Slashdot Mirror
Single Microbe May Have Triggered the "Great Dying"
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Medical Daily about a new theory for what triggered the
"Great Dying: " "Researchers believe that they may finally know why the event occurred, but the theory is not without controversy. There are several theories, including the possibility of a meteorite hitting the planet. Previously, most researchers believed that the Permian mass extinction was a result of a series of volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. ... However, Daniel Rothman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is floating around a different theory. As he presented in a meeting for the American Geophysical Union, he believes that the mass extinction could have been caused by something much smaller. His theory is that the extinction was caused by a single strain of bacteria."
But where's the Earth shattering kaboom? There's supposed to be an Earth shattering kaboom!
He remarked in one of his essays that people completely misunderstand evolution, using teleological thinking to believe that we are in some way the "highest form" or "goal" of evolution. But in fact, in terms of biomass and effects on the Earth's ecosystems, we are still living in the Age of Bacteria.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
By reading the Wikipedia article, I have determined that it also may have been:
- A single rock
- A single volcano
- The build-up of a single type of gas
- The rising of a single body of water
- Lack of a single element in the water
it's how you mass-extinct with it.
Nowadays you HAVE to incorporate gas-influenced Climate Change into EVERYTHING you produce.Otherwise you risk losing your grant to a malleable researcher.
Yeah right because the 100+ nations that fund the IPCC all have exactly the same political agenda and every mainstream scientist, science journal and scientific institute on the planet has been bought of by an international system of grants that doesn't actually exist. Do you realize how fucking crazy paranoid you have to be to believe that, it's the same anti-science shit you hear from creationists, anti-vax'ers, and other groups of whacko's who don't like specific aspects of the natural world and choose to walk around with their head up their arse. Geology is the only tool we have to investigate past climate, get a grip on your paranoid delusions and go read a climate science text book, particularly the chapters on paleo-climatology.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
*sigh*
Quite complaining & get nerding.
As repeated many, many times here, install Adblock, Noscript...
And/or load up your Hosts file...
Or contribute enough, get good karma, and /. lets you turn the ads off
And thinking about the importance of a phylum in terms of its biomass is nothing to do with whether a biologist is American or not - it tells you the significance of that phylum in food chains. What does the AC above think the krill eat? They eat plankton. Now tell me, which is there more of? Krill or plankton? And what do plankton do? They use sunlight and nutrients (largely recycled by bacteria from decaying matter), or they use bacteria directly.
How does organic matter in the soil get broken down into a form that plants can use? Fungi and bacteria. Without plants, there would be only a few people living on the sea coasts.
Read Jay Gould. Then read some of the many books he recommends. You will then be able to make more intelligent posts on these subjects.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
He does not have a theory. He has a hypothesis.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Cofactor F430
Forget the organism. This is about the advent of a novel reaction pathway, that scales on the availability of nickel. Surprisingly, geology might have something to say on that score. Any vigorous reaction pathway that bubbles madly away at an oceanic scale is almost certain to colour the infrared signature of our thin gas membrane. Imagine if everyone on the planet had an F430.
There's a lot to like about this hypothesis. I've seen worse. To determine exactly how this pathway becomes prolific at global scale would take decades of further study. It's as yet a humble beginning, of the kind that sometimes pans out.
And methanosarcina are archaea, not bacteria, a fact that was three clicks away from the Wikipedia entry on methanosarcina, which is apparently too many clicks for Slashdot or Medical Daily (but New Scientist got it right). I suspect that what was actually presented at the meeting was a cogent hypothesis for how methanogens contributed to the Great Dying following an increase in bio-available nickel. What we get is the result after several application of the stupid filter that is the Internet.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
PLEASE - let's not have any more articles from medicaldaily.com until they stop firing off 2 OR MORE auto-playing videos at the same time on every article.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
> The headline made me think that this guy somehow had it narrowed down to one actual organism.
