Betül Kaçar

In response to Steve Jay Gould's proposition, most people who argue that life is convergent and it will in fact lead to a few determined outcomes or results,

It's not that the outcome is determined per se, but the pathways are restricted and the mutational trajectories that life can act upon are already very limited so that the final outcomes are a few and eyes being one of them.

So...

The convergence at the eye level was suggested as an example, was presented as an example of why life may actually embark on the same solution over and over again, given that many species evolved independently from one another.

I think those innovations came again so far after the... I know it's the fun stuff.

Yes.

Because it's... Thank you.

So when we think of earlier, there's...

And I ask this to my students too.

I want them to close their eyes and think about just nothingness but dust.

We don't have trees.

We don't have plants.

When we say an empty place, or visually at least, we are talking about a planet that is really alien.

So understanding our own past is similar to understanding an alien planet altogether.

Given that it is a very different planet that did not have any oxygen for 2 billion years, there's nothing that is familiar to us that we would even think about when we think about life that is present in our past.

Yet here we are.

And we are very, very, we are the super late arrivals to the party, right?

So this is definitely not our planet.

It's the microbial planets that we live in.

How do you know that?