How did Mammals and Birds Survive the End-Cretaceous Event?

Survival of the Fittest

A number of commentators have, over the last few years, expressed a belief that humans will most likely go extinct at their own hands. Or at very least they will revert to primitive behaviors (usually characterized as brutish) coming through a bottleneck by going back to caveman mentalities and actions. These sentiments are certainly understandable from the standpoint that this is the only experience our kind has known as we climbed up from savagery to become domesticated and “civilized.” But this thinking misses some important aspects of the evolution of more intelligent species. In the face of an almost certain collapse of civilization and the prospects of a bottleneck event we might easily think this will propel us backward. But this ignores what has actually happened in previous extinction/bottleneck events. I've been interested in the question of why birds and mammals did so much better during and after the extinction event, 65 million years ago, in terms of survival (as compared with the dinosaurs). Both groups enjoyed a rapid adaptive radiation of species subsequently to give rise to the age of mammals and birds as the dominant mega fauna. Something is going on here that is counter-intuitive. It is a key to claiming that a new bottleneck event for humans might not result in the outcomes so many have expressed as logical. I expect something more promising and I'll tell you why.

The dinosaurs, except for birds, a sub-clade of saurischian dinosaurs, did not survive on Earth. How is it that mammals and many birds did? Of course millions of species and thousands of genera lower in the phylogenetic tree survived as well even though millions more went extinct. The basic rule of evolution is that the fittest organisms (species) will differentially survive and procreate, thus out competing the less fit. But fitness is in reference to the conditions of the environment and econiche of the species. The Earth's hydro and atmospheres have always been in flux. The continents have always been shifting. The local ecologies have always been changing, sometimes rapidly, more often slowly. The more rapid changes are the ones that stress species and provide the major differentiating forces that do the selecting. And then some species are more able to operate under the changed conditions and compete against rivals for the niches available more successfully. Homo sapiens was just such a species, for example out competing the Neanderthals until as recently as 13,000 years before the present, when the latter appear to have died out.

The End-Cretaceous Event appears to have been a fairly abrupt one by geological and climatological standards. The prevailing current hypothesis holds that the event was triggered by an asteroid of sufficient mass slamming into the Yucatan around 65 mybp. Recent evidence adds strength to this hypothesis. The cataclysm had global effect, what we would call a nuclear winter-like phenomenon that so severely altered Earth's climate that the food sources for the dinosaurs died back dramatically and hence the dinosaurs were no longer fit. Selection did the rest.

There are, actually, still many missing pieces of this puzzle. The universality of dinosaurian extinction, except for the bird clade, would seem to require more explanation than this asteroid impact scenario can convincingly supply. There are competing or at least supplemental hypotheses. Many species of mammals and birds also went extinct. But no dinosaurs other than birds survived. Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain this phenomenon as well. Among them have been the general average sizes of birds and mammals (at the time there were no mammalian megafauna to speak of since all of the large animal econiches were occupied by dinosaurs), which were much smaller than the average dinosaur and that size difference plus metabolic energetics (e.g. body temperature maintenance) gave smaller birds and mammals an advantage (somehow). Other hypotheses involve the fact that most mammals, at the time, were burrowers so might have been protected from the harsher aspects of the climate changes.

Two Major Evolutionary Inventions

All of these hypotheses may work as explanations for mechanisms that helped provide some kinds of fitness to some species. And all of them may help explain a little piece of the phenomena. But there is another possibility that would be more universal for the bird clade and mammals that hinges on two completely new attributes for both groups. One of those explanations hinges on the increased capabilities of brains to process complex models of the environment, a competency shown by both birds and mammals but currently believed to not be the case for non-avian dinosaurs. The other is a more subtle competency that is just now gaining a greater understanding in the theory of evolution and that is the recognition of evolvability as a factor in the resilience of a species in the face of environmental stresses. I have mentioned this phenomenon in other posts.

The first factor involves an animals's behavior to be based more on learned relations with the environment than on instincts. We are still learning about the learning and conceptualizing capacity of birds (see: bird intelligence) but it now appears that many types have much higher cognitive abilities than we had assumed. The mammalian brain is evolved to rely on learning and memory as a major factor in shaping behavior. The cerebral cortex is greatly expanded over what we find in modern reptiles. From studies of dinosaurian brain cases (endocasts) it appears that some dinosaurs may have been evolving more cortex which would suggest they were becoming more intelligent than the general reptiles. But the avian line had already evolved a much larger cortex by the time of the End-Cretaceous event. Aside from flight and generally smaller sizes, what demarks the avian sub-clade is their ability to learn and remember.

