Rethinking the Cambrian 17 Mar 200818 Sep 2017 Ever since Gould’s Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, the popular view has been that the Cambrian was an “explosion” of living forms, and for some, usually but not always creationists, this has been touted as contrary to “Darwinism” (whateverthehell that is) or even evolutionary theory. PvM at Panda’s Thumb has a nice post about this and recent work. And I’m not just saying that because he links to one of my articles on the web. One point I would make, that he doesn’t mention, is that figures derived from “genera” or “classes” in the fossil record are weak signals about actual diversity at best, because both are incommensurable across the tree of life and are purely conventional artifacts. So it may be even better than PvM says, because the metrics used to identify diversity at that time are flawed. Evolution Species and systematics
Evolution Visualising Darwin 6 Sep 2009 PZ Macrabbit has already mentioned this, but I thought I’d pile on: it’s a Javascript utility that shows you how Darwin edited the six editions of the Origin over the course of his life, by Ben Fry, who lets you download the program Processing (now that’s a name!) for free…. Read More
Book FAPP on the doorstep 12 May 2010 My copy of What Darwin Got Wrong by Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini has arrived and was waiting at the door for me this AM. God the British mail system is fast to Australia! Now I owe a series of posts on Rossano’s book first, but perhaps I will read FAPP on… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity A code for area names 18 Jun 2008 One of the most important documents published in zoology in the 19th century was in fact a rather mundane one: The Strickland Code: Hugh. E. Strickland, John Phillips, John Richardson, Richard Owen, Leonard Jenyns, William J. Broderip, John S. Henslow, William E. Shuckard, George R. Waterhouse, William Yarrell, Charles R…. Read More
While it may seem sudden, many trace fossils suggest a longer history before fossils of large conspicuous organisms become obvious. The oldest macrofossil I have heard of is a small seaweed, perhaps of red algal affinities, but it’s dated to 2.1 gya, which greatly predates the Cambrian explosion (Han & Runnegar, 1992, Science, 257:232). So organisms were playing around with being larger than plankton way before the Cambrian. Oh, but wait, this isn’t an animal, so maybe it doesn’t count.