The Second Actual Class Related Post: Evolutionary Beginnings

 I am so happy that the professor mentioned X-Men. That IP was a huge part of my teen years (and a little bit before that too). I know it's quite farcical that there could be one gene suddenly developing that both lets you turn invisible and could make someone else able to control the weather. It was the first time I heard the word "mutation" however. Mutation is what makes evolution happen, at least that is my understanding of it thus far. I also enjoyed that the professor mentioned "survival of the fittest" and how a lot of people get that phrase very wrong (including Magneto in the X-Men comics). This brings us to one of two questions we were asked to write about: What is "fitness" and in what ways is this concept misunderstood?  I find it helpful to address what it is not. It isn't "survival of the best". If being an unintelligent slug creature fits the environment more than a superhuman genius, that is what will be selected for (this is an oversimplification, but I'm trying to use it to show the flaw in thinking that evolution is a climb to superior beings). The second question I chose to address is the following: In the video "Watch Earth's History Play Out On a Football Field" Grant Ernhart demonstrated the Earth's timeline from endzone to endzone. What amazed, surprised, intrigued you about this visualization and about the Earth's history? I am constantly humbled at how tiny a fraction of the history of life on this planet is occupied by our own history. One thing that intrigued me was when the video shown during the lecture referenced the large amount of time that life on earth consisted of very simple (microscopic) organisms. That makes it seem more likely that the first alien life we encounter will be the equivalent of bacteria or protists, or even more basic (perhaps just the equivalent of DNA precursors).