Macro evolution, speciation, deep-maroon pill thread

Super fecundity is Mother Nature at her repalcement window salesman worst. "All life on this accidental soggy dust mote is a foregone tragedy anyway. How will we succeed? One word:

Volume."

It's all emergent phenomena, all the way down.

A xerox copy experiences rightward complexity too, if you run it through enough generations.

Punctuated Equilibrium is neither punctuated nor equilibrious. The arbitrary scale of "punctuation events" glosses over local catastrophes of insufficient scale to leave epochal scars and the equilibrium is a euphemism for millions of years of grim carnage, genetic drift, horrific mutation error, and allopatric differentiation.

Why does it all have to be so slimy and gooey and bulbous and frail and smelly? Why? WHY?

Anything can be a spandrel when you don't have a comprehensive model of functionality.

All life forms generated by DNA instructions are works in progress. This is nature's way of saying, "Not only does your individual life not matter, your entire species is just one of millions of trial and error stepping stones toward an eventual outcome which isn't even teleological in its progress. Even your species' entire extinction is meaningless. You're all just an iteration of a blind guess, the product of which will be millions more slightly better refined guesses constrained by comparison to a set of environmental factors which are subject to cancellation at any time with no warning. YAHTZEE!"

This

The work never ends friend

You are now aware that the fatally flawed mutant alleles that could eventually kill all life on Earth may already be coded into a pseudogenetic sequence just lying in wait for the right expression trigger to emerge and wipe out all species descended from its common ancestor.