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    Ahsan Tebha
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    Aristocratic geologist discovered that the first stocking of the oceans did not occur gradually with the successive addition of ever more complex forms of life. To murchison, a devout creationist writing in the 1830s, this episode could only represent God's initial decision to populate the earth. Murchison's observation reflects a biological reality, not the imperfections of geologic evidence.

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    Aristocratic geologist discovered that the first stocking of the oceans did not occur gradually with the successive addition of ever more complex forms of life. To murchison, a devout creationist writing in the 1830s, this episode could only represent God's initial decision to populate the earth. Murchison's observation reflects a biological reality, not the imperfections of geologic evidence.

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    268 views8 pages

    Sigmoid Fraud (For Quiz)

    Uploaded by

    Ahsan Tebha
    Aristocratic geologist discovered that the first stocking of the oceans did not occur gradually with the successive addition of ever more complex forms of life. To murchison, a devout creationist writing in the 1830s, this episode could only represent God's initial decision to populate the earth. Murchison's observation reflects a biological reality, not the imperfections of geologic evidence.

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    15 Is the Cambrian Explosion a Sigmoid Fraud? From: Gould, Stephen Jay, 1977, Ever Since Darwin, W.W. Norton and Co., New York. RopERICK MURCHISON, urged on by his wife, gave up the joys of fox hunting for the more sublime pleasures of scientific research, This aristocratic geologist * devoted much of his second career to documenting the early history of life. He discovered that the first stocking of the oceans did not occur gradually with the successive addition of ever more complex forms of life. Instead, most major Broups seemed to arise simultaneously at what geologists now call the base of the Cambrian period some 600 million years ago. To Murchison, a devout creationist writing in the 1830s, this episode could only represent God’s initial deci- sion to populate the earth. Charles Darwin viewed this observation with trepidation. He assumed, as evolution demanded, that the seas had “swarmed with living creatures” before the Cambrian pe- riod. To explain the absence of fossils in the earlier geologic record, he apologetically speculated that our modern conti- nents accumulated no sediments during Precambrian times because they were covered by clear seas. Our modern view synthesizes these two opinions. Darwin, of course, has been vindicated in his cardinal contention: Cambrian life did arise from otganic antecedents, not from the hand of God. But Murchison's basic observation reflects a biological reality, not the imperfections of geologic evi- dence: the Precambrian fossil record is little mare (save at its very end) than 2.5 billion years of bacteria and blue-green 126 jerome: THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOS!-~N| 127 algac. Complex life did arise with startling speca near the base of the Cambrian. (Readers must remember that geolo- gists have a peculiar view of rapidity. By vernacular stan- dards, it is a slow fuse indeed that burns for 10 million years, Still, 10 million years is but 1/450 of the earth’s history, a mere instant to a geologist.) Paleontologists have spent a largely fruitless century trying to explain this Cambrian “‘explosion"—the steep rise in di- versity during the first 10 to 20 million years of the Cambrian period. (see essay 14). They have assumed, universally, that the puzzling event is the explosion itself. Any adequate the- ory, therefore, would have to explain why the early Cambrian was such an unusual time: perhaps it represents the first accumulation of sufficient atmospheric oxygen for respira- tion, or the cooling down of an earth previously too hot to support complex life (simple algae survive at much higher temperatures than complex animals), or a change in oceanic chemistry permitting the deposition of calcium carbonate to clothe previously soft-bodied animals with preservable skele- tons. T now sense that a fundamental change in attitude is about to take hold within my profession. Perhaps we have been looking at this important problem the wrong way round. Perhaps the explosion itself was merely the predictable out- come of a process inexorably set in motion by an earlier Precambrian event. In such a case, we would not have to believe that early Cambrian times were “special” in any way; the cause of the explosion would be sought in an earlier event that initiated the evolution of complex life. I have recently been persuaded that this new perspective is probably correct. The pattern of the Cambrian explosion seems to follow a general law of growth. This law predicts a phase of steep acceleration; the explosion is no more fundamental (or in need of special explanation) than its antecedent period of slower growth or its subsequent leveling off. Whatever initi- ated the antecedent period virtually guaranteed the later ex- plosion as well. In support of this new perspective, I offer two arguments based on a quantification of the fossil record. I hope not only to make my particular case but also to illustrate A98|EVER SINCE DARWIN ure role that quantification can play in testing hypotheses within professions that once eschewed such rigor. The day-to-day work of field geology is a painstaking exer- cise in apparent minutiae of detail: the mapping of strata; their temporal correlation by fossils and by physical “‘super- position” (younger above older); the recording of rock types, Grain sizes, and environments of deposition. This activity is often pooh-poohed by hotshot young theorists who regard it as the dog work of unimaginative drones. Yet we would have no science without the foundation that these data provide. In this case, our revised perspective on the Cambrian explosion rests upon a refinement of early Cambrian stratigraphy es- tablished primarily by Soviet geologists in recent years. The long Lower Cambrian has been subdivided into four stages and the first appearances of Cambrian fossils have becn re- corded with much greater accuracy. We can now tabulate a finely divided sequence of first appearances where previous stratigraphers could only record “Lower Cambrian” for all groups (thus accentuating the apparent explosion). J.J. Sepkoski, a paleontologist at the University of Roches- ter, has recently found that a plot of increasing organic diver- sity versus time from the late Precambrian to the end of the “explosion” conforms to our most general model of growth —the so-called sigmoidal (S-shaped) curve. Consider the growth of a typical bacterial colony on a previously uninhab- ited medium: each cell divides every twenty minutes to form two daughters. Increase in population size is slow at first. (Rates of cell division are as fast as they will ever be, but founding cells are few in number and the population builds slowly toward its explosive period.) This “lag” phase forms the initial, slowly rising segment of the sigmoidal curve. The explosive, or “‘log,”’ phase follows as each cell ofa substantial population produces two fecund daughters every twenty minutes. Clearly this process cannot continue indefinitely: a not-too-distant extrapolation would fill the entire universe with bacteria. Eventually, the colony guarantees its own sta- bility (or demise) by filling its space, exhausting its nutrients, fouling its nest with waste products, and so on. This leveling puts a ceiling on the log phase and completes the S of the sigmoidal distribution. THE CAMBRIAN EXPLASION | 129 It is a long step from bacteria to the evoluusn of life, but sigmoidal growth is a general property of certain systems, and the analogy seems to hold in this case. For cell division, read speciation; for the agar substrate of a laboratory dish, read the oceans. The lag phase of life is the slow, initial rise of latest Precambrian times. (We now have a modest fauna of latest Precambrian age—mainly coelenterates {soft corals and jellyfish] and worms.) The famous Cambrian explosion is nothing more than the log phase of this continuous pro- cess, while post-Cambrian leveling represents the initial filling of ecological roles in the world’s oceans (terrestrial life evolved later). A bypical sigmoidal (S-shaped) curve. Note slow beginning (lag phase), middle period of rapid increase (log phase) and final tapering off 130 |E-

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