Looks More Like a Puma

From my first day of notes in this Biology class:

Life is…

A. Made of Cells
B. Interconnected
C. Diverse

Maybe it’s just me, but that last point strikes me as patentable nonsense. My immediate response was “Compared to what?”. The word diverse is fundamentally a relative one. It’s just like the word big. When I say elephants are big, I mean that elephants are bigger than most other animals. To say that life in this universe is diverse without having any other universes to compare it to robs the term of all meaning.

In fact, the only analysis I could come up with leads to exactly the opposite conclusion. The one thing we can say is that the number of species that could potentially exist but don’t is greater than the  number of species that could potentially not exist but do (making the very reasonable assumption that the set of all possible species of living things is infinite). By that logic, life on earth is not diverse. (Admittedly, such would be the case for every universe with a finite number of species).

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(I also think it’s funny when people say PIN number)