The earliest mammals were already showing this expansion of cortex and learning ability. They were likely quite adaptive having to contend with the dominant dinosaurian clade kept them on their toes, so to speak. The key to resilience in both birds and mammals depended on their ability to learn and adapt to changing conditions within broader limits than the dinosaurs and all other genera.

Evolvability

Learning and adaptation, however, were not sufficient to deal with the kinds of radical changes that must have come with the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg, formerly called the K-T for Cretaceous-Tertiary) event. Increased cortical processing power was an initial step in the right direction but too many biological constraints would prevent specific animals from changing their behaviors too much. For example most birds and mammals have a limited range of foods that they can take advantage of. Nevertheless many species show an ability to eat a wider range of foods as compared, for example with fish or reptiles.

But another much less appreciated or understood aspect of evolution has been at work for a long time to help living systems become much more resilient than they would have been under a strictly neo-Darwinian scheme, i.e. random mutation of protein coding genes and natural selection. Evolvability is a property of a species to generate variations that are, in a sense, potentially pre-adaptive. That is, they can increase the rate of mutations, especially in selective genes, that increases the possibilities of advantageous results. This math works best for large population sizes or populations that are growing rapidly. There have to be many more individuals being conceived so that the increased mutation rate doesn't swamp the fitness of the species. This is because, as most people know, mutations are more often deleterious than helpful. There has to be an ability to “waste” individuals that end up with destructive mutations.

On the other hand, the promotion of mutations in selective genes may not actually produce a preponderance of harmful mutations. There are classes of proteins, the targets of genetic codes, that are able to take on many alternate sequences of amino acids without overly changing their basic functions. Indeed some new sequences may bestow completely new functions for the proteins without necessarily diminishing their potency in their primary functions. It seems that there are a large number of genes that are accompanied by DNA segments that “promote” mutations in those genes, perhaps by some kind of epigenetic mechanism. Those DNA segments may be triggered into action by environmental stressors that work through second and tertiary messengers to alter an epigenetic factor such as methylation of that segment. This is all still speculative in terms of exact mechanics, but the logic is beginning to look solid.

Evolvability increases the likelihood of finding a viable genotype/phenotype representative (or actually a small subpopulation of them) quickly in a search of variation space. It is a quick turning on of a higher mutation rate but with a higher probability of producing adaptive variants. Clearly, such a mechanism would be advantageous to the possessors in times of high stress. It turns out that many clear bottleneck events, where the number of individuals is drastically reduced during a radical environmental change, may be explained by the possession of higher evolvability by the species involved.

Evolvability has been evolving. It was actually recognized in a primitive form in bacteria that could adapt to restrictions on nutrients that they had evolved to require in their environments. Deprived of a key nutrient that they could not normally manufacture, but where the precursor components were available, evolved into a population that gained the ability to synthesize the needed nutrient. Not much work had been done on exploring this phenomenon in multicellular organisms as it was barely understood in simple bacteria. But recent developments in understanding the nature of the genetic expression control network of DNA that was previously thought to be “junk” have revived an interest in this. Finding the epigenetic mechanisms along with small RNA molecules that modulate various stages of gene expression, from transcription to interfering with protein construction at the ribosomes (even acting as enzymes — ribozymes — to control proteins directly) in development (see: Evolutionary Development) as well as in response to stresses has opened up some new possibilities. It has given us some attractive ways to explain many curious phenomena in evolution, such as punctuated equilibria. The key is to recognize that mutations do not just affect protein-coding genes but can affect the DNA in the control network as well. Mutations in, for example, a gene expression regulator (see especially: functions of non-coding DNA) could cause a radical but non-lethal change in morphology, the “hopeful monsters” theory of sudden changes in species.

We now have a pretty clear picture of evolution of these control networks even though we haven't yet worked out the details of control. The human genome project really opened everyone's eyes. The question was how could the most complex and intelligent being on the planet have fewer coding genes than animals and plants lower on the phylogenetic tree (only between 20 and 25k protein coding segments)? The answer is that it isn't the number of different proteins that are in the phenotype, but rather the way in which those building blocks and enzymes are used in different tissues, the timing of when they are expressed during development and so on. In other words what makes animals more complex is variations in the control of gene expression. For example my own hypothesis regarding the development of larger Brodmann area 10 patches in human brain evolution, leading to sapience (or presapience) involves some subtle changes in when and for how long certain genes that lead to bigger BA10 as well as possibly changing the cytology of the patch resulted from probably few mutations in the DNA involved in controlling the expression of important genes in brain development.

