TAKE 100 newly formed planets of one Earth mass. Place each in the habitable zone of a G-type main sequence star. Set your timer for 4 billion years. What do you get? A hundred planets teeming with life forms quite similar to those on Earth, perhaps even dominated by naked apes? Or would evolution produce very different outcomes every time, if life even got started at all?
Some biologists argue that evolution is a deterministic process, that similar environments will tend to produce similar outcomes. Others, the most famous of whom was Stephen Jay Gould, think its course follows unpredictable twists and turns, and that the same starting point can lead to very different results.
The answer does matter. If the Gould camp is right, the study of evolution is like the study of ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.
No comments:
Post a Comment