Newly sorted.
But how powerful did a tiny cell have to evolve to become a complex
life-form over millions of years?
Just imagine all the genes and life-sustaining organs in the bodies of living things today. What kind of intricate
and complex systems did they have?
Thinking of this, I couldn't help marveling at how miraculous life was, evolving to this point over billions of years.
In fact, aside from the rapid evolution at the very beginning, these special circumstances had become rare. Only a few times, after mass extinctions,
had we seen, in certain
traces, that after each mass extinction, creatures that had lain dormant for millions of years would once again begin evolving and mutating in an explosive burst, giving rise to all sorts of
different species.
So... what had caused these bursts?
Thinking of this, I couldn't help wondering if the virus was responsible.
If it was, then perhaps it wasn't so hard to understand why the pace of evolution had accelerated so much. But it still didn't explain why, after the explosion of diversity,
the pace of evolution for various species had slowed again.
Like humans today, who had more or less settled into a stable state. We were still evolving, but the pace had clearly slowed.
Meanwhile, human interference was destroying the habitats of all kinds of creatures on Earth. The results of millions or even
tens of millions of years of evolution were
gradually stripping them of their ability to survive as their environments were damaged. The rate of extinction had already earned the name of the sixth mass extinction.
I remembered reading on Baidu that the "sixth mass extinction," caused by humans, was unprecedented in speed:
on average, one species went extinct
every hour. Plants, insects, animals, birds—every species that fell within the