The First Animal

The trouble with making sense of evolution is it doesn't seem to want anything. It's not always making the creatures of the planet more complex, it's not really making them simpler, and it's not always making them stronger or smarter.

It might change a single species in any of these ways, but at the same time, species that have opposite traits could be thriving in the same environment. Sometimes traits that are bad for survival are preserved, buried among traits that seem to balance them out.

So, scientists have found that the comb jelly is older than the sponge. It's significant because the jelly is a lot more complicated than the sponge. This means that nature may have back-pedaled after coming up with the first animal, removing many of the bells and whistles of the comb jelly and its descendants, such as tissues and nerves, in order to create the sponge, a cleaner, simpler creature that retained the ability to survive, and consequently went on existing long enough for us to become its contemporaries.

What does this say about the way the world works? Well, for me it brings to mind Planet of the Apes and other creepy scenarios where humankind "devolves" into a more primitive state, as the ability to create high tech weapons with our superbrains becomes more liability than advantage and takes us to the brink of extinction.

Interestingly (or terrifyingly, depressingly, if you like) the capability of humans to contemplate evolution in itself has caused a lot of destruction, if you look at the pseudo-science fueling the genocide and racism of World War II. Ideas and nukes can both be dangerous, especially put together.

Currently, humankind's unique abilities have allowed them to dominate the planet essentially unchallenged, if you knock out the bugs and the microbes and other things that are more abundant than we are even if they can't strictly eat us or kill us if we have the right tools. But I'm not sure this is really what evolution means -- it isn't some machine aimed at the creation of a species with the capacity to dominate. It isn't really the survival of the fittest, either, just the survival of whatever survives. Anything and everything that survives.

Worms and ducks and whales and people and all that other stuff out there.