Quote:So, if this is the "beginning of life" or a possible answer to how life began on earth, wouldn't these cells go through the same type of evolutionary changes over time?
Just think, man could live with dinosaurs! We could have cave man and "evolved" man on the planet at the same time. What kind of respect do you suppose we would give such a being?
This will be interesting to follow.
No, that is absolutely preposterous because evolution does not work that way.
The organisms that inhabit Earth presently are so perfectly adapted to every niche that a simple organism would not be able to compete for resources. It would immediately die out and never evolve.
In some cases an alien invading species will randomly have characteristics that cause it to dominate existing species, which causes them to die off, and their evolution to stop.
If a species does not have sufficient competition, it also will not evolve, because there is no selective pressure for it to do so.
Selective pressure is not some magical or outside force, this is a term that makes explanation more simple ( you seem to have misconstrued it.)
When there is a lot of unused resources over a non-uniform geographic area than a species implanted in one area tends to spread out to cover more area, and in each local area it will adapt to the local environment simply be natural selection (small mutations in dna...). This is the fanning out...and then once capable species fill all the niches they simply become more and more efficient. New species never develop unless there is a catastrophe.
So it is entirely impossible for a simple 1 celled organism, if that's what this is, to evolve, barring the extremely improbable possibility that it is better suited to Earth's environment than anything already on Earth.
Also, when evolution occurs, it does not follow a preset course because each change is random. So you wouldn't get dinosaurs anyway. And furthermore it's an exponential process, so by the time a single celled organism coudl develop to be multicelled, humans would be long extinct most likely from some kind of global catastrophe.
Quote:Anne McCaffrey called. She wants her plot back....
Sadly it's already been done here...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0251075/