Yes and yes.

> **[National Geographic Magazine](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/)**
>
> National Geographic stories take you on a journey that’s always enlightening, often surprising, and unfailingly fascinating.

> [@](#):
>
> Since the late 1970s Gingerich has collected fossil specimens of early whales from remote digs in Egypt and Pakistan. Working with Pakistani colleagues, he discovered Pakicetus, a terrestrial mammal dating from 50 million years ago, whose ear bones reflect its membership in the whale lineage but whose skull looks almost doglike. A former student of Gingerich’s, Hans Thewissen, found a slightly more recent form with webbed feet, legs suitable for either walking or swimming, and a long toothy snout. Thewissen called it Ambulocetus natans, or the “walking-and-swimming whale.” Gingerich and his team turned up several more, including Rodhocetus balochistanensis, which was fully a sea creature, its legs more like flippers, its nostrils shifted backward on the snout, halfway to the blowhole position on a modern whale. The sequence of known forms was becoming more and more complete. And all along, Gingerich told me, he leaned toward believing that whales had descended from a group of carnivorous Eocene mammals known as mesonychids, with cheek teeth useful for chewing meat and bone. Just a bit more evidence, he thought, would confirm that relationship. By the end of the 1990s most paleontologists agreed.
> 
> Meanwhile, molecular biologists had explored the same question and arrived at a different answer. No, the match to those Eocene carnivores might be close, but not close enough. DNA hybridization and other tests suggested that whales had descended from artiodactyls (that is, even-toed herbivores, such as antelopes and hippos), not from meat-eating mesonychids.
> 
> In the year 2000 Gingerich chose a new field site in Pakistan, where one of his students found a single piece of fossil that changed the prevailing view in paleontology. It was half of a pulley-shaped anklebone, known as an astragalus, belonging to another new species of whale.
> 
> A Pakistani colleague found the fragment’s other half. When Gingerich fitted the two pieces together, he had a moment of humbling recognition: The molecular biologists were right. Here was an anklebone, from a four-legged whale dating back 47 million years, that closely resembled the homologus anklebone in an artiodactyls. Suddenly he realized how closely whales are related to antelopes.
> 
> This is how science is supposed to work. Ideas come and go, but the fittest survive. Downstairs in his office Phil Gingerich opened a specimen drawer, showing me some of the actual fossils from which the display skeletons upstairs were modeled. He put a small lump of petrified bone, no longer than a lug nut, into my hand. It was the famous astragalus, from the species he had eventually named Artiocetus clavis. It felt solid and heavy as truth.
> 
> Seeing me to the door, Gingerich volunteered something personal: “I grew up in a conservative church in the Midwest and was not taught anything about evolution. The subject was clearly skirted. That helps me understand the people who are skeptical about it. Because I come from that tradition myself.” He shares the same skeptical instinct. Tell him that there’s an ancestral connection between land animals and whales, and his reaction is: Fine, maybe. But show me the intermediate stages. Like Charles Darwin, the onetime divinity student, who joined that round-the –world voyage aboard the Beagle instead of becoming a country parson, and whose grand view of life on Earth was shaped by attention to small facts, Phil Gingerich is a reverant empiricist. He’s not satisfied until he sees solid data. That’s what excites his so much about pulling shale fossils out of the ground. In 30 years he has seen enough to be satisfied. For him, Gingerich said, it’s “a spiritual experience.”
> 
> “The evidence is there,” he added. “It’s buried in the rocks of ages.”

BTW, that classic National Geographic article had a great intro, the cover of the magazine asked:

\*\*  
Was Darwin wrong?\*\*

I opened the magazine with the fear that some creationists had gotten a hand of the editorial board of the magazine and it was going to be a sickening “let us give a chance to the other side.” kind of article.

The answer in page 3:  
**NO**

In an even bigger font size.

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**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/25 "2008-04-05T04:07:06Z")

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[QUOTE=Dertulm]

1. Is it reasonable to conclude that all features of living creatures can be explained as the result of successive small changes, each one of which had to confer a selectable advantage?  
[/QUOTE]

Why are you assuming all changes are small? Remember that girl in India who was born with four arms, not long ago? That’s a quantum leap over all her two-armed ancestors. If she had been allowed to mature with those arms, perhaps they would have become an evolutionary advantage. I can think of lots of circumstances in which we’d be better off with an additional arm or two. This could have been an example of evolution at work, in only one generation.

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**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 4:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/26 "2008-04-05T04:37:28Z")

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[QUOTE=Starving Artist]  
And then of course, we have not one life form spontaneously combusting, but two: animal & vegetable.

