[avandonk]

Craig there is no confusion. All I was saying that given the same exact starting conditions, life on Earth would be different. Over ninety nine percent of once living species are extinct.

We mammals only really got going after the dinosaurs were rendered extinct by an asteroid.

As humans are we all that intelligent? I see us being like an ants nest where the individuals follow simple rules and the result is a very complex well organised super organism. We of course follow far more complex rules but the result is the same. I guarantee you that 99% of humans have no clue as to how even all our technology works even at a simple level.
Yet give a twelve year old a modern phone he will find all the features very quickly while a highly educated physicist like me only uses it to make phone calls. Which one of us is smarter?

The take home message is that our ants nest has produced a very complex society where we can follow our individual specialities without knowing how to make the tools to make the tools ...... to make the object we need and use.

Just try and make a $20 pop up toaster from scratch. A metal axe head would be easier. Mine the ore after finding it. Refine the ore to metal etc you get the idea?

It took single cell bacteria over three billion years to explore some of the many possibilities of biological molecular interactions. They 'invented' photosynthesis which uses quantum mechanical tunnelling to transport protons before multicelled organisms developed.

Once multicelled organisms started we then have far more complexity space for them to randomly explore.

Your body is a super organism of many cells following 'simple' rules. Thirty percent of your dry weight is foreign bacteria without which you would die.

All your primal behaviours are programmed by your DNA because of the unbroken chain of your ancestors all the way to single cells that survived and procreated. So you hopefully carry all the 'correct answers' when you are born.

It is all simple really once you realize what is going on. It is fractal layers of complexity all the way down and up!

Bert