Class Presentations     

     Ernest Mayr wrote that he thought that is no life to be discovered on Mars.  He was so confident in his belief that he made a five dollar bet with Donald Menzel that they would not find anything like "life as on earth" on Mars.  Although Menzel thought different and support life on Mars.  Mayr talks about the doubtful assuption of suns having planets and there would be millions of planets and he thought if that was true then some of those planets should have spawned life.  He thought that the role played by natural selection was important as well as interesting.  He talks about the duplication of amino-acid, purines, and pyrimidines and how it can be performed in a laboratory.  He says that there is no doubt now that we can do stuff like this but he is not sure how often this information storage and replication has happened, where, and how much evolution has occured else where. For a planet to spawn life it must have all of the right components and the right sequence of conditions to happen exactly right. 

     Mayr said that he was surprised by other scientists in that the search for life on Mars led to the search for intelligent humanoids.  Since he was so against life ever happening on Mars in the first place, this was even more suprising to him that others believed that. He goes into detail about the history of the Earth and how it is 4.5 billion years old.  We know this due to fossils and other evidence that scientists have found.  He thought that the probability of life happening on Earth was a slim chance so why should life so easily happen else where? The evolution of intelligence among animals was found highest in primates and he pondered on the idea that through evolution primates became Homo Sapiens.  He also mentioned convergent evolution of two highly improbable organs, such as the eyes, in which shows that an organ can evolve repeatedly. In his conclusion, he says that the SETI program is wasting everyone's hard earned money and that it could be used for something more useful instead of looking for life on Mars.