Lemmie wrote:Well informed isn't always useful, as DrW and some others demonstrate all the time. "I'm smart, so go read a book" is completely not helpful.
The 'I'm smart' is obviously your projection, because it didn't come from DrW.
Well-informed is ALWAYS useful. Period. As for 'read a book' being 'completely not helpful'??? Your surface expositions include so many egregious inaccuracies, mistakes and insupportable beliefs that 'read a book' should be your daily mantra.
Lemmie wrote:Well informed isn't always useful, as DrW and some others demonstrate all the time. "I'm smart, so go read a book" is completely not helpful.
Well-informed is ALWAYS useful. Period. As for 'read a book' being 'completely not helpful'??? Your surface expositions include so many egregious inaccuracies, mistakes and insupportable beliefs that 'read a book' should be your daily mantra.
Yeah, like I said.
spg wrote:I've read more then a book or two.
SPG wrote:EAllusion wrote:DrW -
He's asking where hetereotrophs come from if all species start out as autotrophs. Looking at the evolution of sponges is way, way too late. His question turns on the logic of, "How does something evolve to eat something else when it can already make its own food?" He's supposing this creates a lack of selective pressure, but this is incorrect, since there are myriad ways we can imagine that the resources necessary for photosynthesis are in shorter supply than the byproducts are in surrounding populations.
He's got it backwards, though. The dominant theory is that heterotrophs came first. He's probably confused by this because he thinks that heterotrophs have to be consumers of producers like most species he is familiar with. But that's not the case. Heterotrophs are defined by consuming energy from the the surrounding environment because they cannot synthesize it themselves. This can be other organisms, or it can simply be taking in organic compounds. Pre-autotroph, heterotrophs are likely to have fed on each other or molecules in their environment preceding their origin.
LIKE
LIKE
LIKE
Thank you, EAllusion, for a wonderful talent of telling someone, "hey, you got it backwards but understandably." Implying that "light eating creatures" might have gotten a little shady isn't something I really had considered.
honorentheos wrote:While I agree EAllusion has a talent for simplifying complex ideas, I think you missed the point he made. Or, at a minimum, chose to double down on the exact thing he said you had backwards if your take away was to consider environmental changes that led photosynthesizing organisms to become predatory on other organism. Which it seems is what you are saying above.
Lemmie wrote:SPG wrote:Yeah, like I said.
That's all you've got?
SPG wrote:
There was a LOT MORE in that statement then you are reading. Seriously, look at it again.
No, thanks, I made my point. I'm more interested in the scientific discussion.SPG wrote:If a life form, hungry and trying to survive was getting everything it needed to live, like CO2 and sunlight, why would it eat its friend? Chemistry can be predatory in a sense, simply by being a specific compound, it might eat another. But did the 'spirit of the hunt' evolve from chemical reacts? Or did a "living thing" decide to eat a friend? I understand that on micro-level, some organisms eat others. In fact, some seem specifically designed to do so. But this desire to eat a specific germ learned, or chemical in nature. When the immune system goes after a germ, is it a chemical reaction, or a learned behavior. It is trying to protect the body or just blindly killing?
Chap wrote:If I had enough time and energy, I would try to explain to you why the terms you using to think and write in are in urgent need of replacement. Ideas like 'trying to survive', 'its friend' or 'spirit of the hunt' or 'trying to protect the body or just blindly killing' just can't lead anywhere useful in understanding the way very simple living things behave.
-snip-
You'll achieve nothing useful this way.
EAllusion wrote:SPG - “Energy” here means forming and breaking chemical bonds in order to create motion that does work. When an organism creates energy, it uses chemical reactions to create chemical bonds that can later be split apart. The splitting of those bonds is where cellular work happens.
Autotrophs are able to do this on their own using sunlight to trigger a cascade of chemical reactions that ultimately form these bonds. Heterotrophs need to take in organic molecules they cannot synthetize themselves. Early life forms didn’t have access to photosynthesis or its prececessors. They got the chemicals they needed to start these reactions from their surrounding environment.
This requires a few chapters of high school or above biology to understand, so let’s just say that chemical X is needed to metabolize the energy molecule. This is an oversimplification, but it abstracts the process correctly. What I am suggesting is that early heterotrophs got X from consuming each other and/or taking it in from their surroundings.
When you understand how that works at the level of molecular biology, it makes sense in terms of chemical reactions happening according to what you expect from the principles of chemistry. It doesn’t require intention. When you look at it at the level of microbiology, it makes sense to talk about the “behavior” of organisms. But this behavior is just a very intricate dance of reactions.