Artificial intelligence finds amazing patterns in the extinction of the Earth’s biological mass

The evolution of Charles Darwin’s landmark “On the Origin of the Spices” concludes with a beautiful summary of his theory of evolution: “This view of life has a grandeur, with its many powers, breathed into the original few forms or one; The planet has been cycling according to a fixed law of gravity, so infinite forms have been, and continue to be, the most beautiful and wonderful, from a very simple beginning. “In fact, scientists now know that most of the species that exist have become extinct. Is gone.

This extinction of the species, as a whole, has been roughly balanced by the emergence of new peoples in the history of the Earth, with some large temporary imbalances being called by scientists a mass extinction. Scientists have long believed that mass extinction leads to 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 central to the classic concepts of evolution. It seems clear that there are 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 “apparent life”) represents the most recent 50 550-million-year period in the Earth’s total ~.-Billion years of history, and is important to paleontologists: before this period, most organisms existed. There were microbes that did not form fossils easily, so it is difficult to observe previous evolutionary records. The new study does not provide a good description of how species evolved or became extinct during phenytoinism, and suggests that many significant periods of evolutionary radiation occurred when life entered a new evolutionary and ecological realm, such as the explosion of animal diversity during Cambrian and Carboniferous expansion of forest biomes. It is not known whether this is true for the last 3 3 billion years dominated by microbes, as the lack of recorded information 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 “Big Five” mass extinctions, such as the End-Permian mass extinction, with an estimated 70% of the species extinct. Biologists have now suggested that we are now the sixth group to become extinct, which they believe is mainly due to human activity, including changes in hunting and land use, due to the expansion of agriculture.

A commonly reported example of the previous “Big Five” mass extinction is the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction (commonly abbreviated as “Katie”), which appears to have occurred when a meteorite hit Earth 65 million years ago. , Clearing 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 the tragedy created a waste, which allows mammals to replenish and “radiate” the organism, and ultimately the development of new mammals. . The foundation for the emergence of man. In other words, if the Katie event of “Creative Destruction” hadn’t happened, we probably wouldn’t be here to discuss this question.

The new study begins with a casual discussion in ELSI’s “Agora”, in which ELSI scientists and visitors mostly have lunch and have new conversations. The two authors of the paper, evolutionary biologist Jennifer Howell Kuthil (now a research fellow at the University of Essex in the UK) and physicist / machine learning expert Nicholas Gutenberg (now a postdoctoral researcher at Cross Labs) , Kicking around the question of whether machine learning can be used to visualize and understand fossil records.

During the ELSI visit, before the Covid-19 epidemic began to ban international travel, they worked tirelessly to enhance 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 the latest machine learning application to investigate the temporary co-occurrence of species in phenytoinic fossil records, examining more than 1 million entries in a vast, curated public database, including about 200,000 species.

Lead author Dr. H. Hoyle Kuthill said, “Some of the most challenging aspects of understanding the history of life are the enormous time and the number of species involved. New machine learning programs can help us visualize this information in a human-readable way. That means we can, in the palm of our hand, hold the evolution of half-a-billion years and gain new insights into what we want. “

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 being extinct with developed radiation or vice versa. Seven additional mass extinctions, two combined mass extinction-radiation events and 15 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 phanerozygous 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 the modern sixth extinction is happening. The Quaternary period, which began 2.5 million years ago, has seen frequent climatic upheavals, including dramatic shifts in glaciations, while high-latitude locations on Earth are covered with ice. This means that the current sixth extinction is erasing biodiversity that was already 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. “Every extinction on our clock erases a species that has existed for millions of years, making it difficult for the normal process of origin of new species to replace what is being lost,” says Dr. H. Hoyle Kuthil.