I'm sure that if plants had required eyes for survival then they would have developed them. Of course this assumes that "eyes" as we know them are
the only means of making visual observations. With the vast amount of light spectrums in our universe it is always feasible that plants have developed
other sensory tools unknown to us.
The Eyes Don't Have It, page 1
reply posted on 28-8-2012 @ 07:46 PM by IsThisThingBugged
reply to post by sm0k3
It's well known within evolution that plants and vegetation came WAY before any animals. So the real question is how did mobile animals evolve from stagnant trees...?
It's well known within evolution that plants and vegetation came WAY before any animals. So the real question is how did mobile animals evolve from stagnant trees...?
reply posted on 28-8-2012 @ 07:52 PM by Panic2k11
reply to post by sm0k3
Animals came after plant life, the theory goes that we evolved from a sponge like creature (not really a plant but not very far from them).
Think on it as layers of complexity, first came the plants, then the insects and after that the animal life vertebrates and invertebrates...
Animals came after plant life, the theory goes that we evolved from a sponge like creature (not really a plant but not very far from them).
Think on it as layers of complexity, first came the plants, then the insects and after that the animal life vertebrates and invertebrates...
reply posted on 28-8-2012 @ 07:56 PM by sm0k3
reply to post by IsThisThingBugged
Personally, I believe that both forms of life (plants/animals) were once part of the same branch of the tree of life. Perhaps an early form of protozoa, bacteria, or perhaps some other form of simple life, evolved into BOTH plants and "squishy creatures" at about the same period, but it would have taken many millennia to evolve into the distinct groups as they are now.
Im not disputing the fact that plants prang up first, in fact, my first post supports that.. but there is still a whole lot that we do not know, too many missing links.. all we can really do is postulate.
I usually hate biology, but this has got me intrigued...
Personally, I believe that both forms of life (plants/animals) were once part of the same branch of the tree of life. Perhaps an early form of protozoa, bacteria, or perhaps some other form of simple life, evolved into BOTH plants and "squishy creatures" at about the same period, but it would have taken many millennia to evolve into the distinct groups as they are now.
Im not disputing the fact that plants prang up first, in fact, my first post supports that.. but there is still a whole lot that we do not know, too many missing links.. all we can really do is postulate.
I usually hate biology, but this has got me intrigued...
edit on 28-8-2012 by sm0k3 because: restated my point
reply posted on 28-8-2012 @ 08:34 PM by iforget
reply to post by jiggerj
You could say what differentiates the various species are changes in the genetic code. If all species were able to interbreed and share genetic information then you might expect trees to contain the DNA for eyes. Whatever species suffered the mutation that produced eyes must have been no longer able to share genetic information with plants. You probably could find cells in some plants that are similar to those we find in our eyes.
You could say what differentiates the various species are changes in the genetic code. If all species were able to interbreed and share genetic information then you might expect trees to contain the DNA for eyes. Whatever species suffered the mutation that produced eyes must have been no longer able to share genetic information with plants. You probably could find cells in some plants that are similar to those we find in our eyes.
reply posted on 28-8-2012 @ 09:36 PM by C-JEAN
reply to post by jiggerj
Hi jiggerj.
If we know that the flowers of plants follow the sun,
or if we have seen an accelerated film of their movements
following the sun, we can ask ourselves:
HOW can the flower know where the sun is ?
HOW can the flower SEE where the sun is ?
HOW can the flower sense where the sun is ?
HOW can the flower _____ where the sun is ?
B-)
We now know that a PLANT knows that we want to burn it ! ! !
We now know that an electron knows when it is observed ! !
We now know a lot from the links of my signature.
Blue skies.
Hi jiggerj.
If we know that the flowers of plants follow the sun,
or if we have seen an accelerated film of their movements
following the sun, we can ask ourselves:
HOW can the flower know where the sun is ?
HOW can the flower SEE where the sun is ?
HOW can the flower sense where the sun is ?
HOW can the flower _____ where the sun is ?