Now evolvability has more opportunity than just promoting key genes to mutate. It can work by promoting mutations in the control circuitry as well, leading to many more possibilities in generated variation. It turns out that birds and mammals enjoyed an explosion of the use of control circuits in DNA meaning that they might have had this greater advantage compared with the dinosaurs. We can't know what sort of control networks in DNA the dinosaurs sported. But if there is a relation between the extent to which control networks generate greater evolvability in birds and mammals as compared with dinosaurs and the degree to which the brains of the former two groups had exceeded the latter, then we might have a possible answer to why the former survived and the latter didn't. Birds and mammals were actually poised to deal with the cataclysm of the K-Pg event both in terms of greater behavioral adaptability and evolutionary adaptability. The latter did not require the millions of years we ordinarily associate with evolution. Higher evolvability and resulting saltation would have rapidly produced variants that were more fit. Furthermore, as conditions settled down from the worst just after the event, these mechanisms could explain rapid evolution to fill the developing econiches in adaptive radiation.

Evolvable Humans

And that brings me to considerations for humanity's future going into a likely bottleneck event of our own making. As the understanding of EvoDevo and the human genome deepens it seems the evidence points ever more strongly toward the idea that we are a super-evolvable species! We have actually seen rapid evolutionary developments in the human species over the past 20- to 100 thousand years of our existence. I've written elsewhere about these so will not dwell on it. The bottom line is that the future of humans may not be as bleak as the more common beliefs would have it.

First consider that the natural variation in our populations for traits such as intelligence and sapience is already pretty high. Humans have been under mental stress since the invention of agriculture, which means what evolvability we have has already been at work for at least 10k years. There are some in our very midst who are pre-adapted for the kind of radical changes we expect to see before long. And they haven't been sitting idle waiting for the worst to hit. There are many people who seem to me to have higher than average sapience who are already considering what they have to do to survive and thrive even in the nightmare scenarios we've come to expect. Also, it is not likely that they are going to expose their plans so you may never hear of them!

I fully expect that a race of highly sapient individuals will go into and emerge from the bottleneck and provide the seed for a new species (or even more than one!) of eusapients someday. Earth isn't over. Nor is sentient life on this planet. Life evolved for more than 3½ billion years and as it did, it learned a few handy tricks from a wide variety of past cataclysms. Evolvability has improved over that time. I feel pretty comfortable with letting nature takes its course in the future. It isn't over for the planet and it isn't over for the naked ape.

Comments

[John Wheeler]

It's pretty logical that when cataclysmic but predictable event occurs, those who can predict and prepare or who can learn and adapt will have a great advantage for survival.

I wouldn't be so sure that those with higher than average sapience are not broadcasting their plans, just not in a way that those with average sapience can comprehend.

[monsta666]

Question is will the people of above average sapience reproduce sufficiently to become the dominant trait in the population? I could easily seeing people with high sapience predicting the event and thus their chances of survival will increase but that is not enough. They need to reproduce also.

It seems to me that people of high sapience tend to produce less offspring (perhaps this is because they know what is coming) yet it is this behaviour or non-behaviour that can limit this groups long-term future. The less sapient, less aware members of society tend to reproduce more furthermore it is likely these members will increase birth rates even higher when the offspring are seen to become an asset (as opposed to a liability seen today). This transformation of the value of children is likely to occur as various public services such as pensions or hospital care begin to breakdown and so these functions must be filled directly by the parents offspring.

Sure we can argue that the probability of these less sapient population to survive is lower but if there are sufficient numbers of these beings it is likely they would still remain the dominant trait through sheer numbers.

In summary while I could see increased sapience as a distinct possibility in the future I think the jury is still out on that one. Still none of these points negate your main theory and if it were to come into play into the future I think this increased mutation disposition is more likely to express itself through some physical trait where the fittest members are more resilient against diseases or have an increased capacity to eat a wider range of food etc.

[Brian]

Interesting take on why birds and mammals made it through 65 MYA. I had always heard it was because both birds and the mammals that did not go extinct had special breathing apparati, birds can clear almost all the air out of their air sacs while the mammals that survived are missing their lower rib cage. I also wonder the implications on intelligence because of the difference between the fact a filter occurred 65 MYA versus a bottleneck we are about to go through.

