| Re: Evolution's Slow Recovery |
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Group: sci.bio.evolution · Group Profile
Author: johnwl4johnwl4 Date: Nov 26, 2006 12:46
> Evolution's Slow Recovery
> By: Stephen Hart
>
> (snip)> What they're aiming to do is to build up a database that not only
> records the first and last occurrence of each species, but also
> catalogues all the places and all the points in geological time that
> those fossils are found, so that you can begin to put together the
> global patterns of who and where and when. And then, hopefully, from
> these patterns we'll learn something about the really big questions,
> the how' and the why.'"
Can't claim to have read the above very carefully, mostly because one
obvious criticism of the data occurs to me, one that I don't believe is
mentioned. So I'll still critisize it. The long times to recovery may
be partly due to the physical situation continuing that caused the
extinction in the first place. After the Permian, for example, Cindy
Looey has documented that the only spores were those of quillwort,
which can reproduce by apomixis, and that these spores were in the
tetrad stage. Something was causing the spores and pollen to remain
in this stage. Perhaps halogen gases were destroying the ozone layer.
So the time to recovery would be affected by the the physical world,
as well as the genetic library surviving.
Regards
John GW
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