Recent extinction findings a puzzle?
| May 8, 2012 | Posted by News under extinction, News |
Extinction seems to be in the news a lot lately; must be TV pilot ratings, or by-elections, or something. 
From “Not Always Safety in Numbers When It Comes to Extinction Risk” (ScienceDaily, May 8, 2012), we learn,
A basic tenet underpinning scientists’ understanding of extinction is that more abundant species persist longer than their less abundant counterparts, but a new University of Georgia study reveals a much more complex relationship.
A team of scientists analyzed more than 46,000 fossils from 52 sites and found that greater numbers did indeed help clam-like brachiopods survive the Ordovician extinction, which killed off approximately half of Earth’s life forms some 444 million years ago. Surprisingly, abundance did not help brachiopod species persist for extended periods outside of the extinction event.
Some years ago, paleontologist David M. Raup, a specialist in extinction, wrote Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), in which he raised the question whether some extinctions are caused by genetic flaws in the life form, rather than by changes in the ecology.
He felt this was worth looking at, especially in cases like the trilobites where, for example, they all went extinct.
Many recent studies of extinction by paleobiologists are coming out with findings that are contrary to what we see in modern environments and sometimes even contrary to what other paleontologists see in other geologic eras,” he said. “I think this is why paleobiology is so important-it’s the only way for us to examine ecology at multiple points in the Earth’s history, when perhaps the environmental and biological settings were different enough that even our most intuitive expectations don’t hold.”
In other words, Raup might have been right.
4 Responses to Recent extinction findings a puzzle?
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i.e. Darwinism predicted animal speciation should happen on a somewhat constant basis on earth. Theism predicted man was the last species created on earth – Man himself is the last generally accepted major fossil form to have suddenly appeared in the fossil record. -
Notes on trilobite fossils:
Trilobites also give evidence, contra Darwin, of extreme complexity appearing very early in the fossil record
This following video, which was made somewhat tongue in cheek, which gives a very small glimpse of the utter confusion we should ‘naturally’ expect to see for life on earth if evolution were actually true instead of the nice neat ‘symbiotic and interdependent’ web of life we actually see:
There never were extinctions .
All fossils below the k-t line were froim death during the flood year.
So these accountings are worthless.
One does not know something is extinct now or in the past.
They simply look and find and don’t find creatures in strata levels and conclude extinction occurred.
Yet if the fossil record is so poor to justify allowance for lack of intermediates then how can one be confident of conclusions about these extinctions and rates?
Nevertheless its all about drawing hard and fast biological conclusions from geological boundary’s.
Without the geology there is no evolution as taught.
One would say the undercutting of geology would destroy the biology yet why must one do this/
why should biology be allowed to prove its conclusions upon a unrelated subject.??
Its a cheat and allows the biological evidence to escape biological criticism.
its a flaw in the logic of scientific investigation.
J. Sanford, in Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, uses the principles of population genetics to show that from the moment a species comes into being, the individuals in each succeeding generation accumulate mutations which they pass on to their offspring. He shows, again using population genetics, that the vast majority of these mutations are very mildly deleterious, so that any one of them will have little or no effect on survivability, and thus will not be able to be selected out, but that as they accumulate in the genomes of the species, the cumulative effect after many, many generations becomes lethal. This is why each species in the fossil record lasts on average a few million years and then abruptly disappears.
It’s a well thought out and supported thesis, and it is absolutely devastating to the Darwinian hypothesis. I regard it, along with irreducible complexity and the problem of the origin of biological information, as one of the three absolute crushers of the neo-Darwinian synthesis.
If the Cambrian Explosion is evidence of Intelligent Design, could not also extinctions be evidence of Intelligent Design? That is, as a nematode develops from an egg cell to an adult of just under 1000 cells, there are some 100 cells that must die for the adult to form. It’s called apoptosis, programmed cell death.
So if there be a symmetry between the development of an organism, and the development of the Earth, would not mass extinctions correspond to apoptosis? If trilobites were the garbage collectors of the Cambrian when oxygen was in short supply and might be exhausted on decomposition of organics, why shouldn’t they go extinct when oxygen levels made their job superfluous?
Can’t an intelligent designer also design in planned obsolescence?