Comment by chatmasta
1 day ago
Sharks are so cool, man. They’ve just been chilling on the planet for 400 million years, swimming the oceans while epochs passed them by in their periphery. Their entire biology is pretty much unchanged. They’ve been sharks the whole time.
They've found a local optimum, and stay in it. There's no easy way out anyway.
> There's no easy way out anyway.
Evolution always finds new nooks and crannies of state space to explore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndbw7SQMCcQ
Not always, species go extinct all the time. Evolution can get stuck in local optima. Consider the whiptail lizard, which has lost the ability to reproduce sexually. Will they be able to adapt to future changes of the environment? Maybe, but the chips are stacked against them.
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Yes, but maybe not from one specific lineage. E.g., extinction really is the end of the line for some species.
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> queue the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club song
Sharks are older than trees
Another Fun Fact: the Appalachian mountains formed before sharks existed, the rings of Saturn existed, and before bones existed.
But they're (possibly) younger than the New River!
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_River_(Kanawha_River_tribu...>
(Blew my mind when I first encountered this a few years back.)
I think you misstated your fun fact
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And the north star, Polaris, is a fraction the age of sharks at only 50-70 Mya (it's a trinary star system but the other two stars are much dimmer and not visible to the eye)
I love this fact.
Also: life on earth is almost as old as the universe itself, within the same order of magnitude. 4.1 GYA (billion years ago) vs 13.8 GYA. We're old and intelligence is hard.
I think there is a theory that we’re not seeing any aliens simply because life on Earth started so early.
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That's not that early, no? There was probably enough C, H, N, O, P, S, Na atoms for life to start 10B years ago. You probably couldnt rely on iron being everywhere though but that's not such a hard requirement.
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Yes I love it too, wish more people appreciated it
When they lose a tooth, they just grow a new one. How conveniently cool!