I decided to do my review on a lecture featuring a man named Dr. Eric Smith. He is a professor that spoke at Santa Fe Institute on April 11 of 2007 about the topic of life. This lecture was sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute and in this lecture Smith covers the main topics of how life started, what it’s is made up of, and if it was inevitable or rare. He begins to talk about how life is the result of physical and chemical processes. Smith then quotes a quote from a man named Steven Gould. “Any replay of the tape of evolution would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken.” He explains that as life is a product of physical and chemical processes then if we were to replay everything from the beginning,
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Why has life persisted? Smith addresses this question with one simple answer. There is a hierarchy of organisms that feed into necessity. Autotrophs and heterotrophs are a prime example of this hierarchy. Autotrophs are able to synthesis their own food using inorganic material. Heterotrophs are then able to feed off of either the autotrophs themselves or off of what they produce because their molecular chemistry is incomplete. With this hierarchy going, life is able to persist with stability and allow new changes to be made without any negative consequences on the later generations. The final question is life rare or inevitable is a question that puzzles many. Dr. Smith transmits an answer by saying yes to both. With yes being the answer to both, I wondered why. Smith, throughout his lecture, is trying to put into the listener’s mind a sense of variability. There are so many variables that life has to go through to get a final result. This final result is never a final result as change and necessity are constantly at play in the tree of life. I feel that he conveyed to me in a very delicate way that each of the things that have caused life to persist have also caused it to evolve in the first place. He quotes yet another biologist, Frances Crick, “the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the condition which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going”. This statement works quite well with the answer to “Is life rare?” because it let’s me know that life is a miracle with the inevitability to keep it going. When Crick says “appears at the moment to be almost a miracle” lets me know that when we put human notion in life we get allow a new door to be opened to the question of
Why has life persisted? Smith addresses this question with one simple answer. There is a hierarchy of organisms that feed into necessity. Autotrophs and heterotrophs are a prime example of this hierarchy. Autotrophs are able to synthesis their own food using inorganic material. Heterotrophs are then able to feed off of either the autotrophs themselves or off of what they produce because their molecular chemistry is incomplete. With this hierarchy going, life is able to persist with stability and allow new changes to be made without any negative consequences on the later generations. The final question is life rare or inevitable is a question that puzzles many. Dr. Smith transmits an answer by saying yes to both. With yes being the answer to both, I wondered why. Smith, throughout his lecture, is trying to put into the listener’s mind a sense of variability. There are so many variables that life has to go through to get a final result. This final result is never a final result as change and necessity are constantly at play in the tree of life. I feel that he conveyed to me in a very delicate way that each of the things that have caused life to persist have also caused it to evolve in the first place. He quotes yet another biologist, Frances Crick, “the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the condition which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going”. This statement works quite well with the answer to “Is life rare?” because it let’s me know that life is a miracle with the inevitability to keep it going. When Crick says “appears at the moment to be almost a miracle” lets me know that when we put human notion in life we get allow a new door to be opened to the question of