Re:Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes
by zeroonetwothree on Saturday June 18, 2022 @12:07PM
(#31791121)
Most other features evolved independently several (or even many) times so this is not a good argument. It’s not as if once there was a eukaryote it instantly spread across the whole planet, taking up every ecological niche. Even today eukaryotes don’t exist in certain environments.
Well, it's quite possible that once it happens, it voids any chance of it happening again just because life filling that niche already exists. If so, it only happens once, and this says absolutely nothing about the odds of that first occurrence.
> what happened once, happens all the time
That's a fallacy people do all the time here when talking about exobiology. It's basically states that all small numbers and all big numbers are alike, and that all small numbers are like the inverse of all big numbers.