The origin of eukaryotes

John Maynard Smith

As I have said several times in this blog, the theory of evolution is now well established. However, it is far from explaining everything. Many mysteries still remain. I listed some of them in a previous post. A book by J. Maynard Smith and E. Szathmáry, The Major Transitions in Evolution (Oxford University Press, 1995), describes them in more detail.

One of these problems refers to the changes of level that have taken place in the history of life, which I made the central idea of ​​my book The Fifth Level of Evolution. As its title implies, during evolution, things have not happened in an orderly or stable manner. At various points, there were changes of state (similar to those in physics) where evolution passed a critical point that made it possible to reach higher levels and opened up huge new fields in the configuration space. These points are the following:

Are cities and companies biological structures?

Geoffrey West

The book Scale: The universal laws of life and death in organisms, cities and companies, by Geoffrey West, from the Santa Fe Institute, which I discussed in the previous post, asserts that cities and companies are subject to laws very similar to those that apply to living beings. They are general laws, applicable to all entities of these types, regardless of their origin. West explains it this way:

Remarkably, analyses of such data show that, as a function of population size, city infrastructure—such as the length of roads, electrical cables, water pipes, and the number of gas stations—scales in the same way whether in the United States, China, Japan, Europe, or Latin America. As in biology, these quantities scale sublinearly with size, indicating a systematic economy of scale but with an exponent of about 0.85 rather than 0.75...[F]ewer roads and electrical cables are needed per capita the bigger the city. Like organisms, cities are indeed approximately scaled versions of one another, despite their different histories, geographies, and cultures, at least as far as their physical infrastructure is concerned.

Richard Dawkins versus John Lennox

Richard Dawkins

At the age of fifteen I wrote my first book, with no intention of publishing, just for my personal use. It was a two-volume zoology of invertebrates. I still refer to it, although classifications have changed a lot, with the rise of cladistics and DNA analysis.

In 1977, this time with the intention of sending it to the printer, I wrote another book in English under the title Human cultures and evolution, where I proposed the following:

·         Cultural evolution is equivalent to biological evolution. Many properties are common to both fields. Human civilizations are equivalent to biological species and describe similar life curves. There is a cultural selection, equivalent to and very similar to natural selection, proposed by Darwin to explain the origin of the species.

Biological evolution and cultural evolution in the history of life and man

The title of this post is the translation into English of a book of mine, published in 2017 by the publisher CEU Ediciones. As its name implies, the book is divided into three main parts, the first of which (the first four chapters) reviews the origin, evolution and history of life (biological evolution), while the second (chapters 5 and 6) focuses on the origin, evolution and history of man (cultural evolution). Finally, the third part (chapters 7 to 9) compares both types of evolution, emphasizing their similarities and differences; reviews the current situation of human evolution; and offers some ideas about the future.

As is often the case, this book did not come out of nowhere, but rather builds on previous works of mine. Especially in the first part, some of the titles of some chapters and subchapters may be familiar to the readers of my blog, because they are similar to some of my posts: