Directionality in the history of life: diffusion from the left wall or repeated scaling of the right?
By Andrew H. Knoll, R. Bambach. Paleobiology, 2000
124 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Issues of directionality in the history of life can be framed in terms of six major evolutionary steps, or megatrajectories (cf. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995): (1) evolution from the origin of life to the last common ancestor of extant organisms, (2) the metabolic diversification of bacteria and archaea, (3) evolution of eukaryotic cells, (4) multicellularity, (5) the invasion of the land and (6) technological intelligence. Within each megatrajectory, overall diversification conforms to a pattern of increasing variance bounded by a right wall as well as one on the left. However, the expanding envelope of forms and physiologies also reflects—at least in part—directional evolution within clades. Each megatrajectory has introduced fundamentally new evolutionary entities that garner resources in new ways, resulting in an unambiguously directional pattern of increasing ecological complexity marked by expanding ecospace utilization. The sequential addition of megatrajectories adheres to logical rules of ecosystem function, providing a blueprint for evolution that may have been followed to varying degrees wherever life has arisen.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Environmental Engineering, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05adda1c9e0f71d19778c71b4bf61d6ecfee623d
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Citations in the corpus
- Predation in the marine fossil record: Studies, data, recognition, environmental factors, and behavior (2019, background): “At the coarsest of time scales, the oxygenation of the atmosphere and hydrosphere enabled, but did not necessarily guarantee, the dramatic increase in body size, diversity, and increasing complexity of metabolically expensive biotic interactions recorded through the Geozoic (Knoll and Bambach, 2000;”