{"id":116943,"date":"2020-12-10T17:22:17","date_gmt":"2020-12-11T01:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/artificial-intelligence-finds-surprising-patterns-in-earths-biological-mass-extinctions"},"modified":"2020-12-10T17:22:17","modified_gmt":"2020-12-11T01:22:17","slug":"artificial-intelligence-finds-surprising-patterns-in-earths-biological-mass-extinctions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/artificial-intelligence-finds-surprising-patterns-in-earths-biological-mass-extinctions","title":{"rendered":"Artificial intelligence finds surprising patterns in Earth\u2019s biological mass extinctions"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Charles Darwin\u2019s landmark opus \u201cOn the Origin of the Species\u201d ends with a beautiful summary of his theory of evolution: \u201cThere is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.\u201d In fact, scientists now know that most species that have ever existed are extinct.<\/p>\n

This extinction of species<\/a> has, on the whole, been roughly balanced by the origination of new ones over Earth\u2019s history, with a few major temporary imbalances scientists call mass<\/a> extinction events. Scientists have long believed that mass extinctions create productive periods of species<\/a> evolution, or \u201cradiations,\u201d a model called \u201ccreative destruction.\u201d A new study led by scientists affiliated with the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology used machine learning to examine the co-occurrence of fossil species and found that radiations and extinctions are rarely connected, and thus mass extinctions likely rarely cause radiations of a comparable scale.<\/p>\n

Creative destruction is central to classic concepts of evolution. It seems clear that there are periods in which many species suddenly disappear, and many new species suddenly appear. However, radiations of a comparable scale to the mass extinctions, which this study, therefore, calls the mass radiations, have received far less analysis than extinction events. This study compared the impacts of both extinction and radiation across the period for which fossils are available, the so-called Phanerozoic Eon. The Phanerozoic (from the Greek meaning \u201capparent life\u201d), represents the most recent ~ 550-million-year period of Earth\u2019s total ~4.5 billion-year history, and is significant to palaeontologists: Before this period, most of the organisms that existed were microbes that didn\u2019t easily form fossils, so the prior evolutionary record is hard to observe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charles Darwin\u2019s landmark opus \u201cOn the Origin of the Species\u201d ends with a beautiful summary of his theory of evolution: \u201cThere is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":363,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-existential-risks","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/363"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}