I was thinking earlier about death and the massive instinct all living things have to survive. The instinct to survive struck me as possibly the single most important evolutionary development once you get to a semi complex level of life.
Just speculation mind you.What do you think?
What do you think is evolution's most important achievement?
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Gawdzilla Sama
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Re: What do you think is evolution's most important achievem
Sex
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Re: What do you think is evolution's most important achievem
Its evolution-ness: its variety and adaptability 
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Re: What do you think is evolution's most important achievem
The eukaryotic cell.
What I've found with a few discussions I've had lately is this self-satisfaction that people express with their proffessed open mindedness. In realty it ammounts to wilful ignorance and intellectual cowardice as they are choosing to not form any sort of opinion on a particular topic. Basically "I don't know and I'm not going to look at any evidence because I'm quite happy on this fence."
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Re: What do you think is evolution's most important achievem
True. If the ability to adapt to new environments hadn't be available the blue-green algae would have been the best Earth got.Elessarina wrote:Its evolution-ness: its variety and adaptability
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Re: What do you think is evolution's most important achievem
DNA
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Re: What do you think is evolution's most important achievem
...followed by Endosymbiosis.macdoc wrote:DNA
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Re: What do you think is evolution's most important achievem
Foreskin. I refer to the wank thread.
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Re: What do you think is evolution's most important achievem
Yep. The persistence and diversity of Life, survivability against the environmental odds, and in the face of the sheer bloody unlikeliness of it all,Rum wrote:I was thinking earlier about death and the massive instinct all living things have to survive. The instinct to survive struck me as possibly the single most important evolutionary development once you get to a semi complex level of life.
Just speculation mind you.What do you think?
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There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice.
There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."
Frank Zappa
"This is how humanity ends; bickering over the irrelevant."
Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: What do you think is evolution's most important achievem
Sorry, Rum, but someone on another thread has put me in a hair-splitting mood. Not all living organisms have instincts, strictly speaking, and thus can't have an instinct to survive. 
"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it." ~ H. L. Mencken
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"We ain't a sharp species. We kill each other over arguments about what happens when you die, then fail to see the fucking irony in that."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion."
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Re: What do you think is evolution's most important achievem
Lemmings. 
No. I'll go with what Elessarina, Gawdzilla and Brian Peacock said.
No. I'll go with what Elessarina, Gawdzilla and Brian Peacock said.
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Re: What do you think is evolution's most important achievem
Probably apropos of nothing, but the OP came to mind when I read this in the novel I'm reading:
For there is this about men. You can embitter and torment them from birth. You can make them waiters and sailors (like Bob) when they want to be authors. You can make them (as Bob and most of them were made) servants of their passions - weak - timorous - querulous - vain - egotistic - puny and afraid. Then, having made them so, you can trick them and mock them with all the implements of fate - lead them on, as Bob was led on, only to betray them, obsess them with hopeless dreams, punish them with senseless accidents, and harass them with wretched fears. You can buffet them, bait them, enrage them - load upon them all evils ans follies in this vale of obstruction and tears. But, even at that, there is yet one thing you cannot do. You can never make them, under any provocation, say die. And therein lies their acquittal.
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Re: What do you think is evolution's most important achievem
I'm really hoping that whatever it is it hasn't happened yet.
The green careening planet
spins blindly in the dark
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Listen. No one listens. Meow.
spins blindly in the dark
so close to annihilation.
Listen. No one listens. Meow.
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Re: What do you think is evolution's most important achievem
A nice, soft woman.
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