Climate change: sudden cooling (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, May 15, 2014, 18:45 (3846 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Climate is hard to predict. This sudden cooling has no known cause:-"Scientists agree that the brief episode at the end of the Ice Age -- officially known as the Younger Dryas for a flower that flourished at that time -- sparked widespread cooling of Earth 12,800 years ago and that this cool period lasted for 1,000 years. But theories about the cause of this abrupt climate change are numerous. They range from changes in ocean circulation patterns caused by glacial meltwater entering the ocean to the cosmic-impact theory."-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140513113605.htm-DAVID: Simple and bilateral predecessors. The Cambrian is a huge evolutionary jump:-"Ediacaran fossils are extremely perplexing: they don't look like any animal that is alive today, and their interrelationships are very poorly understood," said Lucas V. Joel, a former graduate student at UC Riverside and the first author of the research paper. Joel worked in Droser's lab until June 2013"-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140509172917.htm-I know this is going over old ground, but so many of these interesting findings that you alert us to point firmly at the randomness with which life forms evolve, appear and disappear. Since climate change is unpredictable, and brings with it large scale extinctions and/or remarkable innovations (which themselves disappear in the next round of climate changes), I don't see how one can with any confidence extrapolate a plan, unless the plan is simply "que sera sera". -The other obvious conclusion one has to draw ... again going over old ground, but it remains open territory ... is that unless your god separately created these extraordinary bilaterian organisms, which are unlike anything living today, they must have developed out of existing organisms, presumably in response to changes in the environment. We're not talking here of adaptations (which would tend to preserve the status quo) but of innovations. What part of those existing organisms do you think would have been responsible for devising the new structures? Or do you think your God preprogrammed the Ediacaran tubes to appear and then disappear as they did?