Nobody ever talks about plant life in these threads.  
[/QUOTE]

_Combusting?_ Dude: it’s prokaryotes, not pyrokinetics!

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**Author:** ![brazil84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8491ac/32.png) [@brazil84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brazil84)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/27 "2008-04-05T04:41:48Z")

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[QUOTE=panache45]  
Why are you assuming all changes are small?  
[/quote]

I think you need to define “small.” Quite possibly, only a small genetic change will cause somebody to grow an extra pair of arms.

Remember, genes are more like a recipe than a blueprint.

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**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 7:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/28 "2008-04-05T07:47:08Z")

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[QUOTE=panache45]  
Why are you assuming all changes are small? Remember that girl in India who was born with four arms, not long ago? That’s a quantum leap over all her two-armed ancestors. If she had been allowed to mature with those arms, perhaps they would have become an evolutionary advantage. I can think of lots of circumstances in which we’d be better off with an additional arm or two. This could have been an example of evolution at work, in only one generation.  
[/QUOTE]  
Ah, the discredited hopeful monster theory. First, as I recall that was an example of partially merged twins; not something genetic and inheritable. Second, such drastic alterations are pretty much universally unhealthy, or fatal. And third, such large alterations make finding a mate much, much harder. It’s barely possible that at one point or another, such drastic alterations actually did result in an evolutionary leap. But even if it happened, that would be a vanishingly rare freak occurrence; not a significant driver of evolution.

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**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 9:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/29 "2008-04-05T09:22:39Z")

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[QUOTE=Dertulm]

1. Is it reasonable to conclude that all features of living creatures can be explained as the result of successive small changes, each one of which had to confer a selectable advantage?  
[/QUOTE]

As long as you don’t assume the change has to be advantageous _at the time it develops_, for the reason it ends up being selected for eventually, yes, they can. Also noting that big physical changes sometimes arise from small genetic ones. See “preselection”, “homeobox genes” and Dawkins’ wonderful _Climbing Mount Improbable_.

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**Author:** ![nd\_n8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/439d5e/32.png) [@nd\_n8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nd_n8)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 12:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/30 "2008-04-05T12:47:37Z")

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[QUOTE=begbert2]  
He’s equating an inability to answer every possible question with “witnessing”, with pejorative intent. And then in his next post he’s demonstrating some amazing reading comprehension skills.

For a short answer to that question, I’d just say, “It’s not just billions upon billions of dice throws in a row. It’s millions upon millions of dice throws at _once_, billions upon billions of times in a row. _That’s_ where the diversity comes from.”  
[/QUOTE]

I don’t know about this (or at least I don’t understand it).

The only way to have millions upon millions of dice throws at once is to have millions upon millions of dice all at once. It seems that in the early days of this thing called life there were significantly fewer dice available.

Either there was some sequential evolution which branched fairly quickly into variated species and forms (animals and plants) or there was a spontanious event that caused similar building blocks to form in millions of ways up front that then took billions upon billions of dice throws to get to where we are today.

[wittnessing alert]\* Kind of like a big Dungeon Master with a platnum AMEX shopping at the Cosmic Comic Carnival and loading up on a million different Dragon Dice. [/wittnessing alert]

\*At least I’m man enough to admit it.

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**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/31 "2008-04-05T12:58:38Z")

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[QUOTE=nd\_n8]  
I don’t know about this (or at least I don’t understand it).

The only way to have millions upon millions of dice throws at once is to have millions upon millions of dice all at once. It seems that in the early days of this thing called life there were significantly fewer dice available.

[/QUOTE]

Even if there are few species (or even only one), there’s still a large number of individuals.

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**Author:** ![WhyNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c77e96/32.png) [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 1:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/32 "2008-04-05T13:04:36Z")

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[QUOTE=nd\_n8]  
The only way to have millions upon millions of dice throws at once is to have millions upon millions of dice all at once. It seems that in the early days of this thing called life there were significantly fewer dice available.  
[/QUOTE]

Sure, except that wouldn’t last for long. I haven’t gotten to this lab in BIO class yet, but apparently we’re going to grow bacteria - simple prokaryotic cells similar to the “first life” cells. They multiply by dividing, and they do it very quickly - sometimes in only a few hours. So, since 1 becomes 2 and 2 become 4 and 4 become 8, it only takes 20 generations before we have over 1 million (1,048,576, to be precise) “dice” to throw around. And 2 million in the next generation, and then 4 million! Et cetera. Even if we assume that half of those offspring don’t survive, we can have 1 billion dice in less than a week.