B-)
We now know that a PLANT knows that we want to burn it ! ! !
We now know that an electron knows when it is observed ! !
We now know a lot from the links of my signature.
Blue skies.
reply posted on 28-8-2012 @ 11:42 PM by Aim64C
reply to post by jiggerj
Well - this one is not really easy to answer, honestly.
The 'problem' with evolutionary theory is that we can only postulate on how something could have garnered some kind of reproductive advantage - that the environment or other processes could have selected (the peacock is an interesting case in evolutionary theory that has forced a rethinking of classical evolutionary concepts as most of us are familiar with).
We cannot really say why one thing or another did not develop. Further - it can become difficult, outside of fossil records, to speculate on what systems evolved and co-evolved first.
Many single celled organisms have photo-sensitive organelles. Though these work considerably different from an eye - and it's illogical to say that the eye is a direct evolution of a single-celled organelle into a multi-celled neurological link - but it demonstrates that life can accomplish tasks in a number of different ways.
Plants will grow towards light. While it's not an "eye" as we have - it's quite effective. A number of plants will even track the sun during the day - their leaves and stalks warping to allow optimal surface area absorption.
And in that sense - it's really all plants need.
For them to have an "eye" as we have one would require a form of central nervous system. Something of questionable use to a plant. Further, plants do not have quite as deliberate of a reproductive system as most animals do. Animals will select a mate - introducing another evolutionary aspect (one often not considered in the very basics of evolutionary theory that is the extent most of us are taught). Plants, however - are not quite as picky, and don't have the option to select their mates (though I do suspect that further research would show some plants will have a mechanism of imposing selection upon pollen if there are multiple genetic samples available at the time of pollination).
Though that said - evolutionary concepts and principles only apply so long as there is a reproductive process subject to selective factors. Evolution is not a biogenic theory, in that sense. It can only apply to what already exists... and how -that- came into being is another set of theories, entirely (and an area that becomes somewhat futile to debate).
Anyone? Anyone?
Well - this one is not really easy to answer, honestly.
The 'problem' with evolutionary theory is that we can only postulate on how something could have garnered some kind of reproductive advantage - that the environment or other processes could have selected (the peacock is an interesting case in evolutionary theory that has forced a rethinking of classical evolutionary concepts as most of us are familiar with).
We cannot really say why one thing or another did not develop. Further - it can become difficult, outside of fossil records, to speculate on what systems evolved and co-evolved first.
Many single celled organisms have photo-sensitive organelles. Though these work considerably different from an eye - and it's illogical to say that the eye is a direct evolution of a single-celled organelle into a multi-celled neurological link - but it demonstrates that life can accomplish tasks in a number of different ways.
Plants will grow towards light. While it's not an "eye" as we have - it's quite effective. A number of plants will even track the sun during the day - their leaves and stalks warping to allow optimal surface area absorption.
And in that sense - it's really all plants need.
For them to have an "eye" as we have one would require a form of central nervous system. Something of questionable use to a plant. Further, plants do not have quite as deliberate of a reproductive system as most animals do. Animals will select a mate - introducing another evolutionary aspect (one often not considered in the very basics of evolutionary theory that is the extent most of us are taught). Plants, however - are not quite as picky, and don't have the option to select their mates (though I do suspect that further research would show some plants will have a mechanism of imposing selection upon pollen if there are multiple genetic samples available at the time of pollination).
Though that said - evolutionary concepts and principles only apply so long as there is a reproductive process subject to selective factors. Evolution is not a biogenic theory, in that sense. It can only apply to what already exists... and how -that- came into being is another set of theories, entirely (and an area that becomes somewhat futile to debate).
reply posted on 29-8-2012 @ 02:07 PM by Aim64C
reply to post by BogieSmiles
I think that, as time goes on, we'll begin to accept a different concept of "origins."
Obviously - the probability of life in the universe we inhabit is unity - it's going to happen... because we are here.
