Lovelock, in healing Gaia, writes
"Surprisingly, most of our planet is fit for living
organisms. It is neither too hot nor too cold, the sea is
not too salt, nor is it too acid or alkaline..."
I think all the thinking here is backwards. It's not that
life lucked on to a world that fits it perfectly - how can
biologists claim this when everthing in evolution is
selection on adaptation to the environment?
It's that life IS that which best fits the environment - and
it continues to exist because it alone survived that
environment.
There seems to be 2 scenarios for origin of life hypotheses:
1. Pop and adapt - where life pops up (out of a vacumn? from
a lab? flown in by space cadets?) and THEN, after
replication begins, adapts to the environment
- through Darwinian selection. For this to happen the entire
'popping up' process must be a fluke process - a random
bit of luck that by reasonable odds could never happen.
Also this random bit of luck, or fluke event series, must
somehow survive a non random environment during all the
time that the fluke events happened
2. That which best survives the environment IS life. LIfe is
not an independent - built in a vacumn - sent in to an
alien environment - chemical system. It is THE chemical
system that in reacting to the environment, survives
- and later survives and prospers in that environment.
As independent minded humans we want to psychologically
impress on life that it is free and independent, and then
weathering the environment it finds itself
in. Not so - never has been - hardly is now. Instead life is
that which caves in to the environmnet, is best suited
to matching and going along and acting in symbiotic
nature with the environment. That is the key to all
aspects of evolution; yet that is the first thing that
is tossed out when someone offers an origin scenarios!
We are not independent survivors of our environment - we
are those that most slavishly mimicked it!
Does anyone disagree? If so why?