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**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 1:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/33 "2008-04-05T13:08:37Z")

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[QUOTE=nd\_n8]  
I don’t know about this (or at least I don’t understand it).

The only way to have millions upon millions of dice throws at once is to have millions upon millions of dice all at once. It seems that in the early days of this thing called life there were significantly fewer dice available.

[/QUOTE]

Even if there are few species (or even only one), there’s still a large number of individuals. As soon as one organism arises, it will fill every square inche fits for survival in no time, givern the rate of “reproduction” of such simple organisms. Even more so since it doesn’t have any competition. After only one year, there will be billions or copies of it all around the place, and some of them will probably already have mutated.

The only gap is no life/life. Once there’s life, all bets are off.

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**Author:** ![nd\_n8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/439d5e/32.png) [@nd\_n8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nd_n8)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/34 "2008-04-05T14:52:08Z")

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Assuming 50% of the offspring are viable the number reaches 1 million in 21 generations. At 10% viability it hits 1 million in 24 generations and 1 billion in 34 generations. Also assuming an 8 hour cycle for such a simple life form these would hit 34 generations in 272 hours, a little over 11 days.

Assuming humans have an average of 25 years per generation (a blind number, quite high and quite conservative), and an adjusted procreation rate of 33% due to sexual vs. asexual reproduction, we would theoretically reach the 1 billion mark (technically 1,288,490,189) in 32 generations or in about 800 years at 100% viability or 900 years at 10% viability (war, plague, pestilance, genocide and people who just can’t get a date).

This is also assuming a reproduction rate of 1 child per 2 adults. I think that’s somewhere around 2.7 these days but I don’t know for sure. This is a worse case scenario anyway.

So, from one person to one billion people in less than a thousand years. My math machine does not want to work out how many people there would be in the 5000 some odd years of written history let alone the tens of thousands of years of archeological history, even with a low average life span the number would be huge. Either that or the viability rate of the species would be very low, I would guess under 1% but that’s just off the top of my head.

And that’s just one species with a fairly short history compaired to the full archeological spectrum, a blip on the screen so to speak. Add to that the other millions of species that have shared the planet since the point that there were at least a million different species around. All of this times the billions of years since life began (adjusted for catastrophy of course: volcanos, tsunamis, rogue asteroids, Dave’s Insanity Sauce, etc…).

The numbers don’t add up to me. It seems as if, without some serious coordination we would be stepping on organisms with each foot fall (ok, we are stepping on some organisms with each foot fall, and breathing in hundereds with each breath, but the scale I’m talking about is larger than that, we’d be tripping over billions of fairly complex organisms).

I’m not personally attacking evolution or currently advocating creationism. I’m just wondering if I have the math somewhat close and, if so, as the original question stands - Is evolution enough to explain the diversity of life (and the seemingly infinite complexity of the full organic system without some direction)?

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**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/35 "2008-04-05T15:38:42Z")

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[QUOTE=nd\_n8]  
So, from one person to one billion people in less than a thousand years.  
[/quote]

You probably want to start with 2 people. 🙂

> [@](#):
>
> The numbers don’t add up to me. It seems as if, without some serious coordination we would be stepping on organisms with each foot fall (ok, we are stepping on some organisms with each foot fall, and breathing in hundereds with each breath, but the scale I’m talking about is larger than that, we’d be tripping over billions of fairly complex organisms).

Your math fails to account for competition for resources. These numbers a self-limiting when you end up with limited food and space resources. Populations don’t expand that quickly because some other species (or just members of the species in question) are already in that niche or are in competition for resources.

But niches fill up and there are plenty of organisms for evolution to operate on.

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**Author:** ![vison](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/e47774/32.png) [@vison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vison)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/36 "2008-04-05T17:59:18Z")

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There is something here that I see but have a hard time explaining, so I ask for your patience.

There are about 6 billion humans on Earth right now. Each of us had 2 parents, each of them had 2 parents, etc. Within a very short space of time each of us has more ancestors than humans ever alive: so we all share those ancestors pretty quickly, do we not?

I’m not sure what I’m driving at, actually. It just seems really important to me. Once we were a very small population, and it would appear that since that time we have not “evolved”. We are them, they are us.

Is it derailing the thread to speculate what “evolution” might occur in humans? How? When?

Also, somewhere I remember reading (could have been something by Carl Sagan) that humans share DNA with Petunias. I think this was in a discussion about Mr. Spock being the impossible offspring of a Vulcan and a Human.

