Origin of Life: early land life (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 30, 2013, 17:59 (4135 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DHW: It's certainly a logical conclusion that plant life prepared the way for diversified animal life. That concept fits in nicely with evolution. We were asking, though, why there was no explosion in plant life until after the Cambrian, and so I thought you might have a teleological explanation, as opposed to my evolutionary ramblings.-TONY: No explanation at all, and that was my original point. If the neo-evolutionary theory were correct, then in the 3.3byn between vegetable life first appearing and the Cambrian explosion, we should have seen much more diversity and complexity in the plant life than we do, instead of it all appearing in a geological instant and diverging wildly over the span of a few hundred million years.-I've offered you several possible evolutionary scenarios. A change in the atmosphere conducive to diversity and complexity, or a link with the animal "explosion", which may have required new ways of plants "propagating, defending themselves, attracting pollinators". All speculation, but I can't see why this negates evolutionary theory. On the other hand, for those who see God's guiding hand at work in all of creation, there ought to be some kind of theory as to why he didn't bother with plant diversity till after the Cambrian.