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Perhaps a more revealing way to look at things is to see that the cyanobacteria essentially made the Earth's atmosphere toxic with their excreted metabolic by-product. Life, however, appears almost infinitely adaptable and so eventually organisms emerged that could make use of the toxic by-product by means of incorporating it into their respiratory process. Today we think of oxygen as essential for life but the truth is that animals have simply learned to make use of what was poison, and plants & fungi have learned to tolerate it despite its corrosive effects.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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