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What amazes me is that it only took 500 million years for life to start on Earth after its formation. And then that, for the subsequent 3.5 billion, it was wholly single-celled - and only that at a stretch, since the cell itself took a lot of work. In other words, it's only the blink of an eye, really, since I shared an ancestor with Marmite.

(For similar reasons, that's why I'm increasingly unfazed by conservation disasters. It's unlikely that anything we'll do will end all life - it'll just truck on without us in some other form. It's thanks to pollution caused by plants breathing out highly toxic oxygen for half a billion years that animals got a foothold in the first place. The point: there is no such thing as pollution - only pollution seen from a certain perspective. I think that's amazing. Far more amazing than anything the creationist can give us...)
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 17 Jul 2008, 10:21, Reply)