The squid family, which include octopi, squids and cuttlefish, is called Cephalopods. They’re so different from humans that octopi even have 10,000 more genes than we do, just to start with. Cephalopods diverged from any common ancestor to man about 500 million years ago. That’s a very long time in terms of Earth’s evolution. From Google: “Researchers have identified traces of what they believe is the earliest known prehistoric ancestor of humans – a microscopic, bag-like sea creature, which lived about 540 million years ago.“
That should give you some idea of how long it took for us to evolve from a micro-organism to our current form. I’m making a point here, patience, I’ll get to it.
The more DNA studies are done on different creatures and the more we discover in fossils, it becomes ever more apparent that everything on Earth is related.
How is this possible? Does anyone believe that all life on Earth started with just one germ or microbe? That fails the logic test. For any life form on Earth to survive, it has to have company. Even microbes need large numbers because especially in Earth’s early days, life had a very hard time surviving the extreme conditions, and they still have a hard time now because conditions still change. It doesn’t take much at all now to wipe out a colony of 1-celled life.
But if Earth were bombarded with thousands, maybe millions of those same cells, they’d have a far better chance of surviving and evolving and it’s been long suspected that ice-ball comets carry frozen bacteria. We know that’s where our water came from. Is that where our life came from, the same type of bacteria on all those ice balls?
So my point is this: What if there is only one basic form of life in the Universe? What if the natural conditions of the Universe itself are what creates these microbes? They have to come from somewhere and while scientists have been trying for about 90 years now, their best is to create organic protein but not something that self-replicates out of that protein.
Follow that thought a bit, if true it means that all life in the Universe is related.
Was thinking about this, this morning and this possibility hit me. There’s no way today to know if I’m right or wrong, but logic tells me I’m right. Otherwise, there would be species on our planet totally unrelated to each other, and there aren’t any.
UNLESS, of course, (spoiler alert) there were two or more genetically different incursions and one conquered the others, but there’s nothing in our fossil record so far to indicate that ever happened.