It is happening now but evolution takes a long time. If there were a ton of adaptations that happened in the next 10,000 years, that would be incredibly fast on an evolutionary timescale
Comment on arthropods
Live_your_lives@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoWhy do you find that particular theory about the Cambrian Explosion compelling? I assume mankind is putting a similar pressure on many ecosystems today, so shouldn’t we be seeing that kind of evolutionary explosion happening now?
BlemboTheThird@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Azzu@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Humans have only been dominant for a few thousand years. Give it like a million for enough evolution to happen and then ask this question again.
anarchist@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
!remindme 1 million years ask this question again
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Just give it another million years or so.
TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Humans are blitzkrieging the troposphere. Nothing could hope to evolve fast enough except fungi and bacteria I guess
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 2 weeks ago
Before: All phyla differentiated but all the creatures are soft and blobby and sort of unremarkable
After: All of a sudden there's trilobites everywhere, they can see and some of them hunt, and all creatures everywhere suddenly have all this armor and mobility and a lot of them have spikes
I don't really know (even enough to talk about what might be the competing theories), but it seems like it fits and it doesn't seem all that farfetched. That said, it kind of seems like all the scientists think me and Andrew Parker are wrong though, so IDK.
(Also - I didn't know about this before as it's semi-new, but apparently Anomalocaris also had eyes and hunted, so star power of the trilobites aside maybe those guys were involved as well. I have to say though the timing of the way it's written in Wikipedia makes a little more sense if the sequencing is: Cambrian explosion -> some species turn into predators, as opposed to the other way around)
What humans are doing to the natural world right now is a global extinction event (not much different from has happened a handful of times). It's happening too fast for anything to adapt to except in the most short-term emergency ways. Mostly stuff is just dying. If we stay around for millions of years doing this same thing then I would expect the biosphere to develop defenses and then rebound into a new equilibrium with defense measures included against what we tend to do to it, in exactly that same way, but I don't think that we'll be around doing the same stuff for that long. I think once the current extinction pressure is gone (one way or another), there'll be quite a while of re-colonization of all the niches we wiped clean during the time when we were killing everything, instead of any lasting adaptation to us as a long term thing.