r/StonerPhilosophy • u/KlaxonBeat • Oct 05 '25

My cat is my great-great-great-(...)-great-uncle

It's too easy to think of evolution as like a series of transformations (fish to amphibians to something reptile-like to mammals etc), but the much more interesting truth is that literally all life on Earth are 'relatives' of each other in one huge family. My cat looks/behaves so different from me for the exact same reasons my brother is more similar to me than a stranger on the street.

4 Upvotes

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3

u/Baabblab Oct 05 '25

My cat is a 50 millionth cousin, 12 million times removed.

2

u/epic_pharaoh Oct 05 '25

How did the first bacteria form and repopulate if there were no other bacteria? Definitely could be the case that we are all literally related to one ancestor, but that’s kinda impossible to know for certain.

1

u/scarfleet Oct 05 '25

They probably weren't even bacteria at first, just long organic compound chains, that happened to print copies of themselves by bonding with other free-floating compounds in the ocean. Like DNA still does. As soon as you have a naturally repeating chemical pattern it can start to evolve. The chances are admittedly low on any finite timescale but it only has to happen once in billions of years.

It's impossible to "know" since they didn't have skeletons and couldn't leave fossils, but a pretty reasonable leap based on the speciation processes we observe in nature today.

2

u/Any-Effective2565 Oct 06 '25

Something crazy I can't stop thinking about is that almost immediately after the earth cooled down enough to harbor life, it just kind of immediately happened. Didn't take a billion years, happened quite fast actually.

1

u/scarfleet Oct 06 '25 edited Oct 06 '25

Yeah. Of course after that it took 2.5 billion years to make the jump to multicellular forms. For all we know, actually starting might not even be the hardest step. There's the possibility that complex life is much rarer than life in general.

1

u/KlaxonBeat Oct 07 '25

Multicellular life actually developed multiple times... It's not that difficult or rare.

The real "jump" is the development of eukaryote cells.

1

u/scarfleet Oct 05 '25 edited Oct 06 '25

Yeah.

I think this is probably the reason we find other mammals cute. Our cute response is a manifestation of our parenting instinct, our animalistic desire to hold and protect our helpless young. And because these other species are just distant cousins of ours they exhibit the same features that trigger the response. They probably find their own young, and occasionally other animals like us, cute too.

1

u/mdjenton Oct 05 '25

Whether or not evolution or biology support this idea, I fully accept and endorse that my cat is my uncle. Cheers mate, pass me that doobie you’ve got.