Stephen sez: > OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson wrote: > >> Statistically, in terms of how we understood evolution to work, to have >> encountered such a large amount of genetic uniformity made no sense to >> us. We assumed evolution would have naturally engineered more diversity. > > . . . > >> ... The atmosphere was >> subsequently reseeded with a new strain of bacteria, a strain possessing >> a hauntingly similar singular genetic source. > > Entertaining story, but I have a minor nit to pick with the ending. > > Bacteria are prokaryotes, while us big folk are all eukaryotes. That > difference illustrates the enormous evolutionary gulf between bacteria > and us. The point is, one bacterial genome seeded on a planet would be > totally lost in the evolutionary noise when you fast forward a few > hundred million years (and several trillion bacterial generations) to > get to the first intelligent life form. > > While the frequent occurrence of DNA based life would be surprising in > itself, this scenario really wouldn't lead to us seeing remarkably > similar evolved forms or genomes, and in fact the genomes we'd see in > other star systems would surely be completely unrecognizable, with no > apparent similarities to our own. In short, this scenario would not > lead to a "large amount of genetic uniformity"; indeed, given the number > of steps from the first bacterium to, say, an insect, it's not even > clear it would lead to the same set of codons being used everywhere. > > To draw an analogy, it would be like comparing Chinese Han characters > with Cyrillic. They're both alphabets, but showing they have a common > ancestor would be nontrivial, and actually projecting back to that > common ancestor would be just about impossible. Their "evolution" has > apparently not been at all similar, despite having "grown up" just a few > thousand miles apart.
Everyone's a critic! ;-) Thanks for your nits, Stephen. Your analysis is of course valid, one that I will not refute. I suspect few fables hold together when scrutinized objectively. I labeled my story a fable in an attempt to circumnavigate around the specific issues you brought up. Alas, my ploy failed. It was the emotional impact I wuz going for. Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
