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Author Topic:   Is Earth old enough for DNA to evolve?
Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


(1)
Message 23 of 60 (668127)
07-17-2012 11:55 AM
Reply to: Message 21 by bcoop
07-17-2012 11:30 AM


Re: Generation lengths bogus
Principally he means that while humans are currently the latest point in an evolutionary sequence so is every other living thing on the planet. Humans are no more evolved than the yeast you compared them too. They have a larger genome and more organismal complexity but there is no chain of being from lowly yeast to pinnacle humans, instead they both constitute distant but contemporary tips of a ramifying series of diverging branch populations that goes back to a common ancestral population of some form billions of years ago.
Those more primitive ancestors may have resembled yeast or bacteria more in a lot of ways, but a modern yeast is not necessarily any more closely related to them than a modern human is. Indeed the chances are that most unicellular organisms are several thousand, millions or even billions of generations more distant from the hypothetical latest universal common ancestor (LUCA) than the larger multicellular organisms, especially complex metazoans like vertebrates.
TTFN,
WK

This message is a reply to:
 Message 21 by bcoop, posted 07-17-2012 11:30 AM bcoop has replied

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Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


Message 43 of 60 (668185)
07-18-2012 4:05 AM
Reply to: Message 42 by caffeine
07-18-2012 3:32 AM


Is it a bad figure?
I think this picture is badly put together. It is labelled as if the centre is the past, and left and right are the present
I think this criticism is somewhat unfair, there are nested arcs of dashed lines centered around the past and these lines intersect with the times on either side delineating specific regions corresponding to a time period, both the lines and the timescales have complementary colour coding for particular stretches of time. Certain of the lines are also labelled with specific events associated with a particular time period.
It's more accurate to think of the whole outer rim of the diagram as the present.
That is in fact exactly what the diagram shows.
There are plenty of elements which obviate your initial objection if you give the diagram more than a cursory glance.
TTFN,
WK

This message is a reply to:
 Message 42 by caffeine, posted 07-18-2012 3:32 AM caffeine has replied

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 Message 45 by caffeine, posted 07-18-2012 8:00 AM Wounded King has not replied

  
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