[extropy-chat] Extinctions past and future

[Robert Bradbury]

The NY Times has an interesting commentary [1] on a recent Science paper
[2]. The net of it is that the Permian-Triassic Extinction event [3] 251
million years ago eliminated a significant majority of species and forced
most of those that remained into a "mobile" framework to find food.  This
ultimately lead to much of the animal diversity you see on the planet
today.  I.e. were it not for this event animals (and you and I) might not
exist.  The species that remained as "plants" (immobile) adapted to this by
evolving increasingly complex genomes.  Most people don't realize it but
complex plant genomes are *larger* than animal genomes.  The lack of
mobility drove a diversification at the genome level -- you have to evolve
genes to deal with whatever nature (weather, fungi, insects, birds, etc.)
throws at you where you stand.  One can argue that mobility enables genomic
simplicity.

Now, species at the time were incapable of forward thought.  Astrophysical
processes handed them a wakeup call and they adapted as best they could.
*We* on the other hand see the future coming.  *We* have very good ideas as
to how it will evolve towards the limits allowed by physics.  But "we" are
1000 people out of 6 billion [4].  One must ask whether another "great
dying" (to quote the NYT) is coming [5] and whether mobility is the path to
survival or whether like the plants we can evolve ourselves to a point where
"U can't touch this." [6]?

Robert

1. Revkin, AC, "Marine Life Leaped From Simple to Complex After Greatest
Mass Extinction", NY Times (26 Nov 2006)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/science/28mari.html?pagewanted=print
2. Wagner, PJ et al, "Abundance distributions imply elevated complexity of
post-Paleozoic marine ecosystems",
Science 314:1289-92 (24 Nov 2006)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=17124319&itool=pubmed_docsum
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_extinction
4. I'm making this number up.  It would be *nice* if the "powers that be"
would post the number of subscribers to the ExICh list in the monthly
summary!
5. Those over 60 not signed up for cryonics are dead.  Those under 40 are
probably guaranteed a seat unless something really bad happens (an AGI
overlord perhaps?).  For those of us in between its luck-of-the-draw.
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Can't_Touch_This<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Can%27t_Touch_This>
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