My own personal take on intelligence and technology: http://theemergist.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/of-information-and-humans/

[Aboc Zed]

George,

Thanks a lot for this one. Many good points combined make a narrative very convincing. And I learn an aspect of evolutionary process I was not focusing at before.

Thanks again.

@monsta666

Don't forget that 'more sapient' are likely to have better accesss to accumulated knowledge (science) at the moment and it is reasonable to assume that they will be better suited to preserve the knowledge and carry it thru bottleneck event.

When environment becomes harsh and stressful in terms of all the expected climate change, food crisis, desease dissemination and the damaged genetic laboratory of life having more _uneducated_ children may instead of increasing fitness to decrease it.

In this situation those who would respond with more children to the upcoming streess may hasten their own demise by increasing the competition for the limited resources.

Although it is almost certain that the democracy and capitalism as we currently know it will not survive the bottleneck it would be unreasonable to think that hierarchical organization of society and human organism-whole will not go away but insted improves and _evolves_ towards a variant better utilizing _all_ members of the group.

In other words, I think the upcoming bottleneck event will provide environment that will exert pressure onto genus homo pusshing it towards the higher levels of eusociality and the more sapient will be able to mold themselves and their hierarchies faster than less sapient.

Once the environment clears, or once most if not all non-sapient subgroups of genus homo die-off the remaining sapient contigent would be in equilibrium with the whole planetary system of life<->planet<->life gradually learning how not to disterb the balance thru their unique position of being in and outside the bocx at the same time.

The evolutionary pressures of our own making are unlike anything LIFE ever encountered before but in terms of basic mechanism of evolutionary process nothing changed: the fittest will survive and the DNA of other will be recycled by the biota as it has been going on for billions of years.

So, as George said, "It is not over for the planet and it is not over for the naked ape".

The only difference is what would be the level of human population at sustainable level: the faster we learn the higher the numbers we could have later on but none of us could ever come close to actually understand the speed of our species learning on an evolutionary scale simply because the human life time is too short and the bottleneck event has been in the making since the homo sapiens sapiens took its place on the top of the food chain.

[Oliver]

Something deep in the brain stirred and produced a wave of calming sensations when I read Prof. George and Aboc Zed referring authoritatively to "It isn't over for the planet and it isn't over for the naked ape".

When many around the world are either focused on the immediate-term steep downslope for genus Homo, or are simply living in me-now denial, it is stimulating on many levels to contemplate the continuation of sapient evolution at some distant point, rather than a long, long reversion to brute level.

That I myself and probably today's young adults and children and their children will likely only experience the decline, bringing with it at least 'temporary' mayhem and savagery, it is no bad thing to think way ahead to a time when life continues on an incline again.

We are not the center of the universe, we have not so far earned the right to claim species superiority, but evolutionarily we are all playing a part in genetic modification that needs to play out on planet Earth. The sooner we stop dwelling on the dark side of the natural bottleneck that's coming, the more healthy thinking we will add to the pot from which new seeds may flourish.

This is no different from the science fiction plot where it takes a number of generations living and reproducing and dying on a spaceship, complete with dangerous encounters and shocks to the system, before the descendants of descendants arrive at a healthier new world.

[Tom]

First, thanks George for another essay that instructs and enlightens the reader. But:

Here we go again with the "we'll always survive" hubris of human "intelligence" and the vaunted human species. When the air we breathe is so polluted as to cause illness (when Bejing becomes the norm), when the water we need to survive is tainted with bacteria and other organisms that we caused to grow there via dumping waste of all kinds (including pharmaceuticals, tainted blood from medical waste, toxic chemicals from fracking and other industrial by-products, etc.) that are not filtered out through conventional waste treatment, when the land is so depleted of nutrients by over-reliance on petro-fertilizers, non-organic farming, drought and floods that the food produced lacks nutritional value (not to mention taste), CLEARLY the sum total of humanity's actions and inaction (regarding stewardship) indicate that it's all going to end in a decimating collapse that will leave NO human survivors - especially as the planet continues to heat up past the point of plant (ALL VEGETATION), bird, fish and animal (including us) adaptibility (ie. NO FOOD, WATER OR AIR).

Oh, that's not enough? Someone or few MAY survive that? Okay, how about irradiating the planet on an unprecedented scale as all the (over 400) nuclear reactors not completely decommissioned (and all the waste that is being kept in pools), fail all over the world and we get Fukushima times >400?

By the way, now it looks like we're going to screw it up even more with "geo-engineering" plans (to begin in March) to mitigate the very climate change they deny every day!

