this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
549 points (98.4% liked)

Science Memes

11189 readers
3140 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 160 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (6 children)

Just to put some context:

  • Predatory scorpions a couple feet long
  • Armored millipedes larger than a man; they were probably herbivorous but as the article notes they "would have had few, if any, predators."
  • There is a theory, possibly not real well accepted but it makes sense to me, that trilobites were the creature that way-back-when invented effective predation shortly after evolving vision. (Before which the world was a fairly benign place.) The theory further supposes that the Cambrian Explosion was caused by every other organism on the planet having to scramble not to have their soft blobby flesh munched on at leisure by a limitless army of armored, invulnerable hunters, which they couldn't see or avoid, but who could see and follow them.
[–] Windex007 43 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I salivate whenever I hear about these ancient mega arthropods. Like, gigantic and armoured, whatever. But by modern standards, blind and incredibly stupid. And in that atmosphere you'd be constantly so well oxygenated. I don't know why but I'm convinced these big fucks tasted like lobster.

[–] HappycamperNZ 18 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Sounds like we need to break into a museum with some butter

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

It BELONGS in a CAFETERIA.

[–] ZeffSyde 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Let's hit up the butter museum first.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Get some of that premium bronze age bog better.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

A missed opportunity for a movie called Night at the Museum.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago

Fantastic addition to the conversation, thank you

[–] drmoose 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I really like that theory too. It further expands that vision is what granted us intelligence as creatures coming on land could see significantly further and thus start planning and reacting to distant changes giving birth to modern intelligence. To add, whales developed this intelligence and went back to the ocean to absolutely dominate it.

[–] samus12345 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

This video is really interesting and made me realize what a huge evolutionary advantage it is to be able to remember things - something we take completely for granted, but isn't required to survive.

[–] Live_your_lives 6 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Why do you find that particular theory about the Cambrian Explosion compelling? I assume mankind is putting a similar pressure on many ecosystems today, so shouldn't we be seeing that kind of evolutionary explosion happening now?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Before: All phyla differentiated but all the creatures are soft and blobby and sort of unremarkable
After: All of a sudden there's trilobites everywhere, they can see and some of them hunt, and all creatures everywhere suddenly have all this armor and mobility and a lot of them have spikes

I don't really know (even enough to talk about what might be the competing theories), but it seems like it fits and it doesn't seem all that farfetched. That said, it kind of seems like all the scientists think me and Andrew Parker are wrong though, so IDK.

(Also - I didn't know about this before as it's semi-new, but apparently Anomalocaris also had eyes and hunted, so star power of the trilobites aside maybe those guys were involved as well. I have to say though the timing of the way it's written in Wikipedia makes a little more sense if the sequencing is: Cambrian explosion -> some species turn into predators, as opposed to the other way around)

What humans are doing to the natural world right now is a global extinction event (not much different from has happened a handful of times). It's happening too fast for anything to adapt to except in the most short-term emergency ways. Mostly stuff is just dying.

If we stay around for millions of years doing this same thing then I would expect the biosphere to develop defenses and then rebound into a new equilibrium with defense measures included against what we tend to do to it. Even that outcome wouldn't really be another Cambrian explosion though, because everything before it was so universally blobby and unremarkable. That is actually exactly why I like this theory -- the clear lack of a certain type of selection pressure before the explosion happened is as much as part of the theory (there must have been something missing from the threat matrix that suddenly arrived, and what was that thing?) as what things looked like after the Cambrian.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

It is happening now but evolution takes a long time. If there were a ton of adaptations that happened in the next 10,000 years, that would be incredibly fast on an evolutionary timescale

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Humans have only been dominant for a few thousand years. Give it like a million for enough evolution to happen and then ask this question again.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

!remindme 1 million years ask this question again

[–] Diplomjodler3 8 points 7 months ago

Just give it another million years or so.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Humans are blitzkrieging the troposphere. Nothing could hope to evolve fast enough except fungi and bacteria I guess

[–] samus12345 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

trilobites were the creature that way-back-when invented effective predation shortly after evolving vision.

The fact that their closet living relative, the horseshoe crab, has remained pretty much unchanged for up to 480 million years lends credence to the idea that their design works very well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

anomalocaris anomalocaris anomalocaris

anomalocaris