What a deep and personal question....
Thinking further on it, if one were to use billions of years as a
metric, average size does tend toward the larger, even with tens of
millions of years, if you use major extinctions as reset points. This
metric would also be a good reference to answer the question why the
Martian "fossils" of bacteria are on average less than half the size of
Earth archaea, they are simply even more primitive, though the planetary
GM may have some structural influence on cell size.
Using less than a million years, one sees much more influence by
environmental factors rather than genetic, as there is not a lot of
drift in a million years or less.
-- TANSTAAFL!!!Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ President retroman@tpk.net Northstar Technologies Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com Inventor of the Lorrey Drive Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com
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