Lots of luck with that survival of the most sapient dumbasses on the planet, who can breathe oxygen-depleted nanoparticulate-filled air, drink non-existent toxic water, and survive in a completely inhospitable and hostile environment.

Since we've failed to heed the warning signs up til TODAY, and tomorrow we'll still keep doing what got us into this mess in the first place - until we can't - humanity not only won't survive, but doesn't even deserve it! We're the idiots of creation - not the crowning beacon we perceive ourselves to be. Our science and math has been misused, misapplied and co-opted over the centuries to produce the industrial civilization we have now: overpopulated beyond the carrying capacity of the planet, lopsided "wealth" distribution, inadequate stewardship of the environment, non-stop (ever worsening) pollution of all kinds, and greed-induced depletion of all resources.

We can't even overcome our own internal drives, so how are we supposed to suddenly "cooperate" (a long-forgotten attribute we once had) to turn it all around immediately and guarantee that not only we survive, but that the earth can heal itself in short order so that the rest of the species and environmental factors we rely on for our existence aren't terminated? Hint: we CAN'T and WON'T, because faulty, frail, non-sapient HUMANS make the big decisions to KEEP IT THIS WAY!

[Tom]

Forgot to add this for your reading pleasure:

http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-emperor-has-no-clothes.html

[Oliver]

Tom - you make interesting points as always.

By way of castigation, you state: Here we go again with the "we'll always survive" hubris of human "intelligence" and the vaunted human species.

Do you not think that this statement could easily be changed to: Here we go again with the "we'll all be extinct" hubris of human "intelligence" and the vaunted human species.?

Wielding the word hubris as a weapon against my viewpoint is purely judgemental on your part. It could easily be levelled at doomers.

You have misinterpreted my rationale if you believe that I am anthropocentric. I have no egotism about our species. Philosophically, I feel we have had our time in the sun and used it poorly, and it may be time for 'something else' to arise. However, in my prior comments, I am merely theorizing that total extinction may not occur, to us or to plant, bird, fish and animal life, similar to avian dinosaurs (and many other species) surviving the planetary catastrophe that resulted in the extinction of mighty land dinosaurs.

There is room for all our viewpoints. I respect yours. Time will tell, none of us knows for sure, despite the wild claims bandied around by non-scientists. (As I understand it, scientists work with theory, historical and contemporary facts, testing and proof.)

One more point, if I may. What is the purpose of blogging about 'certain disaster', such as the web links you supply? I am confused when I read hardcore doomerism. Is it to influence decision makers in the plutocracy? (Too late) To warn the general public? (Ineffective) To forewarn that it is the End of the World in 'I told you so' terms? (Egotistic) Please teach me.

[Gail]

Assuming mine is one of "certain disaster" websites you refer to, Oliver, I have to say that you have asked a good question. In fact I am probably a bit more pessimistic than even Tom, because from all that I have been able to learn, his idea that cooperation is a "long-forgotten attribute we once had" is very doubtful. The evidence is that on balance our species has always been competitive, even warlike.

Whether you subscribe to the notion that there exists some higher spirit with a benign natural connection to nature that has been severed by agriculture or capitalism or industrial civilization - or that we are more like bacteria overflowing the petri dish - the outcome will be equally gruesome. So your question as to why blog about it is worthy of an answer.

People come to awareness of certain disaster via different paths, none of them the least bit enjoyable. For some it's peak oil, for others climate change, for others economic injustice and corrupt institutions. Personally, I was pretty oblivious until 2008, when I realized trees are dying. Once you look at the trend objectively, it's clear that they are in rapid decline, all over the world.

For a while I thought it was from climate change and so I set out to read everything I could. I very quickly realized that climate change, especially this unprecedently rapid era with amplifying feebacks kicking in fast already, always leads to mass extinctions. I wouldn't have bothered to write about it, because there are many far more informed and skilled authors scribbling frantically away on the topic even back then.

Then from various observations (tropical plants being watered in pots also dying, for example) I came to understand that in fact it isn't climate change that is killing trees (yet), it's tropospheric ozone pollution. So that is the reason I started writing - since nobody else is. There have been a few people in the past who even published books about it, but they were ignored and have given up. It's an incredibly terrifying and thus wildly unpopular subject.

I wrote because the fact is, unlike CO2 which is the main driver of climate change, the precursors to ozone dissipate very quickly. The atmosphere would become much cleaner within days, and since all the trees aren't completely dead yet, some might revive and certainly new ones could grow. And it would result in anywhere from a 10 to 60 percent increase in annual crop yield with higher nutritive quality.

