Recent die-offs from a viral wasting disease in starfish along the Pacific coast of North America seem to have resulted from complex external processes, including ocean warming. Sea star wasting disease also hit starfish in cool waters off the coast of Oregon, calling the role of a single cause like warmer temperature into question.
New research also suggests a need for multiple hypotheses to explain dinosaur extinction. Dinosaurs seemed to be in decline during the late Cretaceous before a ten-kilometer-wide comet or asteroid punched the Chicxulub Crater into the Yucatan Peninsula. The extinction event also punched holes in Earth’s ecological niches, but not permanently. Nature abhors a vacuum, you know.
About ten million years after the dinosaur demise, primates began to populate the planet. They proliferated in forests under global warmth that lasted until the early Oligocene, and then multiple external circumstances changed their evolutionary direction according to K. Christopher Beard of the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute. Earth’s tectonic activity and other complex causes shifted the planet into a cooling and drying trend. Primate species adapted in part by moving west- and southwestward from once forested areas in Asia. During the stressful environmental changes new species arose, and, well, here you are, one of the replacements.
Die-offs and speciation are the way Nature keeps renewing itself. I know. This is too teleological to be scientific, but don’t you wonder sometimes whether or not there isn’t some Indifferent Law of Demise and Renewal? Many species succumb, and others take their places. Under this law Nature affords either a recovery of starfish or an eventual replacement in their role of eating mussels along the West Coast. Otherwise, mussels proliferate unchecked, defying another law: No organism proliferates long without some kind of limitation. Most such limitations are imposed from the outside.
For starfish the imposed limitation is a virus enhanced by multiple circumstances that we might be able to identify. For dinosaurs the limiting circumstances of extinction will be shrouded in some mystery. Yet, like today’s starfish disaster, the demise of dinosaurs was probably a complex merging of external forces.
In contrast to the recently estimated trillion species that now inhabit Earth and the probable trillions that preceded all our co-inhabitants, our own species seems bent on destruction from within. Nature doesn’t have to contribute. For our own demise we don’t seem to need an outside agent though such agents, such as bacteria, viruses, earthquakes, volcanoes, storms, and even asteroids, abound.
Murder and war.
Need I say more?
If there is an Indifferent Law of Demise and Renewal, it serves no species in particular. Renewal is a matter of filling niches. We vacate the planet; some other organisms take our place just as some new species will feed on mussels once eaten by starfish and just as primates underwent speciation that led to us. Nature does its thing—blindly. Kind of ironic that of trillions of organisms that have inhabited the planet only one seems to be not only capable of willful self-destruction, but also willing to self-destruct. Nature abhors a vacuum. Humans seem to desire one.
New research also suggests a need for multiple hypotheses to explain dinosaur extinction. Dinosaurs seemed to be in decline during the late Cretaceous before a ten-kilometer-wide comet or asteroid punched the Chicxulub Crater into the Yucatan Peninsula. The extinction event also punched holes in Earth’s ecological niches, but not permanently. Nature abhors a vacuum, you know.
About ten million years after the dinosaur demise, primates began to populate the planet. They proliferated in forests under global warmth that lasted until the early Oligocene, and then multiple external circumstances changed their evolutionary direction according to K. Christopher Beard of the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute. Earth’s tectonic activity and other complex causes shifted the planet into a cooling and drying trend. Primate species adapted in part by moving west- and southwestward from once forested areas in Asia. During the stressful environmental changes new species arose, and, well, here you are, one of the replacements.
Die-offs and speciation are the way Nature keeps renewing itself. I know. This is too teleological to be scientific, but don’t you wonder sometimes whether or not there isn’t some Indifferent Law of Demise and Renewal? Many species succumb, and others take their places. Under this law Nature affords either a recovery of starfish or an eventual replacement in their role of eating mussels along the West Coast. Otherwise, mussels proliferate unchecked, defying another law: No organism proliferates long without some kind of limitation. Most such limitations are imposed from the outside.
For starfish the imposed limitation is a virus enhanced by multiple circumstances that we might be able to identify. For dinosaurs the limiting circumstances of extinction will be shrouded in some mystery. Yet, like today’s starfish disaster, the demise of dinosaurs was probably a complex merging of external forces.
In contrast to the recently estimated trillion species that now inhabit Earth and the probable trillions that preceded all our co-inhabitants, our own species seems bent on destruction from within. Nature doesn’t have to contribute. For our own demise we don’t seem to need an outside agent though such agents, such as bacteria, viruses, earthquakes, volcanoes, storms, and even asteroids, abound.
Murder and war.
Need I say more?
If there is an Indifferent Law of Demise and Renewal, it serves no species in particular. Renewal is a matter of filling niches. We vacate the planet; some other organisms take our place just as some new species will feed on mussels once eaten by starfish and just as primates underwent speciation that led to us. Nature does its thing—blindly. Kind of ironic that of trillions of organisms that have inhabited the planet only one seems to be not only capable of willful self-destruction, but also willing to self-destruct. Nature abhors a vacuum. Humans seem to desire one.
RSS Feed