Evolutionary Leaps/ Great Extinctions

[paigetheoracle]

Could the great extinctions of animals and evoltionary leaps be equal but opposite to each other?

 

What I'm thinking is that could both of the processes be like the way transport developments over the ages, lead to changes within society itself and its structural bounds? For instance when all men could do was walk, cultural progress was slow but improvements in wheeled vehicles as well as their invention, led to better exchange of information between isolated groups (Horse drawn supplies/ bulk group travel as well as individual riders). Steam speeded up the process further, not only travel (trains) but heavy farming/short haulage (steam engines too slow for distance work but relieving the need for 'man'power ) and of course the creation of industry ('Plants' as opposed to 'Iron Horses'). Petrol engines of course not only speeded up overground travel but allowed it to individuate (personal transport), take to the skies in a way steam couldn't (fly like the birds/insects) and further improve sea travel and train services (Before steam' water travel was dependent on the vagaries of the wind).

 

I've deliberately drawn parallels with life forms to show that as circumstances change, old ways are abandoned in favour of the new. When oil runs out a new way of movement will arise, leading to the extinction of the old, outdated 'form' of transport we now know, just as youth supercedes the old automatically. No dinosaurs, no cars - new mammals, new conditions of life.

[Buffy]

You might want to check out Stephen Jay Gould's writings on Punctuated Equilibrium. This is not really a strange claim: shocks to the system that can cause great extinctions are in fact highly correllated with rapid evolutionary advances. Means "necessity is the mother of invention."

 

Adapt or die,

Buffy

[Eclogite]

Could the great extinctions of animals and evoltionary leaps be equal but opposite to each other?

Extinctions occur, let us say, for two reasons:

a) The environment changes in a way that makes it impossible for the species to survive. All members of the species perish. This occurs over many generations. The environmental change may be physical, or it may be related to the appearance of a new predator, or competitor, or the disapperance of food source.

:evil: As above, but one sub-set of the species evolves into a new species.

c) As for a), but the environmental change effects all, or many other life forms.

 

Only form c) appears to fit your category of great extinction.

 

In this instance it is the extinction, by some external event, that leads to an explosion of evolutionary novelty as life forms seek to fill ecological niches that have been emptied by some catastrophe.