So I started in 2009 trying to document tree death and collect research about ozone in the hopes people would wake up and decide to choose life over driving cars. And the blog is also a diary - and the best I can come up with to demonstrate to my children that I didn't sit idly by as the ecosystem collapsed. But since then, climate change has accelerating at a dizzying speed.

Now I think that enormous disasters are already occuring with many more on the horizon very soon - floods, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, landslides - and the social unrest that results from governments' inability to respond to so many crises all at once is going to lead to a very volatile, unpredicatable, and dangerous situation from which there will be no escape.

And so I really often don't know why I continue to write since I feel this way. I suppose it's because I don't know what else to do - and because some people (a very few) actually do want to know about what is happening to trees and other plants - and because with one solitary exception, every single person I know is completely oblivious and in denial. I would be very alone without being able to commiserate with the wonderful friends I have met via the internet who understand, to one degree or another, that we're on a freight train headed over a cliff.

Or, my latest favorite metaphor for our earth, more current than the perennially popular Titanic, is unfolding in real time on the even more ironically named Carnival “Triumph”.

People crowded and trapped on a luxury liner, hungry, hot, and drowning in their own shit and vomit. Apparently there is still plenty of booze though. Something to look forward to!

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/02/14/stranded-carnival-cruise-expected-to-dock-in-alabama-after-four-days-with/

[Aboc Zed]

Gail,

You account of transformation of the trees is profound but it is "old news" in the sense that pure science warned of 'limits to growth' some 50 years ago.

Being scared without having any means to influence the course of events only leads to waste of mental and emotional energy.

To the extent that it is hapenning to people who have capability to understand it is a double disservice to genus homo and LIFE as the whole.

When we allow our negative emotions to rob us of energy we act unwise.

Over unraveling bottleneck event and eventual collapse of fossil fuel civilization the members of the very thin strata of aware and science oriented among genus homo has to identify each other, connect and begin to evolve the ways of institutionalization that are only capable under complete and exclusive guidance by science of sustainability.

Given the enormous complexity and rare occurence and dispersal of such individuals over the planet this task seems to be close to impossible. But if one factors rapid die-off of humans population it is not inconceivable that those individuals may find each other at some point down the road.

When we talk "doom and gloom" we add to the noise making the task of identification and collaboration much much harder.

If we want to be of service to posterity (in whatever numbers and organization they will superceed us) we should carefully manage what kind of thoughts we allow ourselves to think and what kind of communications we pass along.

As it is all of uss are part of the problem.

And only select few may turn out to be part of the solution - we will never know who but the fact that LIFE survived many extinctions guarantees their existance among us.

[Manolo]

Hi George !

Just as a reminder, humanity went through 2 terrible bottlenecks in the last 70'000 years, the first being the "Mount Toba event"( last Super volcano eruption in recent history), which left, after 6 years of darkness and according to our best genetic science, less than 10'000 homo sapiens roaming on mother earth. Though selection I suppose...and the ride was pretty wild from there through the Ice age, definitively no cake walk.
The second was 12'900 years ago, the very sudden breakdown of the Laurentide ice sheet. This one was even reported in mythology by about 600 cultures around the globe and must have been devastating. Sea level rise of about + 40 meters very sudden, reported "in one day and one night", loss of landmass (submerged to this very day...) estimated to be almost the size of China and Europe together.
Whoever was around on the low level seafronts and islands perished. Humans like to be close to sea and at that time, getting food from the sea was certainly very attractive. Pristine world at that time :)
Just to say, here we are again, 7 billions ... pretty resilient that homo sapiens species!

[Tom]

Oliver - you know i meant no disrespect to you personally as i was writing for the general reader and expressing my utter contempt of mankind's history with respect to living on Earth (especially since the Industrial Revolution). Your point is well taken, that the exact comment can be turned around and could be, except the measurable direction we're heading is obviously not one that will include "growth" or an easier time for mankind (though people continue to stay high on hopium to continue doing what we're doing - and killing off all other species while we're at it). i've become familiar with your position and respect it, but beg to differ on the state of the Earth we'll leave behind.

Oh and the reason i write is a "mission impossible" directive - trying to awaken as many as i can that this charade we've been living is going to end SHORTLY and to enjoy their remaining time. As you stated, it's probably useless.

At least you aren't recommending the self-censorship that Aboc Zed is advocating - you know, just ignore the science and be happy. Go shopping, all is well.

