Machine studies are applied to the fossil record to visualize the history of life, showing the influence of large evolutionary events. This reflects the long-term evolution and ecological influences of large events of extinction and specification. Colors represent the geographical period from Tonian to 1 billion years ago, from yellow, to the current quarterly period, in green. The transition from red to blue marks the end-Permian mass extinction, the most disruptive event in the fossil record. Credit: J. Hoyle Kuthil and Ann. Gutenberg
The idea that mass extinction allows many new species to evolve is a central concept in evolution, but a new study using artificial intelligence to examine fossil records is rarely true, and there must be another explanation.
Charles Darwin’s landmark, On the origin of the species, Concludes with a beautiful summary of his theory of evolution, “This view of life has grandeur, with its many powers, originally breathed in a few forms or in one; And that, while this planet has been cycling according to the fixed laws of gravity, so from the very simple beginning the infinite forms have been, and are being, the most beautiful and the most wonderful.
In fact, scientists now know that most of the species that exist have become extinct. This extinction of species has been almost balanced by the emergence of new peoples throughout the history of the planet, with some large temporary imbalances scientists call mass extinction events. Scientists have long believed that mass extinction creates a productive period of species evolution, or “radiation,” which is called “creative extinction.” A new study led by scientists affiliated with the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology used machine learning to investigate the co-occurrence of fossil species and found that radiation and extinction are rarely linked, and large The possibility of extinction is rare. Causes radiation of comparable scale.
Creative destruction is at the heart of the classic concept of evolution. It seems clear that there are some periods in which many species suddenly disappear, and many new species suddenly appear. However, radiation of a scale comparable to mass extinction, which this study calls mass radiation, has received far less analysis than extinction events.
In this study, the effects of both extinction and radiation during the period in which the residue is available are compared, the so-called phenorozoic ions. Phenerozoic (Greek meaning “clear life”), a total of 3 Earth. Billion represents the most recent ~ 550-million-year period in history, and is significant for paleontologists: before this period most organisms were microorganisms that did not easily form fossils, so it is difficult to observe previous evolutionary records.
The new study suggests that species did not give a good description of how they evolved or became extinct during the Phenyrozic, and suggests that when life entered a new evolutionary and ecological realm, there were many significant periods of evolutionary radiation, such as the eruption of animal diversity during the Cambrian and the forest. Carboniferous expansion of biomes. It is not known whether this is true for the last billions of years dominated by microbes, as the lack of recorded data on such ancient diversity does not allow for similar analysis.
Paleontologists have identified some of the most serious, mass extinctions in the Phenerozoic fossil record. These mainly include the Big Five mass extinctions, such as the End-Permian mass extinction, with more than 70% of the species estimated to be extinct. Biologists have suggested that we may now enter the “sixth mass extinction”, which they believe is largely due to human activity, including changes in hunting and land use, due to the expansion of agriculture. The previous “Big Five” is a commonly reported example of mass extinction Cretaceous-Teriyari one (commonly using the German spelling of Cretaceous, abbreviated as “Katie”), which is likely to have occurred when a meteorite hit Earth 65 million years ago, wiped out non-avian dinosaurs.
By observing the fossil record, scientists believed that mass extinction events produced particularly productive radiation. In the Katy Dinosaur-Extermination event, for example, it is traditionally believed that a debris, which allows mammals to reorganize and “radiate” the organism, eventually laid the foundation. For the emergence of man. In other words, if “Katie” of “creative destruction” had not happened, we probably would not be here to discuss this question.
The new study began with ELSI’s “Agora” casual discussion, where there is a common common room in which ELSI scientists and visitors often have lunch and have new conversations. The two authors of the paper, Jennifer Howell Kuthil, an evolutionary biologist (now a research fellow at the University of Essex in the UK) and Nicholas Gutenberg, a physicist / machine learning expert (now a postdoctoral researcher at Good Labs in the Republic). , Kicking around the question of whether machine learning can be used to visualize and understand fossil records.
During the ELSI visit, first COVID-19 As the epidemic began to restrict international travel, they worked tirelessly to expand their analysis to investigate the relationship between extinction and radiation events. These discussions allowed them to combine their new data with the breadth of existing ideas on mass extinction and radiation. They quickly discovered that evolutionary methods known as machine learning differed significantly from traditional interpretations.
The team used an innovative application of machine learning to investigate the temporary co-occurrence of species in the phenytoin fossil record, examining more than one million entries in a huge curated, public database, including nearly two million species.
Leading author Dr. “Some of the most challenging aspects of understanding the history of life are the enormous timing and number of species involved,” said Hoyle Kuthil. New applications of machine learning can help us visualize this information in human-readable form. This means that we can, so to speak, capture the evolution of half a billion years in the palms of our hands and gain new insights from what we see. “
Using their objective methods, they found that the “big five” mass extinction events previously identified by paleontologists were captured by machine learning methods, with the top 5% of significant disruptions involving extinction developed radiation or .Lutton, There were seven additional mass extinctions, two combined mass extinction-radiation events, and fifteen mass radiations. Surprisingly, in contrast to previous stories emphasizing the importance of post-delayed radiation, this work found that most comparative mass radiation and extinction were only rarely linked in time, which negates the notion of a causal relationship between them.
Co-author Dr. Nicholas Guttenberg said, “The ecosystem is dynamic, you don’t have to cut the existing part to let something new appear.”
The team further discovered that radiation could in fact bring about major changes in existing ecosystems, an idea the authors call a “catastrophic creation”. They found that, during the phenytoin ion, on average, the species that formed the ecosystem at any one time passed away after about 19 million years. But when mass extinction or radiation occurs, this rate of turnover is much higher.
This gives a new perspective on how modern “sixth extinction” occurs. The Quaternary period, which began 2.5 million years ago, has seen frequent climatic upheavals, including dramatic shifts in glaciers, while high latitudes on Earth are covered with ice. This means that the current “sixth extinction” is erasing biodiversity that has already been disrupted, and the authors suggest that it will take at least 8 million years to return to a long-term average of 19 million years. Dr. “Every extinction on our clock erases a species that has existed for millions of years now, complicating the normal process of ‘origin of new species’ instead of being lost,” commented Hoyle Kuthil.
References: Jennifer F. Hoyle Kuthil, Nicholas Gutenberg and Graham E. By Bud, 9 December 2020, “Specification and Effects of Evolution as Measured by the Evolution Crisis Clock” Nature.
DOI: 10.1038 / s41586-020-3003-4
