The Theory of Evolution and its implications (III) If you can read this: CONGRATULATIONS! And I was not referring to having endured during the first
and second part of the evolution, and come back for more. Rather, I congratulate you for being alive. You're a champion, a winner. Your ancestors, during the last 3.7 billion years, were healthy enough, were strong enough and were lucky enough to at some point devote his life to create your own ancestor. And since your ancestors have sexual reproduction, not only above, but also were attractive enough to attract the opposite sex and to mate to father an ancestor yours. In short, you're the milk!
But as he started all this?
Darwin said yesterday that only come from a common ancestor. Life as we know it today, in all its forms and diversity, was born of the same being. We are family, in the most literal sense of the word. You, me, the orange tree in the park, the bacteria is in yeast, the dog that barks and a rosemary plant, we are all family.
This gives us enough task (the task of knowing that we're here) because we do not have to explain how they formed thousands of millions of lives, but one, and then follow the track. The first being formed by a carbon-based structure, it was quite simple. Simple compared to a cell of an apple or a fly's eye, I mean. It was simple enough, after many failed attempts, was created at random. And he had a feature that had not had anything else in the universe (known) was able to self-replicate. So where there was one, now there are two, then 3, 4, 7, 23215, etc.
However, not all was perfect replicas. Sometimes randomly (randomly) you made a mistake. And when he made that mistake, basically two things could happen: the ability of this new being to the replicates itself was greater than before, or was lower. And this immediately saw the greatest "scientific laboratory" or "playing field" that is: the universe. If this new being, thanks to chance, was unable to replicate themselves, obviously his species life was short. If self-replicating, but worse / better than the last, what began was a race for survival. Depended on the resources that were available in the natural environment in which they were. If you had enough resources they could normally co-exist, each replicate themselves in his image and likeness. If not, anyone who had an advantage, would stay the resources (a clear advantage is for example being able to autorreplicarte twice as fast, another benefit could be to have a longer life, another might be to have some features that the necessary resources to achieve faster, etc ...)
curious thing about this is that, although the self-replication errors are totally random, its implications are not. And that depends on the goodness or badness of random error is the particular environment in which that that be. And this process of survival of the fittest (for self-replicating) is what Darwin called natural selection.
Knowing all this, it is very difficult to realize that for one to be self-replicating, this strange combination tests of random errors in their natural environment is capable of creating greater complexity, because although the probability that a random error reporting a profit is very small, when this happens, do not lose the opportunity and the new being begins to replicate himself, his descendants donated to this new skill.
Three things are therefore necessary to be of evolution: self-replication, error in it, and an environment in which to evaluate the goodness of the error.
We will see in the next which is the reason for the evolution, ie to evolve, which is also an answer to the question to which we live, that is: Who gains from all this?
continuara...
