THE DIVERSITY OF LIFE By: Jose Segadaes

How did life come about on earth? If we consider the variety of organisms, even the simple ones, it’s astonishing to realize what they’re able to do. Think about a humble rabbit. Rabbits can hop. You might not be too impressed about a rabbit’s hop, but it hops better than any hopping device designed by man. Animals, insects and plants can do remarkable things. We humans have only been around on earth for the last hundreds of thousand of years but other life forms go back billions of years, which reminds us how wonderful the existence life on earth is. Take for example a type of orchid plant which goes through many great lengths to induce insects and in some cases bats to pollinate it and thus induce it to make more orchids. A mosquito, with wings on its back, can fly. What a remarkable thing. Something we humans haven’t figured out how to do it although we are so much heavier. A chimpanzee’s DNA is 99.5% like that of us humans. Admire the beautiful pattern on the zebra’s coat. I mentioned large animals but there are small organisms as well such as bacteria and microbes, with such symmetrical and geometrical regularity. Some are even able to survive in extreme environmental conditions. Take for example a type of fish which is able to live in almost freezing waters due to antifreeze circulating in its body. Earth contains small and large organisms. There are organisms with sensory capabilities within the ultraviolet and infrared domain such as some plants and insects. This is just a slight insight into the diversity of life on earth. Where did they come from? There has been life on earth for quite some time as we can deduce from fossils. Many of the species have become extinct and others have evolved. Dinosaurs were around 600 million years ago. The earth is 4.5 billion years old. Microscopic life goes far back as 3.5 billion years on earth. Early time on earth was unfit for life. Life is thus a likely process or in other words the origin of life is easy, This fact can be extrapolated to the rest of the universe. Nothing is preordained as life develops through evolution. But diversity in a way is misleading. You look very different from an oak tree but down deep you are not. You are astonishly like a oak tree and an oak tree is astonishly like you. The chemistry inherent in the trillion of cells in our bodies is the same as that of an oak tree. We both have enzymes which instruct cells what to do and the nuclei acids in the cells allow for the reproduction of themselves. This is true for every organism on earth. This suggests that we are all cousins.