See Schrodinger's cat in quantum mechanics. In any isolated system, both the past and present state of the system exist in super positions. Once you open the fabled box, the history fills in appropriately to the observed current state.
This works fine in terms of short term isolation. But when considering long-term isolation, the very nature of quantum mechanics makes history, itself, unknowable.
Let's presume there is a pocket of space the size of our own universe that has been isolated from our own since... well - it's never been in contact with ours. Suppose we have a device able to peer into this universe that we can hypothetically prove the existence of (but cannot peer into). Prior to looking into this universe - it exists in a superposition. We can make a number of rudimentary estimates about it - how much total energy is in it, for example - but we don't know what's in it. It could be the spitting image of our own universe - or it could be an absolutely chaotic system filled with exotic particles that have no way of existing in our own universe.
We take a look, and find arrangements of galaxies much like our own - except in a grid-like lattice pattern that is far more ordered than our own universe.
It could have been anything up until the point at which we peered inside. We can theorize all we want to about how those galaxies came to exist in that pattern - but the simple fact is that we observed them being in that pattern. Some would argue that the universe had no form at all until we took a look at it (and, indeed, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics would say it's functionally useless to presume it did) - any pasts we infer from it are merely a sort of "back-filling" we insist upon doing.
Even though we can infer a past - we can only infer from a possible range of pasts knowing the properties of the universe and the rules it functions according to.
It's no different than walking in on a chess board with pieces arranged in a random pattern. Knowing the rules of the game, you can postulate on how the game was played before you entered the room. You assume that, because there is a chess board and the pieces are arranged upon it - that a game was being played. But the pieces could have merely been placed that way with no game having been played. Sure - you can infer that there was a game, and that it could have started any number of different ways... but you don't know - and it's not really important to try to argue how the pieces came to be in the positions they are.
In a round-about way - life could very well exist because 'we' exist (or the conscious process we identify as our own). Because something 'looked' at our universe, and cells existed then (or perhaps entire life forms) - a sort of history was 'created' for it... but it becomes increasingly hazy as we turn back the clock (just as the probable locations of pieces in a game of chess increase exponentially with each turn).
Thus - it's a pragmatic look at what actually can be known. Call it the "hand of god" - call it "chance" - Science cannot effectively make the distinction.
DNA is a simple molecule.
The problem is that it requires various compounds to replicate... compounds that only exist as information encoded into DNA.
Presently, DNA is the only fully self-replicating molecule known to science. We can argue about RNA chains that make up many viruses - but since those require the replicating systems of other life forms (that cannot be found in nature) - they don't exactly qualify.
The problem is that A requires B to produce C that is responsible for reading A to produce B and C. It's a hurdle that people tackle the only way they know how: Faith.
Faith that there were simple biological compounds that could arrange into a self-replicating molecule or system (it's impossible to prove this one way or the other - but no one has been able to demonstrate it to be possible).
Or faith that some higher power created said system.
Of course - this problem exists because people believe the 'origin' of our universe to have come into existence from a single event or point. If you take my above "origin" concept based on prior existence in a super-position combined with an "observation" that included many of the systems we see - then the problem evaporates.
Though I'm sure many would consider it a cop-out.
OK, we don't agree that life is improbable or that the best explanation is that life was seeded here from elsewhere somehow.
I think that, as time goes on, we'll begin to accept a different concept of "origins."
Obviously - the probability of life in the universe we inhabit is unity - it's going to happen... because we are here.
See Schrodinger's cat in quantum mechanics. In any isolated system, both the past and present state of the system exist in super positions. Once you open the fabled box, the history fills in appropriately to the observed current state.
This works fine in terms of short term isolation. But when considering long-term isolation, the very nature of quantum mechanics makes history, itself, unknowable.
Let's presume there is a pocket of space the size of our own universe that has been isolated from our own since... well - it's never been in contact with ours. Suppose we have a device able to peer into this universe that we can hypothetically prove the existence of (but cannot peer into). Prior to looking into this universe - it exists in a superposition. We can make a number of rudimentary estimates about it - how much total energy is in it, for example - but we don't know what's in it. It could be the spitting image of our own universe - or it could be an absolutely chaotic system filled with exotic particles that have no way of existing in our own universe.
