It's your fantasy, I figured you had thought it through a bit...How the hell do I know?
It's your fantasy, I figured you had thought it through a bit...How the hell do I know?
I hope we find such a planet. Furthermore, I hope that once this planet is found it turns out to be just chock full of benign, benevolent lifeforms that were never exposed to predation.So, imagine a different solar system, with a different energy source on a different rock with a different environment - think that life on that planet evolves from predatory behavior or not?
I am inclined to think that if there are balanced, equal resource distribution, over time, there is life and there is some form of advancement that leads to consciousness...without eating each other.
Yes, because we have no idea how long "significant" life in environments other than Earth take to evolve...but we do know that predation did not exist until roughly 600,000,000 years ago...meaning that for the largest span of life, significant or other wise, it was not reflecting any sort of predator vs. prey interaction to stimulate evolution.
One could argue that life on this planet would not have evolved and advanced without catastrophe and predation. That's entirely possible...but we still do not know if life would advance based on other catalysts over time, or a different energy source.
That really comes down to a consideration of life, over time in a stable, ample resource filled environment vs. an environment devoid of resources. In the case of life on Earth that caused the need to be able to process sunlight (a mediocre sun at that) which created a miasma for all other life forms which in turn caused a great dying. That miasma then stimulated the need for additional energy sources in which life started to ingest other life.
We know there are much more significant and exotic stars in the Universe.
We know there are an unfathomable amount of planets that have the potential for life.
From the lecture above, and other research, there is a great potential for chemistry to turn into biology based on environment and energy source to create work.
Put it all together, in combination with the Earth caused catastrophic events for 99% of all life that has ever existed on this planet, and the potential for predatory behavior to be a symptom of this ecosystem and this planet seem all the more plausible...at least to me it does.
This reminds me of the kind of stuff that Young Earth Creationists say about every animal being a herbivore - at least until that incident with the apple...
WTF? It kind of seems like you are online to say you aren't online??Thanks for the responses, unfortunately we had a massive storm last night and lost power...will be back to respond once back online. Thanks!
I think this is too narrow. Billvon mentioned scavengers, but more broadly even than that, all organisms compete with other organisms for resources. And whether they are actually consuming those other organisms or just killing them by taking their resources or choking them to death with their waste, all organisms are violently hostile toward other organisms and destructive of the environment. In many ways, plants are among the more powerfully desrtructive and hostile:The only life that does not consume other life that I know of are plants and some thermophile bacteria.
Life seizes opportunities. I think it is safe to say that there will always be predators and parasites in any environment.
This article is interesting. This article offers no support for your statement that predation did not exist until around 600,000,000 years ago. Thank you for the interesting article, but please now provide the evidence that predation did not appear till around 600 m.y. ago.Just google mutlicellular life...I just did, and what pops up? An article published yesterday...
http://www.newscientist.com/article...-cell-to-multicellular-life.html#.VYm48flVhBc
"The leap from single-celled life to multicellular creatures is easier than we ever thought. And it seems there's more than one way it can happen.
The mutation of a single gene is enough to transform single-celled brewer's yeast into a "snowflake" that evolves as a multicellular organism.
Similarly, single-celled algae quickly evolve into spherical multicellular organisms when faced with predators that eat single cells.
These findings back the emerging idea that this leap in complexity isn't the giant evolutionary hurdle it was thought to be."
This article is interesting. This article offers no support for your statement that predation did not exist until around 600,000,000 years ago. Thank you for the interesting article, but please now provide the evidence that predation did not appear till around 600 m.y. ago.
Oh, I've read that book. I liked it. I didn't remember the part about the mouth. I was thinking he associated predatory behaviour with the emergence of mulitcellular life, or perhaps complex organisms, but the dates still do not match I think.What he may possibly be thinking of is the evolution of the mouth. Martin Brasier's book "Darwin's Lost World", about the pre-Cambrian and Cambrian, contains the hypothesis that the "small shelly fossils" that are the first of the conventional fossils we have are from organisms that developed shelly armour in response to the evolution of the mouth, a very important and overlooked stage in the evolution of animals. This would have been around 600my bpe.
Oh, I've read that book. I liked it. I didn't remember the part about the mouth. I was thinking he associated predatory behaviour with the emergence of mulitcellular life, or perhaps complex organisms, but the dates still do not match I think.
But why did you snip the main point of my post, which was: " If you have bacteria and viruses that can poison or disrupt the cells of an organism, the only way it can defend itself is via an immune system, surely? This generally involves cells that ingest, i.e. eat, the invaders. Do you really envisage a form of ecosystem in which none of this exists?"
Do you?
The radiation levels from such stars are unlikely to allow for life, and they burn out in just a few million years, not giving life, or even planets, time to form.
"Cycles" indicate that material is recycled. That can't happen without consuming earlier versions of life. Those earlier versions might be alive or dead; to the consuming organism it doesn't really matter. So if you do have "other cycles" available that will include predation or something very much like it.
Again, that takes care of energy, not raw materials.
Right. It most likely happened far before that.
This article is interesting. This article offers no support for your statement that predation did not exist until around 600,000,000 years ago. Thank you for the interesting article, but please now provide the evidence that predation did not appear till around 600 m.y. ago.
What he may possibly be thinking of is the evolution of the mouth. Martin Brasier's book "Darwin's Lost World", about the pre-Cambrian and Cambrian, contains the hypothesis that the "small shelly fossils" that are the first of the conventional fossils we have are from organisms that developed shelly armour in response to the evolution of the mouth, a very important and overlooked stage in the evolution of animals. This would have been around 600my bpe.
But as several of us have pointed out, it seems a bit arbitrary - or at any rate to need justification - to regard the creatures that ingested others by means of a mouth "predators" but not those that ingested other organisms in other ways, which certainly must have been happening a lot earlier than this.