Alan Byers -- Humbling Humanity скачать в хорошем качестве

Alan Byers -- Humbling Humanity

Former Burgess Shale tour guide and BCHA member Alan Byers talks about "inevitability" and "progress" as misnomers in the evolution of life. From Alan: The Burgess Shale teaches us a great deal of things about early life, containing the immaculately well-preserved remains of Cambrian (~600 million year old) fossils. This knowledge of early life, in turn, lends us a less naive perspective about modern life. I want to talk about the three ways it does this: 1. It teaches us "primitive" doesn't mean much. We carry with us the assumption that "primitive" or early animals aught to be simpler, less refined, less functional than their modern relatives. I'll look at a Burgess Shale animal or two that shows this simply isn't the case: between the fantastic resolution of trilobite eyes to Yohoia's grasping "great" appendages, it can be shown there isn't some grand "march of progress" in the history of life; animals have always been able to create specialized solutions to their immediate pressures, and never toward any objective notion of "perfection". 2. Survival of the "fittest" isn't what many think it is. For one, as stated above, it's only ever a blind response to immediate concerns; animals better fitted to their local environments are not objectively "better" than others. In other words, "progress" in evolution is a misnomer. Second, massive, catastrophic extinction events have also had a great deal of influence on why we see the animals we do today. You can be fit and specialized for your local environment, but when a meteor comes along, which animals survive may come down more to luck. This follows into point 3. 3. Anomalocaris was far and away the most specialized, "fit" predator in the Cambrian ocean, while the early chordate Pikaia, a rare, small, free-swimming slug-thing, wasn't particularly successful-looking at all. Chordates, however, now rule the planet in the form of humans, while dinocarids like Anomalocaris have long since disappeared. Why? Because No matter how fit a predator you are, you're no more equipped to deal with catastrophic extinction events (like what happened in both the end Cambrian and Permian) than the little slug-thing. This bears a humbling question, one all humanists should ask: how inevitable were we? If we had re-wound and re-played the tape a second time, what's to say that Pikaia would have survived this one? Would humans be walking the planet today? Probably not, but discussion will probably yield some disagreement.