• Question: If evolution is true,( humans evolved from monkeys, monkeys evolved from plankton and plankton evolved from the atmosphere) Where did the atmosphere evolve from?

    Asked by shrimpyking to Andrew, Emma, Marianne on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by apjk03.
    • Photo: Andrew Maynard

      Andrew Maynard answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Hi shrimpyking,

      Star-dust – and rather than evolving (because things that aren’t living don’t evolve like living organisms), it underwent a series of chemical reactions until it was just right to support the emergence of life.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Back to the big bang again. Shrimpyking it’s a well-phrased and reasoned question but the answer is complicated maths and physics. I think the atmosphere (probably you mean matter) you talk about used to be tightly packed and really hot in a tiny little ball. That ball exploded out at the big bang and is still expanding. What that little ball was sitting in (if not atmosphere I don’t know) but mybe a giant cosmic snooker table (sometimes I feel like this is alI just a big game of some sort, don’t you?). Truth is can’t get my head round that stuff so I’ll let AndrewM take this one further.

    • Photo: Marianne Baker

      Marianne Baker answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Hey shrimpyking.

      Evolution is about the way life forms change over time. It does not incorporate the beginning of life (abiogenesis or whichever theory of how life came to be on the planet one is ascribing to).
      So, non-living things are not part of evolutionary theory.

      Plankton is the collective name for lots of microscopic life forms present in the sea today. It is not one species but many and in fact if you added them all together, they have more mass (i.e. they weigh more) than many other species on the planet! Here’s some wiki stuff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_%28ecology%29#Ocean_biomass – looks like Krill (whale food; slightly higher up the food chain than plankton) win the biomass competition.

      So if you’re talking about the primordial soup; that is, the water/other chemicals mixture that existed on the Earth before life, and how life came to be from that – that’s a different story from evolution.

      One well-accepted idea is that molecules formed RNA – ribonucleic acid, like a less complicated form of DNA. The DNA precursor. RNA molecules got copied and the self-replicating molecule was ‘born’ – but that doesn’t constitute life. The formation of the first most primitive cell in the primordial soup is what’s called ‘abiogenesis’ – life from non-life. But there are other theories about how life started on Earth – maybe it came here on a chunk of space rock (we’re finding that bacterial spores can survive in a vacuum, like the outside of our space shuttles we send to the moon and Mars!) so it’s not impossible.

      Also just to be picky, humans didn’t evolve from monkeys – not the monkeys we see today anyway. But we do share a common ancestor; that is, a relative of today’s monkeys, apes and humans living long ago, whose family then gave rise to all these different types of primates.

      So when people say ‘why are there still chimps if we evolved from chimps??’ they’re kinda missing the point – we share common ancestry way back in time and those individuals would have been ape-like creatures, something like those you see at the beginning of the March of Progress! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Progress

      It’s quite confusing, I know, but evolutionary biology is really interesting and makes a lot of sense when you study it for a long time to really understand the evidence 🙂

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