Also the moon provides tides. Which meant that the first billion years of wet Earth, every grain of sand on every beach was a little chemical laboratory of wet/dry, sun/shade, hot/cold and with local conditions of pH and salinity. An organic chemistry lab for trying to invent life.

Without the moon it would have just sat stagnant.

Definitely the tides are a huge factor in the development of life but given the fact that the earth would still rotate the wind would still agitate the water and the waves would come in to the shore. Life mostly developed in the oceans from what I've read, not on the land/water interface though there is a good chance that without the tides the first animals to really adapt to living on the land would have had a much harder time to make the transition.

This creature still lives like that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periophthalmus

Super interesting, a bit like a planet sized phase-locked-loop. Given the predicted effect of a couple of degrees centigrade on average on our climate you have to really respect the impact a degree more or less in axial tilt would have. Thank you for the explanation.

At least three astronomic cycles affect climate on Earth: the varying eccentricity of Earth's orbit around the Sun, the varying obliquity of the Earth's axis of rotation, and the precession of the equinoxes. The sum of these waveforms are known as the Milankovitch cycles, which is a theory about the correlation of glacial/interglacial periods with those astronomic cycles. I'm not sure what the effect of these cycles would have been before the current ice age, but in this ice age it really does seem like glacial and interglacial periods correlate with the Milankovitch cycles. Specifically, interglacials correlate with maximum insolation during the summer in the Northern hemisphere, specifically around the 65th parallel, while glacial periods coincide with minimum insolation in the summer of the Northern hemisphere -- not every maximum/minimum leads to a state transition, of course.