Aboc Zed: there are no guarantees and you know it.

[Tom]

Here's an example of human intelligence being exposed as a LETHAL MUTATION!

http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-evolution-of-anthropogenic.html

[Oliver]

Gail - Thanks for your thoughtful response, and I hear you about why you are driven to write about your certainty that pollution is causing tree death, precipitating a mass extinction. But it's this very certainty that I question. And it's the certainty I read about on many blogs that has made me stop, scratch my head and wonder about the basis on which this certainty is expressed.

Everyone worldwide should be free to express opinions about anything that worries them, and even to sound a clarion call to fellow planet dwellers. However, I would like to see more scientific rigor in the statements made - such as "the latest thinking is that ...", rather than unprovable assertions such as "all large animal life will be extinct by 2031" etc.

The reason I posed my question about the motivation to write about unverifiable certain doom is because it seems to me to be a waste of energy - emotional and physical. I like what Tom said about enjoying our remaining time, echoed by Aboc Zed in different words, which has always been valid advice since the dawn of Man, seeing as we are each mortal beings with a relatively short life. On this basis, agonizing about The Forthcoming End in my opinion serves no greater purpose than enabling individuals to express their anguish, which just adds more pain to a painful existence.

Hence my desire to think beyond the bottleneck to the possible renewal of some aspect of Life on this resilient planet. (I admit I arrived at this point having gone through doom-is-nigh thinking for several years.)

Tom - I know you weren't being personal, and I enjoy the debate. But I would again question you about the validity of your statements such as "this charade ... is going to end shortly". If you added "in my considered view" I would understand better. As I mentioned to Gail, it's the unverifiable certainty that puzzles me.

Also, I can only speak for myself, but allowing for the possibility of some humans living beyond catastrophe and continuing to evolve is nothing to do with "ignoring the science and be happy", "going shopping" or "growth as usual". Far from ignoring it, it is the science of evolution that informs my viewpoint. I think the science you refer to is environmental science, where adherents seem to pick and choose from reports of changes going on and jump to the conclusion that complete doom is certain.

---

I guess at the end of the day, it is up to each of us to decide how to cope with the knowledge we think we have gained about this era of decline. If we can keep debating in this civil way, we will probably all learn from each other and benefit from communing - it certainly is lonely living in isolated angst.

PS: The news that something hit Russia from outer space reminds me that no matter how badly we treat our planet, it’s the cosmos that holds all the cards to our long-term survival.

[Tom]

Oliver, thanks for the continuing civil debate. Let me first point out that everything i write here is OF COURSE in my humble opinion. So you can take everything i say with a grain (ok, a 5lb bag) of salt. i read the science and understand your concern for rigor but i think you're ignoring the negative effects of our humanity. Let's start with science and math. Ever since these fields were discovered/invented they've been hi-jacked by the military, banking and business interests for their own ends. To keep this comment down to less than dissertation length i'll skip a lot of examples and "fleshing out" that we can do as we go along. To get the point across, let's look at one modern, recent example. In India right now they're having problems with bird flu in some regions. Knowing that the reporting of any cases is critical to keeping the virus from gaining a foothold and becoming stronger, the current way to deal with it by the authorities is to cull the herds. Being poor and not wanting to lose their only source of income many are NOT reporting and even threatening the veterinarians in the agencies who are monitoring the disease with violence/death. This happens all over the place. Scientific research in universities is another one we could look at. Anyone finding contrary evidence to the effectiveness of a new drug or whatever is being funded by large corporations is castigated, career and name ruined or even prosecuted and jailed.
To make a long comment short let me just say that the belief in the supremacy of human intelligence is a bit premature since our individual and group selfishness/ignorance keep any strides we make from being utilized to benefit all mankind and instead get shunted off to individual/corporate entities engaged in the all too human advantage propensity. It's happened with oil, nuclear energy (especially in regard to clean up), food production, pharmaceuticals, banking, and on and on.
If we weren't such idiots we'd have been taking steps since the 1970's (at least) to change our ways. Since it isn't beneficial to the bottom lines of the powers that be, here we are.