We take a look, and find arrangements of galaxies much like our own - except in a grid-like lattice pattern that is far more ordered than our own universe.
It could have been anything up until the point at which we peered inside. We can theorize all we want to about how those galaxies came to exist in that pattern - but the simple fact is that we observed them being in that pattern. Some would argue that the universe had no form at all until we took a look at it (and, indeed, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics would say it's functionally useless to presume it did) - any pasts we infer from it are merely a sort of "back-filling" we insist upon doing.
Even though we can infer a past - we can only infer from a possible range of pasts knowing the properties of the universe and the rules it functions according to.
It's no different than walking in on a chess board with pieces arranged in a random pattern. Knowing the rules of the game, you can postulate on how the game was played before you entered the room. You assume that, because there is a chess board and the pieces are arranged upon it - that a game was being played. But the pieces could have merely been placed that way with no game having been played. Sure - you can infer that there was a game, and that it could have started any number of different ways... but you don't know - and it's not really important to try to argue how the pieces came to be in the positions they are.
In a round-about way - life could very well exist because 'we' exist (or the conscious process we identify as our own). Because something 'looked' at our universe, and cells existed then (or perhaps entire life forms) - a sort of history was 'created' for it... but it becomes increasingly hazy as we turn back the clock (just as the probable locations of pieces in a game of chess increase exponentially with each turn).
Thus - it's a pragmatic look at what actually can be known. Call it the "hand of god" - call it "chance" - Science cannot effectively make the distinction.
I'm thinking that the lowest level living self replicating molecule is relatively simple chemically.
DNA is a simple molecule.
The problem is that it requires various compounds to replicate... compounds that only exist as information encoded into DNA.
Presently, DNA is the only fully self-replicating molecule known to science. We can argue about RNA chains that make up many viruses - but since those require the replicating systems of other life forms (that cannot be found in nature) - they don't exactly qualify.
The problem is that A requires B to produce C that is responsible for reading A to produce B and C. It's a hurdle that people tackle the only way they know how: Faith.
Faith that there were simple biological compounds that could arrange into a self-replicating molecule or system (it's impossible to prove this one way or the other - but no one has been able to demonstrate it to be possible).
Or faith that some higher power created said system.
Of course - this problem exists because people believe the 'origin' of our universe to have come into existence from a single event or point. If you take my above "origin" concept based on prior existence in a super-position combined with an "observation" that included many of the systems we see - then the problem evaporates.
Though I'm sure many would consider it a cop-out.
reply posted on 29-8-2012 @ 02:29 PM by BogieSmiles
reply to post by Aim64C
That is a well thought out and presented analysis and an interesting concept of "origin". And it is not easily falsifiable or testable, and we cat lovers don't want to try the thing with cats, lol.
You put your finger though on a big issue in any field of science; the unknown past. I solve the problem by invoking an infinite past but I don't have any way to document the history before a point of observation so I'm in the same boat that you are. Your idea of origin is as good as any if just placing "faith" in an infinite past is not enough.
That is a well thought out and presented analysis and an interesting concept of "origin". And it is not easily falsifiable or testable, and we cat lovers don't want to try the thing with cats, lol.
You put your finger though on a big issue in any field of science; the unknown past. I solve the problem by invoking an infinite past but I don't have any way to document the history before a point of observation so I'm in the same boat that you are. Your idea of origin is as good as any if just placing "faith" in an infinite past is not enough.
reply posted on 29-8-2012 @ 03:15 PM by Aim64C
reply to post by flexy123
There are two common errors included in this statement that I think are important to address.
First - it's not about what "makes sense" - it's about what gains a reproductive advantage. This may not, particularly in the case of animals, always be "sensible" in terms of survival. Just look at the Peacock and its ridiculously resource-intensive feathers (and the target they make the bird) - and you'll see where classic evolutionary theory regarding survival slams into a wall.
