See Gould's book "Wonderful Life" for an informative and entertaining account of his theories on convergent evolution and the misconception that evolution is continually working to increase complexity. Much of what Gould presents is probably true, but not all of his evidence and theories are completely accepted. While there are plenty of examples of convergent evolution, it's reasonable to assume that certain new traits, such as the ability to use chlorophyll for photosynthesis or sexual differentiation, gave the lucky organism such an advantage that it quickly evolved and spread to fill new and existing niches. In cases such as these, it's likely that the watershed evolutionary event happened only once, and all organisms that exhibit that trait are descendents of that first species. Whether a primitive proto-backbone gave such an advantage is really hard to tell, given the scant fossil records available.
Sig: not found
The important point here is that they were able to use the two Keck "big guns" together to simulate the resolution of a much bigger telescope. Until recently, only bright stars were bright enough to make these sort of observations. The Keck and ESO interferometers are light-years ahead both because of their large mirrors and because they're using advanced image correction via small, flexible mirrors to correct for the distortion caused by our atmosphere. This makes the light train much more coherent and makes it much easier to get good interference patterns. Therefore they can observe much fainter objects.
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See Gould's book "Wonderful Life" for an informative and entertaining account of his theories on convergent evolution and the misconception that evolution is continually working to increase complexity. Much of what Gould presents is probably true, but not all of his evidence and theories are completely accepted. While there are plenty of examples of convergent evolution, it's reasonable to assume that certain new traits, such as the ability to use chlorophyll for photosynthesis or sexual differentiation, gave the lucky organism such an advantage that it quickly evolved and spread to fill new and existing niches. In cases such as these, it's likely that the watershed evolutionary event happened only once, and all organisms that exhibit that trait are descendents of that first species. Whether a primitive proto-backbone gave such an advantage is really hard to tell, given the scant fossil records available. Sig: not found
The important point here is that they were able to use the two Keck "big guns" together to simulate the resolution of a much bigger telescope. Until recently, only bright stars were bright enough to make these sort of observations. The Keck and ESO interferometers are light-years ahead both because of their large mirrors and because they're using advanced image correction via small, flexible mirrors to correct for the distortion caused by our atmosphere. This makes the light train much more coherent and makes it much easier to get good interference patterns. Therefore they can observe much fainter objects.