[Tom]

http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2013/02/16/the-horror-of-a-disaster-carnival-cruise-vs-the-unfolding-eco-apocalypse/

[Tom]

last one:

http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-evolution-of-anthropogenic.html

"Another evolutionist, Ernst Mayr, has stated that human intelligence is a fatal mutation dooming the species:

I'LL BEGIN with an interesting debate that took place some years ago between Carl Sagan, the well-known astrophysicist, and Ernst Mayr, the grand old man of American biology. They were debating the possibility of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And Sagan, speaking from the point of view of an astrophysicist, pointed out that there are innumerable planets just like ours. There is no reason they shouldn't have developed intelligent life. Mayr, from the point of view of a biologist, argued that it's very unlikely that we'll find any. And his reason was, he said, we have exactly one example: Earth. So let's take a look at Earth. And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation ... you're just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won't find it here for very long either because it's just a lethal mutation ... With the environmental crisis, we're now in a situation where we can decide whether Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we'll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us."

[Oliver]

Tom - Good points again. We can agree quite easily here. I believe that as a whole, the human race is not (yet) intelligent - in the sense of sapient. [Our denomination as Homo sapiens is erroneous and wishful thinking.] We could say that en masse we are clever, but this is not the same as sapient, not by any rational definition.

Clever people do all the sneaky self-serving things you describe, and more. Sapient people act far differently*, and if our species was primarily sapient rather than clever, life on Earth would be a lot different, and for a start I imagine you and I and other visitors to this blog would not be found in isolated spots on the margins of the power-elite society. (I am making some assumptions here, but I can't think Question Everything is favored reading for plutocrats, politicians and other sociopathic "leaders".)

Please be assured that I am not making any claim that because our species is intelligent, some of "us" will survive the coming bottleneck. I merely express the hypothesis that another evolutionary step towards real sapience would favor remnant humans, because in a much more hostile physical environment, wise cooperation would become a key factor in evolution's "survival of the fittest", rather than the greedy selfishness that denotes the explosion of Homo sapiens since the invention of agriculture c.10,000 years ago.

In my understanding of the theory to which I refer, there is a likelihood that, following a Dark Ages period of mayhem and carnage during which food, drinkable water and energy resources are vastly diminished and clever thugs attempt to dominate the remaining resources, this cleverness trait will not prove useful longer term, owing to the predictable last-man-standing outcome among the violent clever Alphas. Meanwhile, any emergent more sapient groups would strive to cooperate and use their brains to favor the whole group, rather than just themselves. This strategy for survival would include some kind of avoidance tactics regarding "clever others". And it is from these sapient groups that future man could emerge. Aboc Zed has referred to them as Homo cogitans.

In my view, it is selfish cleverness (ingloriously demonstrated by any number of Alpha males among today's plutocracy) that is the lethal mutation referred to by Mayr, not intelligence/sapience - which by evidential proof has yet to arise in a large enough proportion of the human race. Of course, if you are right, sapience will be snuffed out before it can properly emerge.

I still remember a university joke in the 1970s. Everyone in the bar was talking excitedly about the new funding for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). One guy sat quietly, watching everyone with detachment. When at last there was a moment of calm, he piped up: "They should start the search on Earth."

---

* History shows some examples of precursor sapients - Jesus (real or apocryphal), Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Their conduct was altogether different from the norm, and look how they fared among the mass of clever humans.

[John Wheeler]

And who knows, maybe this is the end of the age of carbon based life forms... Our "offspring" may end up being a "grey goo" of self-replicating nanobots that start a whole new chain of evolution.

[Martin Gisser]

Oliver, far earlier than Jesus, Gandhi, MLK there was a man named Siddhattha Gotama, aka Buddha. He fared better and died peacefully aged 80. He left behind a still existing "religion" - whose core is actually more a philosophy. Some of his teachings (process ontology, psychology, epistemic pragmatism) were centuries ahead of the rest of the pack. Some modern Buddhists (e.g. Stephen Batchelor) even managed to drop the rebirth BS. This gives me some hope.

Actually, it's a detail of my (Mars JP Florifulgurator's) sinister plan to save some of mankind plus habitat, and perhaps even me. Yes, I don't keep this plan secret. (It might be just a stupid hippie's dream, of course.) I've exposed the necessary part for the first time here: http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2009/08/getting-serious.html#comment-6a00e54f9ea2e588340120a4ccde7a970b
I still haven't done a good writeup/manifesto. My idea is to use secular Buddhism (or, as Batchelor calls it, Buddhism 2.0) as a motivational tool, governance framework (cf. vinaya) and psychologic guidance. One sinister socio-Frankensteinian idea of mine is to yoke Mahayana Buddhism to get things started: For, anybody interested in seriously following the bodhisattva ideal this century needs to understand:
1) Not carbon negative, no bodhisattva
2) Not carbon negative, no sangha

This should propel serious Buddhists into action. Mwahahahaha...