Saving Wildlife from Mass Extinction due to Global Warming

Paleobiological Background to
Mass Extinction

 

Paleobiological Background

to

Mass Extinction

       
       

Michelangelo was superb in portraying his chosen subject, but he might have chosen the wrong subject to portray - a  white man - as God.

 

As a nonwhite person, I find this unconvincing if not unacceptable. And my sister, not white and not a man, finds it doubly so.

 

It is not really a matter of color or gender.  It is more profound than that.  I find portraying God in the image of a human, black or white, male or female, well, embarrassing. God would take a look at the painting and laugh. Imagine a worm worshipping a human as deity erecting a statuette in honor of their god, i.e. a human, in the form of a worm!

 

Further, I find the concept of worship itself demeaning of God's greatness. Suppose there are 2 creators of robots, one creating a robot who can fly from solar system to solar system in search of new life, and the other creating a robot who can do nothing but repeat, on its knees, "Praise be to Man!" Question: Which is the greater robot, and which is the great robot creator?

 

 

 

 

 

HMS Beagle departing England 1831.

 

HMS Beagle skirting Patagonia.

 

Part and parcel of the medieval dogma was that all life on Earth was created instantaneously and simultaneously within those 6 days 6 thousand years ago when God created light and darkness, and heaven and earth. A tiger was created a tiger and a lion a lion.  To call them "related, sharing a common ancestor" would be heresy. No species can change, much less evolve, and there is no need, since God's Creations are all perfect from the start.

 

The 3-year voyage of HMS Beagle changed all that.

 

HMS Beagle at the Galapagos, where Charles Darwin began to question Creationism.

 

 

 

The voyage of the Beagle - 1831-1833 - when Charles Darwin conceived of Evolution.

 

Charles Darwin embarked in HMS Beagle in 1831 as a Creationist, and disembarked three years later as an Evolutionist.  He used his "God-given" eyes and "God-given" intellect to make sense of the vast amount of observations he made of "God's creatures" by the millions worldwide in his long global voyage.  He agonized over the inevitable conclusion versus the "word of God" which was nonetheless written by human hand.  He chose truth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Young Charles Darwin, then a medical school drop-out, considering theology towards a clerical career, and still a Creationist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charles the Great, and Alfred Russell Wallace, who independently conceived of Evolution by Random Mutation and Natural Selection.

 

The truth, as I see it, is that the Earth in the beginning was inorganic and abiotic.  In the 1.3 billion years between 4.6 billion years ago when the Earth was formed and 3.3 billion years ago when the first cells emerged, the elements and compounds interacted with each other, exploring all possibilities, eventually forming the DNA molecule of the first cell of the first cellular species.  Given enough time, and time was unlimited, the DNA molecules in all species randomly mutated, and natural selection chose the fittest phenotypes for survival and subsequent mutations and selections. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eras of life on Earth - spanning 4 billion years.

 

Evolution - true or false?

U.S.A. ranks lowest among Western nations for truth.

 

When one species, animal or plant, is split into two or more separate populations by geographical and/or climatic barriers, they will change to fit their respective local environments by random mutation and natural selection, and if these environments are sufficiently different, new species will be formed.  The branch that entered an environment too extreme for the species to adapt to will go extinct.  As species evolve, they may form intertwined ecological relationships and co-evolve as partnerships which often involve many species, where one species going extinct may mean all going extinct. 

 

"Would you be upset if only Creationism/Evolution is taught?"

 

 

 

 

 

 

Belief in Evolution by Partisanship.

 

Between 3.3 billion years ago and about 600 million years ago, the early cellular species speciated into hundreds of thousand of species, and formed complex ecosystems in the form of food webs, but they did something else equally important.  The originally asocial cells developed sociality (specialization and cooperation) and formed cellular societies, which eventually became perfected into multicellular organisms.  Therefore, a multicellular organism, plant or animal, is a society of its own cells, just as a cell is a society of its own molecules, and the multicellular organisms would form societies of their own.   

 

From the original inorganic molecules to amino acids to molecular ecosystems to molecular societies to concervates to the first cells.

 

The Primordial Soup - comprising a vast spectrum of inorganic, organic and biochemical molecules, including DNA.

 

 

In his book Omni-Science and the Human Destiny, Anthony Marr wrote:  How organisms form societies is called Transcendent Integration. How a society becomes a higher organism is called Integrative Transcendence.  The multicellular human organisms transcendently integrated into tribal societies, which built multi-tribal societies of their own, which became multi-tribal nations, or national organisms, which formed a global society of their own.  Hopefully, the global multinational society will succeed in integratively transcending into the one and only planetary organism Earth.

 

 

 

 

 

Phylogenetic Tree of Life

 

Plant evolutionary tree.

 

Amongst all the projections of global warming, "all nations for themselves" constitutes the worst case scenario.

The national organisms transcendently integrating into a global multinational society

and the multinational society integratively transcending into a single planetary organism

is essential and tantamount to solving the overwhelming ecological problems of our time.

 

First appearances of major animal groups.

 

 

 

 

Diversity of marine animal families over geologic time.

 

 

 

 

 

Evolution of beetles.

 

 

 

 

 

Evolution of bees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evolutionary tree - general.

 

Evolutionary tree - general.

 

Evolutionary tree - general.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evolution of fish.

 

Milestones of Vertebrate Evolution.

 

Evolution of dinosaurs.

 

 

 

 

 

Tyrannosaurus.

 

Evolution of dinosaurs.

 

Evolution of dinosaurs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evolution of birds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evolution of feathered dinosaurs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evolution of the horse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evolution of elephants.

 

Evolution of whales.

 

Evolutionary tree - general.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A spherical evolutionary tree.

 

Evolutionary tree of apes and hominids.

 

Evolutionary tree of hominids.

 

 

 

 

 

Human evolution - multi-regional theory.

 

Human evolutionary tree.

 

Human evolutionary progression.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hominid evolutionary tree.

 

Tree of Life

(detailed)

 

Return to: Home Page

Your Comments and Inquiries are Welcome

Fair Use Notice: This document may contain copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owners. We believe that this not-for-profit, educational use on the Web constitutes a fair use of the copyrighted material (as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law). If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.



This site is hosted and maintained by
The Mary T. and Frank L. Hoffman Family Foundation.

Since