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I guess the revision is "we hit optimal complexity for life pretty quickly"?

Szathmáry 2015 is a pretty good treatise of this sort of major complexity bumps. I also summarized the basic mechanisms here. McShea 2016 notices three parallel trends over time: sometimes, a new level of organization is added at the top (e.g. cells combine to form multicellular bodies); diversity increases one level down (e.g. differentiation of cells in more complex multicellular organisms); and diversity reduces two levels down (individual cells within multicellular bodies have fewer subparts than independent unicellular organisms, since they don't have to survive on their own).

McShea 2016, the "evolutionary syndrome". Left could be a unicellular alga like Chlamydmonas, middle a simple colonial alga like Volvox, and right a complex plant with specialized cell types.

AIUI even Stephen Jay Gould, famous for arguing that evolution has no large-scale tendencies and is largely driven by contingency, acknowledged that the complexity of the most complex organism at any given time increased since he origin of life, if for no other reason that increasing is all it can do when you start from a maximally simple organism. Others could say that there are sensible evolutionary reasons for complexity to increase. Certainly the idea that there is a universal innate pro-complexity tendency (technical term is orthogenesis) in all organisms is discredited for a good reason.

Gould, 1994

Nevertheless, many lineages become simpler. Yeasts are fungi that returned to unicellularity, and many parasitic animals lost most of their internal structures (shout out to Orthonectida, which reverted to having only two kinds of cells). Complexity certainly isn't the same as fitness or evolutionary success. After all, the most numerous known species on Earth is a marine bacterium, Pelagibacter ubique, with as many as a billion billion billion individuals, and the most common autotroph is another bacterium, Prochlorococcus.

Complexification is useful in many cases, to take advantage of scale economy and comparative advantage, but so is simplification. Depends on circumstances. There certainly have been many instances throughout the history of life in which the maximum complexity available to organisms increased, even though not all lineages necessarily became more complex.

It’s very important you slay both of these demons as soon as you hit 30.

Even blaming the parents doesn’t give the full picture. The amount of time and care a child needs is incompatible with capitalism’s requirements of 40 hour a week labor. One or both parents are going to be overworked at home and at their job. This incentivizes more neglectful parenting styles.

Part 1 ​ i like pokemon

Part 2 pain

Part 3 pain

Part 4 pain

Part 5 i like pokemon

"L'Heure d'abstinthe." The absinthe hour. Grande mythologie tintamarresque. 1881. Illustrated by G. Lafosse.

A satirical comment on "absinthism," a condition brought on by drinking absinthe that allegedly led to gross depravity.