Second - a species doesn't evolve. Individual strands of DNA accumulate mutations that better enhance its ability to reproduce compared to strands of DNA within the same species. The cell - and even the entire organism - is a vessel for DNA to replicate itself. We are subservient to our DNA's drive to propagate itself (if DNA can be said to have a drive or motive).
I'll link to some highly relevant reading:
www.science20.com...
jhered.oxfordjournals.org...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...
www.thegreatdebate.org.uk...
And that is why I consider this aspect of the Red Queen to be a mandatory educational concept as fundamental as reading.
I'm pulling small quotes out of much, much larger bodies of text that lay things out coherently - I highly encourage people to actually read the link instead of just the excerpt.
I think the mistake here is to see something as "better" or superior, while in reality it comes down to what makes most sense for a specific species.
There are two common errors included in this statement that I think are important to address.
First - it's not about what "makes sense" - it's about what gains a reproductive advantage. This may not, particularly in the case of animals, always be "sensible" in terms of survival. Just look at the Peacock and its ridiculously resource-intensive feathers (and the target they make the bird) - and you'll see where classic evolutionary theory regarding survival slams into a wall.
Second - a species doesn't evolve. Individual strands of DNA accumulate mutations that better enhance its ability to reproduce compared to strands of DNA within the same species. The cell - and even the entire organism - is a vessel for DNA to replicate itself. We are subservient to our DNA's drive to propagate itself (if DNA can be said to have a drive or motive).
I'll link to some highly relevant reading:
www.science20.com...
How did sexual reproduction evolve? How do parasites and their hosts survive together? Why do predators manage to catch their prey only some of the time? To answer these questions, we journey into the Kingdom of the Red Queen. A realm in the universe of biology that has an answer for all these questions and many more. In its entirety, the Red Queen Hypothesis states that in any co-evolving environment, each species needs to continually change itself to adapt to environmental changes in order to compete and co-exist with another co-evolving species in the same environment.
jhered.oxfordjournals.org...
However, for moderately virulent parasites, the combination of infection and mutation accumulation was sufficient to select for sexual reproduction and eliminate asexual reproduction. Here, the elimination of asex was caused by mutation accumulation. Parasites would drive clonal hosts through population bottlenecks (even though the host population itself was maintained at a constant density), which increased the rate of mutation accumulation by Muller's ratchet. Later models verified that the results were robust to the exact function (synergistic vs. multiplicative) relating mutation load to fitness (Howard and Lively 1998) and showed further that the same combination of coevolution and mutation accumulation could also select for sex in the parasite (Howard and Lively 2002). This later result is helpful in that parasites of parasites are not required to select for parasite sex (also see, Lythgoe 2000; Galvani et al. 2003).
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...
www.thegreatdebate.org.uk...
Matt Ridley does not find any of these explanations satisfactory as they still beg the question why humans, and not other apes, evolved such a large brain. Following Geoffrey Miller he suggests that, in fact, only runaway sexual selection as described by Fisher is sufficient to explain the huge increase in brain size. Being intelligent, witty and entertaining was sexy to our ancestors! This hypothesis requires only that there was an initial preference for more intelligent mates that drove the process from then on. This helps to explain why only humans developed in this way. First, because the initial preference was quite arbitrary and only came about by chance and we can thus assume that an equivalent preference never arose in the other apes. Second, because the human mating system is unique among apes in that it is characterised primarily by monogamous pair bonding (with occasional polygamy) and shared parental effort in child rearing. This leads to a whole set of tendencies untypical of apes such as the preference of males for young or youthful-looking mates and the preference of females for high status, often older, men.
And that is why I consider this aspect of the Red Queen to be a mandatory educational concept as fundamental as reading.
I'm pulling small quotes out of much, much larger bodies of text that lay things out coherently - I highly encourage people to actually read the link instead of just the excerpt.
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