Word: cambrian
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...tailers, who each pay a fee to be listed. "If you really want to be the place where people can find anything," Bezos says, "you have to partner with other companies." Meanwhile, he fondly compares the profusion of e-tailers today with the explosion of new life in the Cambrian era--a period, he says, that witnessed "the greatest rate of speciation ever seen but also the greatest rate of extinction...
...largest intact bit was about three-quarters of an inch long, a good gemstone (a fossilized and then opalized shell from the Pre-Cambrian period), worth perhaps $1,500 uncut and much more when cleaned up. It was an amazing moment, and I am sure that nobody who sees it on film will believe that it was anything but a set-up. But it wasn't a set-up. In that moment I believe I came to understand something of the lunatic, persistent optimism that keeps these miners going through good times and bad. It was an epiphany...
...addition to her weighty courseload, Nappi finds time to work 10 to 15 hours a week researching pre- Cambrian microfossil core samples with Professorof Biology Andrew H. Knoll...
...Narbonne absorbs this gigantic problem by saying, "...there also seems to be a non-Darwinian kind of evolution that functions over extremely short time periods--and that's where all the action is." TIME's nonscientific speculation is the height of gullibility. You tell us that after the Cambrian explosion, everything else was a piece of cake. Even the human brain might be just the result of elaborate tinkering with details. Could some human brains be tinkering with details to try to prop up entrenched dogmas that are being severely undermined by marvelous discoveries like this one? JULIA HENDRICKSON Calistoga...
...STEVEN JAY GOULD'S BOOK WONDERful Life, which described the strangeness of early fossils, was fascinating, your update of new scientific findings is more so. It not only adds pieces to this intriguing puzzle but also goes one step further: making an analogy between the events of the Cambrian explosion and the characteristics of a chaotic system. In so doing, you raise a disturbing question: Might not theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman's idea of the intrinsic instability of the evolving system be greatest when the gradient of change is at its steepest? If so, is the closing paragraph of your...