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**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/37 "2008-04-05T18:39:45Z")

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[QUOTE=vison]  
There is something here that I see but have a hard time explaining, so I ask for your patience.

There are about 6 billion humans on Earth right now. Each of us had 2 parents, each of them had 2 parents, etc. Within a very short space of time each of us has more ancestors than humans ever alive: so we all share those ancestors pretty quickly, do we not?

I’m not sure what I’m driving at, actually. It just seems really important to me. Once we were a very small population, and it would appear that since that time we have not “evolved”. We are them, they are us.  
[/quote]

There is strong evidence that we (ie, our ancestors) went through a genetic bottleneck around 60k years ago, and there may have been as few as 10,000 humans total at that time. This would have been right before the time that some of our ancestors left Africa and colonized Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas.

Just by looking at the various ethnic groups you see around the world, it’s pretty obvious that we’ve evolved some since that time.

> [@](#):
>
> Is it derailing the thread to speculate what “evolution” might occur in humans? How? When?

Every population is always evolving. Whether that evolution is visible to the casual observer is a different issue. Every new generation is new mix of the genes from the past generation, plus a few mutations. Sometimes those mutations are harmful, sometimes beneficial and sometimes neutral. It all depends on the the conditions in the environment at the time.

> [@](#):
>
> Also, somewhere I remember reading (could have been something by Carl Sagan) that humans share DNA with Petunias. I think this was in a discussion about Mr. Spock being the impossible offspring of a Vulcan and a Human.

Yes, we share genes with all living organisms on earth. [Link](http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/genomics/1_identity/alike.html). How you define what % we share can vary depending on what you are comparing, but it’s pretty surprising how closely we are related to something like a mouse (about 90% shared DNA).

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**Author:** ![vison](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/e47774/32.png) [@vison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vison)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/38 "2008-04-05T19:36:36Z")

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I don’t see the various ethnic groups as “evolution”. Am I wrong?

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**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/39 "2008-04-05T19:47:22Z")

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[QUOTE=nd\_n8]

Assuming humans have an average of 25 years per generation (a blind number, quite high and quite conservative), and an adjusted procreation rate of 33% due to sexual vs. asexual reproduction, we would theoretically reach the 1 billion mark (technically 1,288,490,189) in 32 generations or in about 800 years at 100% viability or 900 years at 10% viability (war, plague, pestilance, genocide and people who just can’t get a date).

This is also assuming a reproduction rate of 1 child per 2 adults. I think that’s somewhere around 2.7 these days but I don’t know for sure. This is a worse case scenario anyway.

So, from one person to one billion people in less than a thousand years. My math machine does not want to work out how many people there would be in the 5000 some odd years of written history let alone the tens of thousands of years of archeological history, even with a low average life span the number would be huge. Either that or the viability rate of the species would be very low, I would guess under 1% but that’s just off the top of my head.

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Does the Black Death mean anything to you at all? Until fairly recently (the last few hundred years) disease and famine pruned the population quite nicely. The same for animals. More prey, more predators.

I’m not sure what infant mortality rates were, and I’m too lazy to look them up, but the reason that many cultures didn’t name babies until a week after birth was that so many of them died.

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**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2008, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-evolution-enough-to-explain-he-diversity-of-life/444003/40 "2008-04-05T19:51:51Z")

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[QUOTE=Dertulm]

Regarding the need for TIME … life on this planet is estimated to have appeared around 3.8 billions years ago, not long after the earth itself was formed (4.5 billion years ago). Let’s ignore the coincidence of life spontaneously arising so soon after the earth’s formation, and consider that amount of time: 3.8 billion years. Is that really so much time? An Intel Core Duo processor can execute 59 billion instructions in one second. If you actually break down the number of individual changes that would have had to happen sequentially to arrive at a modern human, then I think you’d find that evolution would have to clip along at a pretty good pace. Since there is obviously going to be a huge spectrum of rate of change, you have to figure that some changes would happen exponentially faster than other changes. In all the years that scientists have been examining the natural world, you’d think we’d have at least ONE clear-cut, irrefutable example of complicated new features arising as the result of sequential mutations which introduced new genetic instructions.

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First of, no processor is that fast (yet.) You’re probably confusing clocks with instructions for the first part.

Second, the reason it can process so much is that it has two cores. Life has the equivalent of billions and billions of processors - the more primitive the life, the more reproduction and the more chance for mutation. So you should reconsider the case with a billion core processor.

Third, you should read about how much genetic information we share with our ancestors and cousins. The number of changes is not all that great.

Remember, life is a bush. You don’t need that much branching at each stage to get a lot of diversity at the end.

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