Somewhere around 530 million years ago, Opie (opabinia) was swimming around on his favorite continental shelf; propelling himself with his fantail, perusing the scenery with his five eyes and munching on critters he had picked up with his articulated pinching claw-nose. There was a huge mudslide and, unfortunately, Opie and several million of his best friends were trapped in what would become to be known as Burgess Shale.
Burgess Shale is important because it’s the subject of criticism brought up against Darwin’s theory of evolution. Specifically, this fossil-rich rock contained greater diversity of life than ever seen before. So there’s no way that simple evolution could account for the explosion and contraction of diversity. Or could it.
Steven Jay Gould, an American paleontologist and Harvard professor, came up with the idea of Punctuated Equilibrium and published it in 1972.
The theory proposes that there are times of accelerated change, but they’re still driven by the scientific principles of Darwin’s Natural Selection.
I’ve been able to distill, from sources on the Web, primarily but not limited to Wikipedia, that there are three elements in the process that lead to this rapid adaptation:
1) Presence of enabling building blocks.
2) A change in the environment that facilitates thing that’s adapting
3) The recombination of existing building blocks into something uniquely suited to succeed or flourish
In the case of Opie and many of his frightfully mutated friends, the building blocks came in the form of millions of years of genetic changes that were ready to differentiate eyes, tails, mouths and claw-noses out of generalized cells. (HOX genes)
His enabling environmental change came in the form of new shallow waters on emerging continental shelves – created by the breakup of the supercontinent of Gondwana, as well as an increase of oxygen in the atmosphere.
So, with genes raring to go, the warm, oxygenated shallow waters of the Laurentian continental shelf gave the perfectly hospitable environment for an acceleration of diversity. Some with five eyes and claw-noses, some with poisonous spikes and wormy bodies and some that were three-foot-long creatures with pinchers and toothed sucker-mouths… The stuff of horror movies.
Good for us that the mudslide happened.
Interestingly, though, all of our current classifications of living things (Kingdom, Phylum, Order… etc) can be traced back to ancestors of the Cambrian period. So something lasting took place there.
Why the science lesson? I have found the pattern to be broadly applicable to lots of things.
Take the Renaissance. (Trust me, I will get to technology eventually…)
It all started in Italy somewhere in the mid-1300’s. The known world had been the stage for the Crusades. Medieval times, also known as the Dark Ages, were winding down. The Catholic Church was experiencing a decline and the Pope was losing power. Not much progress in terms of society, economics or knowledge had taken place for a while.
If you want to understand what the Dark Ages were about, take a tour of the Tower of London with a Beefeater. It was all about the chopping off of people’s heads, from what I can tell.
An interesting thing was happening, though. Northern Italy – specifically Florence – was a hotbed. It was on the trade route between the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe.
This trade route brought both economic benefit and a flow of knowledge through Italy. It created a virtual continental shelf, complete with sunlight and oxygen – in the form of wealth and knowledge.
The last piece of the environmental picture is that the Medici family took power in the 1360’s, and reigned until the 1730’s. The family is famous for its support of art and architecture. And, by chance, also had a big successful banking enterprise. See how the building blocks assembled themselves?
Then an interesting thing happened. France and England had the 100 years war, effectively ruining the Western side of the trade route. On the other end of the line the Turks took Constantinople and the Greek scholars fled to the West. Many landing in Italy. By 1453 much of the economic power from Europe and the brain power from the Eastern Mediterranean were concentrated in Northern Italy. It was a good time to be there.
So the selective forces of war and power concentrated wealth and knowledge in Northern Italy and the greatest diversity of Art, Architecture and, ultimately, Science was born.
It’s also interesting to note that the men who mastered the emerging activities of the day were deemed “Renaissance Men” and were skilled in all of the relevant fields.
One of the most amazing things about the renaissance time is that we currently live under the structures and celebrate the products of the period. Specifically, our current definitions of the Arts, Sciences and Architecture and Finance were defined then and there. The Renaissance men such as DaVinci, and Michelangelo gave rise to a new form of excellence and innovation that crossed boundaries. Gutenberg, Copernicus, Descartes and Galileo were all men of the Renaissance. It can be argued that there have been no equals to these characters. And there may never be. At least in those specialties.
Where does this leave us?
I’m going to make the case that we are currently experiencing a flourish similar to that captured in the Burgess Shale and the Renaissance.
Our building blocks are different in form but nearly identical in function. Our environment is no less rich than that of the continental shelves of the Cambrian or Northern Italy at the end of the Dark Ages.
Our expansion is different, too, yet very similar. Our lives and the lives of every human from now forward, have been fundamentally restructured by the developments of our age.
Out of this time we will define the structure for countless future generations. We will give the stage to our own polymaths and, ultimately, be subject to natural selection processes that dampen the flourish and determine the “winners” for the future.
Stay tuned to LuckyRobot.
Illustration and design by Kurt Aspland
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