A disturbing similarity
Lately I've been reading Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee (http://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe/dp/0387952896). In the process I learned an extremely disturbing similarity between Home sapiens -- i.e., us, in all our ugly primate glory -- and bacteria and archaea: whereas the hallmark of almost all eukarya, that is, all organisms that are not bacteria or archaea, complex organisms with much more intricate intracellular architecture than is found in bacteria and archaea, is that they adapt and thus evolve to keep up with changes in their environment, that of bacteria and archaea is that they change their environment to suit themselves, and make adjustments in their own biochemistry to do that. So what is the similarity between us and archaea and bacteria? It's that we, too, act on our environment to change it to suit our needs rather than evolving to fit its shifts. In the process, we've wrought tremendous changes in our world, changes that may ultimately do us far more harm than good -- think air pollution from industrial sources, for example, which can induce lung cancer and a host of other ailments and even cause genetic mutations that cripple their possessors; or the giant clots of plastic bags and other detritus that are the Great Gyres of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, the result of our wasteful dumping practices, which prove to be dietary honey traps for numerous marine organisms; or improperly disposed of nuclear wastes (let's not even go there). Over four billion years we've gone from archaea to eukarya to giant, complex archaea. Since when is this progress?