...as in "karyotes"?Prokaryotes are organisms without nuclei (kingdom Monera) and eukaryotes are with (the other four kingdoms).
What is truly remarkable, though, is that the genetic material of both, and of viruses, which are not (yet) considered a living kingdom, is DNA-based. Therefore, the likelihood that we are unrelated is virtually zero. Even more remarkable is that life, in the form of prokaryotes, probably came into existence not after 2 billion years but almost as soon as the Earth cooled enough to support it. Far from being an "accident", it seems that life was "programmed in" to the birth of the universe. This concept is explored in many books, but one of the best is
The Goldilocks Enigma, by Paul Davies.
Regardless of one's beliefs about origins, this "inevitability" of life means we are not a vanishingly small probability but a prime factor in the makeup of the universe.
No comments:
Post a Comment