Word: cambrian
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...book, At Home in the Universe (Oxford University Press; $25), theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute argues that underlying the creative commotion during the Cambrian are laws that we have only dimly glimpsed - laws that govern not just biological evolution but also the evolution of physical, chemical and technological systems. The fanciful animals that first appeared on nature's sketchpad remind Kauffman of early bicycles, with their odd-size wheels and strangely angled handlebars. "Soon after a major innovation," he writes, "discovery of profoundly different variations is easy. Later innovation is limited to modest improvements on increasingly...
...fact, some of prehistory's worst mass extinctions took place during the Cambrian itself, and they probably occurred for no obvious reason. Rather, just as the tiniest touch can cause a steeply angled sand pile to slide, so may a small evolutionary advance that gives one species a temporary advantage over another be enough to bring down an entire ecosystem. "These patterns of speciations and extinctions, avalanching across ecosystems and time," warns Kauffman, are to be found in every chaotic system - human and biological. "We are all part of the same pageant," as he puts it. Thus, even in this...
...What's new about the Cambrian?" she asked David Jablonski, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago...
...here today, now, this very minute," Jablonski replied. He told Nash that a colleague had just returned from an expedition to Namibia, where he had unearthed fossils that shed amazing new light on evolution's "Big Bang"--the unparalleled explosion of life forms that sprang into being during the Cambrian period. So began an odyssey that led Nash to labs, museums and rocky outcroppings across the country, and culminated in the extraordinary report in this week's issue...
...Cambrian for a long, long time," says Nash, who specializes in telling complex science stories in a way that's not just comprehensible but compelling. The key, she says, is a sense of adventure. "People think of science as a body of knowledge, but in truth it's a process of discovery. When things don't make sense, that's when they get really exciting...