That is difficult to envision, Chuck Norris was born so much later.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
If this is correct it is the second time an organism has wiped out most existing life forms The Great Oxygenation Event is thought to have killed most existing forms of life - then single-celled organisms. It makes you wonder, could it happen again - a bacteria completely changing Earth's chemistry in a way that's incompatible with most existing life forms?
No. No, it doesn't. We have the ability to create a global extinction event at any time. It is absolutely ridiculous to imply that bacteria have more potential drastic effects on the ecosystems on Earth than humans. That we choose not to wield the vast array of means we have to do so, does not equate to the idea that those means do not exist.
Continuing, I was and am very well aware that total biomass can indicate the significance of a species to the ecosystem as a whole (but made an apparently failed attempt at humour). To imply that biomass is particularly important in determining what success in evolution is, is wrong, however.
You intentionally introduced the word phylum, thereby lobbing quite a number of species on the same pile. If one looks at biomass of distinct species, krill and humans are numbers one and two. More importantly, the specializations of different bacteria species means that any individual species is by far not as versatile, resilient, stable, long-living and powerful as humans are. If you disagree, I'd like to hear which specific species we are dwarfed by.
Jay Gould is not a supporter of traditional evolution theory. He supports the punctuated equilibrium based upon evidence in the fossil record. The basic idea is that animals do not gradually adapt to an environement. Instead, some mutant freak for some reason becomes dominant in an area. This is often because of a radical change in that environment. Richard Dawkins highly opposes these views: despite the significant evidence Gould produced, it cannot prove that traditional evolution did not occur for the same reason that no one can prove there is no God.
He doesn't need to - ecosystems adapt to him.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
But then again, we have no idea..
Options are: 1) METEOR!!! - hit the earth, causing huge cataclysmic weather effects. 2) ICE AGE!!! - cooled everything down to horribly low temperatures in a flash (few hundred or thousands ofyears). 3) GENETIC MUTATION IN BACTERIA!!! - rare killer viruses killed everything accidentally. 4) GENETIC MUTATION IN VEGETATION!!! - plants discovered a new way to be less nutritious and fend off the herding-hordes
Any hypothesis will have to come up with reasons why small dinosaurs, small mammals, and lizards, lots and lots of lizards survived, and not the bigger dinosaurs, that's why I think ice age or mutation in vegetation are the likeliest options.
You seem to be confusing The Great Dying (the extinction event at the P-Tr boundary which killed 83% of all genera on the planet) and the K-T extinction event, which killed the dinosaurs and various other creatures and plants.
The consensus on the latter is that the extinction was caused primarily by the impact that created the Chicxulub crater, possibly with additional impacts and increased volcanic activity playing a further role.
Meh. Chuck Norris makes his yogurt out of Bacillus jeanclaudevandammiensis.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I'll see your Wells and raise you a Watts:
"Let me tell you what happens if this thing gets out," she said quietly. "First off, nothing. We outnumber it, you see. At first we swamp it through sheer numbers, the models predict all sorts of skirmishes and false starts. But eventually it gets a foothold. Then it outcompetes conventional decomposers and monopolizes our inorganic nutrient base. That cuts the whole trophic pyramid off at the ankles. You, and me, and the viruses and the giant sequoias all just fade away for want of nitrates or some stupid thing. And welcome to the Age of Behemoth."
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Actually Agent Smith compared us to a virus, rather than a microbe
It's the smell!
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
in science all theories are supposed to have a null value for validity until proven valid/invalid.
in pure science if a scientist presents a conflicting point of view or theory, based on whatever evidence, it should be investigated to determine its validity.
the guy was refering to the fact that anyone who thinks they have a counter argument to climate change has much trouble getting funding and get shutdown, without any determination of validity, because climate change has very much become a politicized topic, and it is a dogma of sorts in the world outside actual climate research.
the scientists are all too willing to "do science" and perform research, even into counter arguments, because it all advances knowledge on the subject.
its the funders, the politicians, the people obliquely involved, the general public, and by your reposnse you yourself too, that have fallen into the dogma trap, and cut things off that dont agree with their already preconceived notions.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.