Chapter category: Evolution
Thoughts on Multi-Cellularity: How Nature got Around Darwin
The Genomic Potential Hypothesis: A Chemist's View of the Origins, Evolution and Unfolding of Life
Edited by: Christian SchwabeISBN: 1-58706-044-2
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Chapter authors:
Christian Schwabe
Reproductive success is the ultimate criterion for survival in the Darwinian paradigm, and since micro-organisms are undisputed champions of reproduction the countless creatures that condensed in the shallow Cambrian waters simply drained the old model of credibility. Every living shape appearing at once, crawling, swimming or slithering away from the line that separated the microbial world from the age of large, short-lived creatures, was testimony to an unstoppable drive to complexity with merely adequate reproductive levels. How did nature get around Darwin? The answer may seem extensive but I simply do not know enough to make it short.
The sharp line between the animate and the inanimate world and the speed of transition reflects the powerful force of atomic structure. It took about 6 times as long (3 billion years) to produce macro-organisms from single cellular life than it did to produce life. Most students of evolution find this quite surprising because, at the level of biological processes, it would seem easier to produce a large animal from a cell than to produce a living cell from elements. In the chapter on the origin of structure this observation is explained by the logarithmic increase in the number of connections required with every additional layer of complexity.
Animals appeared in the Ediacaran, slightly ahead of the Cambrian but most of them were soft-bodied and did not survive except the jelly fish. The first 10 million years of the Cambrian, now known as the Tommotian, brought about a bewildering array of micro-fossils, none larger than a few millimeters. A quote from Stanley’s text is illuminating in that context.1
"Also found in Tommotian rocks, however, is a host of strange skeletal elements that cannot be assigned to any living phylum and that seem to be unrelated to any group of fossils found in rocks younger than Cambrian age.
Additional chapters from this book:
The Genomic Potential Hypothesis: Introduction
Christian Schwabe
The Genomic Potential Hypothesis is a biochemists' view of the origin, evolution, and development of life. Large numbers are second nature to a biochemist an...
Quintessence
Christian Schwabe
Steven Weinberg once said that the complexity of physics today reaches very close to the edge of the human intellect.1 Where would that leave us, the bioch...
Experiments in Evolution
Christian Schwabe
Conceptual science interfaces with the experimental world as predictions emanate from the internal logic of a paradigm. Hypotheses concerning the origin and unfolding...
Molecular Geneology
Christian Schwabe
Is it rational to expect proteins such as insulin, relaxin, hemoglobin, or cytochrome to have followed the evolutionary route of the organisms from which they were taken? Of course it is , but...
On the Evolution of Humans
Christian Schwabe
Ancient bones are somewhat like wind vanes that show from which direction a particular hypothesis breezes across the fossil field. If a paradigm is useful one should ...
The Invariance Concept
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Tucked away, if it were possible, within the hollow of the tip of a dart gun needle aimed at man or beast one could make a memorable discovery. Just a moment after sk...
Natura non facit saltum (Nature does nothing in jumps)
Christian Schwabe
Latin is intimidating, and people tend to defer to anything expressed in that venerable language. Of all the errors chiseled into our cultural foundation in Latin, th...
Thoughts on Multi-Cellularity: How Nature got Around Darwin
Christian Schwabe
Reproductive success is the ultimate criterion for survival in the Darwinian paradigm, and since micro-organisms are undisputed champions of reproduction the countles...
Development of Biological Potential
Christian Schwabe
Should development come after speciation? Yes, of course, in the new model it is natural, one produces the Anlage and develops it to its potential. The word evolution...
The Origins of Species
Christian Schwabe
There was never a time on earth when only one kind, one species, existed. At least there is no evidence to that effect and a plausible extension of that simple though...
The Condensation of Life
Christian Schwabe
The course of biogenesis was carved into molecular structures by the events of the primeval initiation of our universe. The speed at which pure energy segregated into...
Our Young Planet: One is not a Choice
Christian Schwabe
The old model begins with one origin and the biochemist knows that to be impossible. The scientific basis for the genomist’s position has been discussed and will...
The Origin of Complexity
Christian Schwabe
Clearly, molecular complexity was a precondition for biogenesis. Contiguous molecular structures are monkey bars for electrons that provide the stream of energy requi...
Genomism and the Nature Trail
Christian Schwabe
As genes move into the center of a hypothesis one needs an "ism" to refer to the background of ideas that make up the new model. Thus, as the term Darwinism...
The Frame for New Hypotheses of Evolution
Christian Schwabe
How does one present any new idea, which is in principle impossible to proof? Hypotheses are self-limiting and an old paradigm of evolution will fall victim to its er...
Life in a Tenuous Universe
Christian Schwabe
The question is, do we live independent of the shape of our universe, or are we an intimate partner as well as a beneficiary of its peculiar structure and its awesome...
