The analogy between airconditioning and warm bloodedness

Earlier, from unicellular organisms to multicellular invertebrates to fish to amphibians to reptiles, all animals could not control the temperature in their bodies. It used to dance with the rhythms of the days and the seasons.

These animals would become sluggish when its cold, and active when its warm. They were productivity used to alternate with temperature. These animals are called cold blooded.

Enter the beta version: "Mammals". Mammals used a larger part of the energy they gained by eating, into keeping their body temperatures constant at 37.5. So they were able to tremendously increase productivity.
Why? because all enzymes and catalyst in our body's effectiveness, reduces "exponentially" with reducing temperature.

This had an even more significant effect. Only if temperature is kept constant at 37.5, complex brains can be developed. So, without this "airconditioning" of the body, my brain wouldnt exist to enable you to read a complex article written by an over active brain.

How is it suddenly that mammals evolved warm bloodness? Through evolutionary randomness one may say. However we have to remember that the disolved oxygen in water does not hold enough energy to allow any animal to be warm blooded. Let us examine this.

A snake eats only one meal in a month. Would you be able to survive on one meal a month? Keeping your body airconditioned (or warm blooded) keeps enormous stress on your body to power this airconditioning. The body constantly increases metabolism to keep it at 37.5 C which is normally way about outside temperature. Even a fat person with slow metabolism will consume much much more energy than a repilian counter part with the same body mass.

In order to metabolise all that food, the oxygen dissolved in water would just not be enough. Hence coming to the open air on land was a prerequisite for warm bloodedness and developing a complex brain like we do.

Is this extravagent spending of energy justified? Lets remember that there are more ants in the world than humans even today. How effective the genes of our species is a function of future events. Inspite of ants having such a simple body (compared to humans), they are much more in number. This goes for rice crop, as well as the trillions of uni cellular organisms in the world.

However, let us hope that through diversification, and shifting homes to other planets we as humans are able to survive into the long term.
Possibly conditions for radical changes in evolution are not possible on earth due to the absense of a mystery chemical X. If we were able to explore the universe, we would be able to find out. It would also provide back up for the species. If one planet is destroyed we have another. But whether the human species will genetically remain the same is again doubtful :)

In short "Who cares" like the buddha said