Could it be that different niches of life don’t independently evolve because those niches are already being filled? Can we say with confidence that if all animals died, something like animals wouldn’t eventually evolve again? Or any order of life.
That’s a good point. I guess not. My intuition is that a lot of organisms have evolved simple multicellularity, and so would probably be doing better as unified multicellular organisms, but it’s possible, as you say, that they haven’t gotten to that point for lack of the niche. I don’t know enough about the topic to say.
Could it be that different niches of life don’t independently evolve because those niches are already being filled? Can we say with confidence that if all animals died, something like animals wouldn’t eventually evolve again? Or any order of life.
That’s a good point. I guess not. My intuition is that a lot of organisms have evolved simple multicellularity, and so would probably be doing better as unified multicellular organisms, but it’s possible, as you say, that they haven’t gotten to that point for lack of the niche. I don’t know enough about the topic to say.