Re: Re. Progress

[Dinogeorge@aol.com]

In a message dated 5/3/00 4:29:52 AM EST, chris.lavers@nottingham.ac.uk 
writes:

<< Every year I struggle to remove the baser notions of progress in evolution
 from 150 first year undergraduates, and it's invariably a struggle. >>

Have you ever given thought to >why< this is such a struggle? It might be 
because you are struggling >against truth.<

If evolution does not engender progress, then why were all the earliest-known 
life forms on earth unicellular prokaryotes? Why didn't all kinds of life 
forms--from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to multicellular plants and 
animals--appear all together at the end of the Hadean Era? The entire history 
of life on earth is the story of progress from simple life forms to more 
complex life forms, from monotony to diversity. Naturally, this doesn't 
happen in every lineage, only in a very few lineages--but over the course of 
several billion years these few lineages make all the difference.