Don’t Blame Meteors

Earlier this month a very surprising paper was published in the journal Nature. Using machine learning, two researchers have upended the standard narrative that giant extinction events (resulting from things like meteors + ensuing climate changes) were the cause of major expansions in biological diversity. The previous understanding was that these extinction events cleared the decks, so to speak, making room for new species to emerge.

Instead, by crunching the data, they found that extinction events and diversity events were decoupled in time.

In contrast to narratives that emphasize post-extinction radiations, we find that the proportionally most comparable mass radiations and extinctions (such as the Cambrian explosion and the end-Permian mass extinction) are typically decoupled in time, refuting any direct causal relationship between them. Moreover, in addition to extinctions, evolutionary radiations themselves cause evolutionary decay (modelled co-occurrence probability and shared fraction of species between times approaching zero), a concept that we describe as destructive creation.

Wow.

A good article about the paper is in SciTech Daily.