Pyropyro
Magos Biologis
Mainstream article
Actual paper
Anyways, there's a paper that says that life is seeded via virus and microorganism - containing comets like the old theory of panspermia. They speculate that these viruses and microorganisms forced the evolution of Cambrian life. Case and point is the octopus whose intelligence and complexity is quite impressive.
Unfortunately, that's not that likely. Viruses are quite specific (like say Banana bunchy top virus can mess up bananas but not dogs). So viruses that can "evolve" squids to octopi should come from somewhere with lots of squids (r'lyeh?) and somehow improving intelligence gives advantages to the viruses' reproduction.
so yeah, no cthulhu fhtagn for us
Actual paper
Anyways, there's a paper that says that life is seeded via virus and microorganism - containing comets like the old theory of panspermia. They speculate that these viruses and microorganisms forced the evolution of Cambrian life. Case and point is the octopus whose intelligence and complexity is quite impressive.
Unfortunately, that's not that likely. Viruses are quite specific (like say Banana bunchy top virus can mess up bananas but not dogs). So viruses that can "evolve" squids to octopi should come from somewhere with lots of squids (r'lyeh?) and somehow improving intelligence gives advantages to the viruses' reproduction.
so yeah, no cthulhu fhtagn for us