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Comment by statictype | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that being sealed for 5 million years did not yield any life forms more complex than insects.

Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.

That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...

Humans didn’t evolve from chimps.

No but they could over 5 million years

We went from wolves to chihuahua in just 40k years. Yeah selective breeding and all that, but it emphasizes that you can have very extreme changes in very brief periods of time. Imagine chihuahuas didn't exist today, and somebody said that within 40k years you could turn a wolf into one. It'd sound absurd!

Isn't it more accurate to say we went from wolves to dogs? Dogs are not a group of species. The domesticated dog is a species.

Also canines seem to hybridize well, suggesting they aren't truly differentiated anyways.

Biology is quite arbitrary. For instance the dingo is basically just a wild dog, looks like a dog, can breed and create fertile offspring with dogs, yet is considered its own species.

So I prefer things that are more visceral in nature. There are lots of dogs that look a lot like wolves, but going from a wolf to a chihuahua is just kind of mind boggling in terms of the degree of change over such a small window of time. There's one extremely disappointed great great great ... grandfather wolf somewhere. 'Kids these days.'

Same thing happens with plants on a similar timescale right? Cultivars look nothing like their wild relatives at this point.

Add to this that life in darkness sustained by microbes consuming a rock surface will be rather slow. Because any fast processes would just flash out after a boom/bust cycle or two. And presumably not just slow in terms of no cheetah vs antelope racing, but also much slower than out in the sun in generational turnover.

I wonder how big that cave system is, as in number of barley connected caverns. There might have been quite a few cycles one cavern flashing out and then slowly getting repopulated from the neighboring cavern(s). The "magical" balance we admire in nature isn't a miracle, it's the result of endless series of failure.

Yes, but an alternative would be that if an organism is perfectly fit for its static environment (that hasn't changed in 5 million years) then there is no benefit to evolving novel features.

More likely a dynamic environment is most important for intelligence.

the sun is energy so i’d expect there to be a correlation there.

There’s residual and radioactive heating from the Earth itself that can provide energy for an ecosystem. We expect Jupiter’s moons to provide similar environments because of tidal deformations (which provide enough energy for Io’s vulcanism).

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