OK, so I wrote this because both of you have shown yourselves to be thoughtful, having the energy to deliver more than the mere quips to which FreeRepublic has degenerated over the last decade.
I've pondered Steven Jay Gould's observations about the "Precambrian Explosion" for many years, particularly for its honesty about evolutionary theory. He observed that after eons of two celled life, we suddenly had entire food chains from plants to predators with stomachs, brains, skeletons, bisexual reproduction, and presumably complex symbioses that has since declined both in the variety and the number of phyla. That history looks like a planet that was seeded, just to see what would take. A lot of it didn't.
Nor was life since that time fundamentally more developed, diverse, or complex ever since. DNA stayed DNA. The fundamentals of animals and plants have remained fairly constant. Even Gould admitted that the "Evolutionary Tree" was upside down, with massive die-offs due to various singularities. At least that thesis respects the Second Law of Thermodynamics better than does the theory of Evolution. Hence, life itself has respected that Precambrian singularity.
In fact, if one studies the Hebrew of Genesis 1 for what it literally says (as in concert with other Semitic languages), it refers to the same process of successive culling. The term "bara" is linguistically a word of shaping, removing undesired material producing chips and dust off a pre-existing workpiece. It is certainly not an ex-nihilo "Creation." That thesis does respect the Second Law. So what I've been doing is going through the Bible to extract this narrative, which I think originated among tribal shepherds as an "oral story," not of how things came to be, but how they work and what to do in the way of preparation by which to survive, a catastrophist's manual if you will of knowledge developed over 5,000 years.
So I'm not totally opposed to the idea that we are a planet under cultivation. After all, once one has physical laws knocked, what else is there to do but to cultivate life? It is, after all, a big universe.
I hope that makes you happy.
Charles Fort wrote, “I think we’re property.” :^)
Thank you. Points well worth pondering! :)