Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Person012345 t1_j5lti2r wrote

  1. even if you start with the same animal, the random processes that make up evolution are vanishingly unlikely to produce the exact same end result twice when it's working with such an immense thing as the genetic code.
  2. Other animals may well move in to occupy the niche that D occupied, if indeed the niche itself even exists any more (which it may well do again at some point).
  3. C rarely continues to exist unchanged. There are some animals we think of as ancient but even those are rarely the exact same as they were 50 million years ago and even aside from that in the vast majority of cases C simply no longer exists in any form. I mean say humans went extinct next week. We look back to our last common ancestors with chimps: Gone. With gorillas? Gone. With other primates? Gone. I doubt there is a single extant animal (or any other kind of life) we can directly trace our lineage back to to give humans "another try" 5 billion years down the line. The same is probably true of most animals.
2