Cambrian Explosion: best non-answer (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, September 20, 2013, 15:23 (4082 days ago) @ David Turell

Here is grantsmanship at its best or worst if you are a taxpayer. A lot of words saying nothing, but they had a great trip to Northern Greenland:-"Professor Harper, Professor of Palaeontology in the Department of Earth Sciences at Durham University, said: 'The Cambrian Explosion is one of the most important events in the history of life on our planet, establishing animals as the most visible part of the planet's marine ecosystems.
 
'It would be naïve to think that any one cause ignited this phenomenal explosion of animal life. Rather, a chain reaction involving a number of biological and geological drivers kicked into gear, escalating the planet's diversity during a relatively short interval of deep time.
 
'The Cambrian Explosion set the scene for much of the subsequent marine life that built on cascading and nested feedback loops, linking the organisms and their environment, that first developed some 520 million years ago.'
 
"Professor Smith said: 'Work at the Siriuspasset site in north Greenland has cemented our thinking that it wasn't a matter of saying one hypothesis is right and one is wrong. Rather than focusing on one single cause, we should be looking at the interaction of a number of different mechanisms.
 
'Most of the hypotheses have at least a kernel of truth, but each is insufficient to have been the single cause of the Cambrian explosion. What we need to do now is focus on the sequence of interconnected events and the way they related to each other ... the initial geological triggers that led to the geochemical effects, followed by a range of biological processes.'-
 Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-09-cascade-events-sudden-explosion-animal.html#jCp