Is evolution a gradual process, as Darwin believed, or can transnational change occur suddenly, in a violently brief time span, as suggested by Harvard biologist, Stephen Jay Gould who argued in Ever Since Darwin that “the ‘sudden’ appearance of species in the fossil record and our failure to note subsequent evolutionary change within them is the proper prediction of evolutionary theory as we understand it. That ‘evolutionary ‘sequences’ are not rungs on a ladder, but our retrospective reconstruction of a circuitous path running like a labyrinth, branch to branch, from the base of the bush to a lineage now surviving at its top.”
“Through how many dimensions and how many media will life have to pass? Down how many roads among the stars must man propel himself in search of the final secret?” asked scientist and philosopher Loren Eiseley with almost poetic, lyrical insight in The Immense Journey.
“Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid.
Was our South Pole’s past a prelude to its future? An ancient 90-million-year-old sediment core from the Cretaceous revealed a startling discovery –fossil pollen and spores, indicating a long-lost rain forest from the age of the dinosaurs that was cloaked in perpetual darkness for months at a time.
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb and mass-extinction authority Peter Brannen, author of Ends of the World, both ask is Mother Nature and COVID-19 teaching our “Anthropocene Epoch” a powerful lesson?
Like the Hindu god, Shiva, enigmatic viruses –not living, yet not dead–help create, protect and transform the universe. Viruses have had a huge impact on the history of all life on Earth. It was in the oceans that cover 2/3s of our planet, that life got its start. The oldest traces of life are fossils of marine microbes dating back almost 3.5 billion years.
