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Oct. 7th, 2006
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Evolution and Ediacarans.
Oct. 7th, 2006 02:52 pmYeah, that's a pretty profound topic for me to touch on, huh?
I read a lot. At the moment I'm making my way through a book called "Captured By Aliens" by Joel Achenbach. Don't get excited - it's not about alien abduction. In fact it's a skeptical journalist's account of the culture built up about both UFOlogy and man's search for extraterrestrial life forms.
In this book is mentioned the Ediacarans. They're a bunch of life forms (those pretty little life FORMS! - er... sorry) that lived in the early Cambrian era. Now, I've read a lot that they fall in line with the evolution of animals, that they're definitely animals and that they're sort of early annelids (worms). But I read in this book that there's a dude called Mark McMenamin who has a theory that these Ediacarans aren't animals at all, that they're a separate form of life, like plants, animals and fungi are all different. This theory rather neatly explains why Ediacarans fossilise so easily compared to the soft-bodied worms of today. However, there weren't the same ecosystems back then. Maybe there weren't the same creatures around to gobble them up?
If McMenamin's theory can be proved true, it's got some pretty awesome implications as to how inventive life is when evolving. Ediacarans were starting to develop nerve bundles at one end of their bodies - rudiementary brains. If these unrelated creatures were developing this, then it developed independently *twice* in the Earth's history. Does that mean that complex life isn't just a jinx, that it is, in fact, inevitable when certain proteins start fraternising with each other?
It's definitely food for thought.
I read a lot. At the moment I'm making my way through a book called "Captured By Aliens" by Joel Achenbach. Don't get excited - it's not about alien abduction. In fact it's a skeptical journalist's account of the culture built up about both UFOlogy and man's search for extraterrestrial life forms.
In this book is mentioned the Ediacarans. They're a bunch of life forms (those pretty little life FORMS! - er... sorry) that lived in the early Cambrian era. Now, I've read a lot that they fall in line with the evolution of animals, that they're definitely animals and that they're sort of early annelids (worms). But I read in this book that there's a dude called Mark McMenamin who has a theory that these Ediacarans aren't animals at all, that they're a separate form of life, like plants, animals and fungi are all different. This theory rather neatly explains why Ediacarans fossilise so easily compared to the soft-bodied worms of today. However, there weren't the same ecosystems back then. Maybe there weren't the same creatures around to gobble them up?
If McMenamin's theory can be proved true, it's got some pretty awesome implications as to how inventive life is when evolving. Ediacarans were starting to develop nerve bundles at one end of their bodies - rudiementary brains. If these unrelated creatures were developing this, then it developed independently *twice* in the Earth's history. Does that mean that complex life isn't just a jinx, that it is, in fact, inevitable when certain proteins start fraternising with each other?
It's definitely food for thought.
