The way that Earth's first animals reproduced held back life's diversity for millions of years, until stress and competition led to the development of sexual reproduction, which in turn accelerated the pace of evolution.
  • AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    16·
    10 hours ago

    Well the diversity of the Cambrian explosion makes more sense now. Life on earth discovered sex and just had a few million year long planet-wide orgy lol

    On a serious note, what if that’s actually kind of what happened? Like what if species specific sexual reproduction wasn’t the norm when life was starting out? If animals were basically just accepting whatever DNA was given them—regardless of whether it was from their species or not—sure lots of the offspring wouldn’t be viable, but ample food and lacking predators means you can try again. This kind of breeding would facilitate some incredible genetic diversity which is exactly what we see in the Cambrian diversification.

    We have no idea why so many of them looked the way they do, but what if thats because they inherited lots of traits they didn’t need?

    • GentriFriedRice@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      60 minutes ago

      I think that’s a little backwards. Evolution is all about filling niches. The article seems to state Ediacaran diversity was driven by phenotypic (environment-induced) variation caused by ecological stressors. They claim sexual reproduction seems to be a product of environmental factors which drove the diversification.

      It’s thought that the Ediacaran had fewer viable niches than the Cambrian, it’s just really not understood why that is. We don’t really see anything near that explosion in diversity again until the land-colonization of the Devonian which is kind of the same explosion driven by unoccupied niche phenomena

  • danekrae@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    14 hours ago

    “Cool, what is this I grew?! Maybe I can stick it in whatever that thing over there is.”