Media releases
Evolution: We’re all in it together
8 May 2009
Different life forms are causing each other to evolve and shaping our planet giving us an interconnectedness and intimacy that is not often recognised says evolutionary biologist and author Dr Olivia Judson.
‘This planet that we live on now has been made by life, it is the product of activities of millions of different kinds of life forms, and we are of it. We have evolved from the planet and our relationship with it is very deep and intimate.’
Dr Judson, author of the book and star of the TV series Dr Tatiana’s sex advice to all creation, will be speaking about evolution today at the Australian Academy of Science’s symposium titled Evolution of the Universe, planets, life and thought which forms part of the Academy’s peak annual event Science at the Shine Dome.
Dr Judson says that the diversity of life we have on Earth helps to shape the planet.
‘There was a paper published last year that argued that more than half of the minerals produced on earth are the direct or indirect result of biological activity. And so the implication of this is that a planet that has never had life will be geologically much less interesting. It just won’t have the variety and in fact meteorites that arrive on earth have far fewer minerals than this planet.’
She says that life forms are evolving together over time and that our vision of a constantly branching tree of life is not quite accurate:
‘We think of the tree of life as this branching process but actually what has become clear in the last 40 years is that there’s quite a bit of branches coming together and evolving together essentially as one organism.’
She says that this happens to various degrees in different organisms:
‘This takes place on different levels and sometimes you have a total merger so that two organisms become one organism and begin evolving together, in perpetuity, and in other cases its not that they have actually physically become one organism but that they can’t live without each other. So there’s a kind of interconnectedness of the tree of life and a parallelism of the tree of life.’
Dr Judson also says that humans ‘have been evolved’ in various ways due to our interaction with other organisms such as cows, bacteria, mosquitoes etc. and this is part of who we are.
‘I think its really magnificent and quite moving somehow. It makes us in many respects, more remarkable. We think of ourselves as just kind of plonked here wandering around the surface of the Earth and yet actually we are totally integrated with the planet.’
However she says that there are some sobering implications for this interconnectedness, namely the extent to which we can live without other organisms and our ability to wipe species out.
‘It would be really a shame if we tipped the planet way out of balance, because we are a very unusual species and have the opportunity to think about what we are and how we live here in a way that no other species has had’
What: Evolution of the Universe, planets, life and thought symposium
When: 8:45 – 4:20 Friday 8 May
Where: The Shine Dome, Gordon St, Acton, Canberra
Contact: Mona Akbari, (02) 6201 9452 or 0447 679 612
