One day, one little critter was swimming about, going about it's daily business, met it's end, became fossilized, and by chance was dug up 500 million years later and it's picture was shared and discussed amongst millions of wonderful beings.
All the receptors microtubules switches the cells seem like an information processing system the brain is not a computer but a network of computers and cells ourselves are computers
Note that most insects actually have five "eyes": two big compound eyes and three ocelli in front of them. I think some crustaceans have this also and something similar occurs in horseshoe crabs.
When I was a kid my famiky stopped into a knick-knack shop in Massachusetts. Among the bric-a-brac was a collection of signed Stephen J. Gould books. My father was a fan of Gould's articles and asked the owner why she had autographed copies of his books for sale. It turned out she was his mother. We talked to her for a bit, mostly regarding his health as he had recently been ill, and my we bought 3 or 4 of the books.
You're not living under a rock. That the Burgess Shale findings (or Gould's contributions) aren't widely taught, even viewed as controversial in pop culture, can be explained largely by opposition from religious/creationist groups. Hopefully this video will help at least somewhat.
The Cambrian “explosion” took place from 541 mya to 484 mya. It was less of an explosion and more of a steady emergence of 63% of all biological classes and most of the major modern animal phyla appeared. Most notable events were the appearance of burrowing and diversification of skeletonized animals which was absent or rare before the Cambrian. Most life was aquatic at this time and mostly on the sea floor or near it. After the Cambrian comes the Ordovician after an extinction event, and is just as important as the Cambrian due to what’s known as G.O.B.E., the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event. The Cambrian explosion was important because it created most of the modern phyla, but the GOBE is just as important because it was the filling out of the phyla with the modern classes and lower level taxa.
It's astonishing to me that the length of time this diversification continued for is not much shorter than the amount of time that has elapsed since the dinosaurs vanished. Mind boggling spans of time
It seems to me that the development of brains carries such an evolutionary advantage that they are likely to develop. Look how different cephalopods are from us and yet they have very good brains.
Yes. Every organism has sensory systems and they are concentrated on one end of the body, which becames frontal. This is likely to evolve convergently across all planets inhabited by life.
My thinking exactly. The animals most likely to survive an extinction event are those with better capabilities for actively searching food and shelter and evading predators. And having a brain increases your capability to do that.
Right, but thats after the fact. Not challenging you personally but what would we have thought needed to happen standing on the edge of the “brain era” in order for additional niches to be filled? I think we need to re-think the idea of “niche”. Niche implies that the Spot was there and was Pre-constructed. It seems thar evolution does not find a niche as much as it creates an new method.
@@asage5801 A niche is a potential livelihood for an organism with appropriate adaptations to exploit. The wonderful thing about ecosystemic evolution is that once a niche is occupied, it’s not ‘total of niches minus one’, but ‘total niches plus x more niches’.
@@asage5801 Niches are simply opportunities for making living. They exist without any need for a pre-construction. Rocks have top and bottoms, two different niches but rocks are not constructed. Life simply evolves to fit the environment and there are many environments which includes other evolving life.
It took billions of years for nature to become aware of its own existence - it takes just decades for mankind to throw it all in the bin. I will forever remain fascinated by the self-limiting factors that make up life.
Jeesh. I think it's likely you're right. A parsimonious explanation for the 'Fermi Paradox' is that all civilisations implode. Old UK duffer here, enjoying the ride :)
Great topic Anton, you rock! My childhood was spent around the Canadian Shale, and it's topic has followed my interest and study. We need more children discussing what these findings could be as functional, as they're innocence begets genius. Understanding where/when on our DNA evolution as to the beginning of "brains" or other cellular organizations (including when emotions first came onto our timeline) will allow us to understand so much more about life in the universe, and even tech here on earth. Thanks again Anton... wonderful!
Simon Conway Morris’ 1977 reconstruction of Hallucigenia is central to “Wonderful Life” and I thoroughly agree with your assessment over the importance of this work. I have read it several times, always with great relish, since its original publication. Conway Morris’ reconstruction was, “so peculiar, so hard to imagine as an efficiently working beast” Gould speculated that Hallucigenia might be “a complex appendage of a larger creature, still undiscovered.” BUT I do recommend it be read in conjunction with Conway Morris’ own writing, in particular “Life Everywhere”. It’s possible to interpret the data in more than one way and Morris does an excellent job of doing so. Also to (mis)quote Lynn Margulis: “Random just means we haven’t discovered the relevant law yet”. And in an infinite universe a tiny percentage could still be a _very_ large number.
Hallucingenia was likely imagined by Morris, upside down. He had the spines as legs. The image in the video has the spines on top, the present best guess for it. Not much of a guess really as it pretty obvious, now but not then.
I think this is one of your best videos yet, Anton At least I really enjoyed it. I studied Zoology at uni, so it is particularly interesting to me. I agree that the 'rare Earth' hypothesis is a real possibility, or even probability. However I do tend to think natural selection acted as a relentless filter to the random variations that repeatedly arose in the genetic code as it was passed down from each organism to its progeny. Whilst you might say that the changes to the niches available over time were essentially also 'random', I would suggest that there is a measure of inevitability to the accrual of the characteristics thus selected, particularly as the organisms as a whole became more and more complex, allowing the possibility of novel complex niches not seen before. Kind of like the way repeatedly taking the square root of a number eventually converges on 1.0. However, that is just my intuition, and completely non-science-based
You basically described natural selection with extra steps. Look at chess, video games, card games, etc. Over time, game theory and strategy within the limitations of the game leads to a defined meta. That is also how natural selection works. The same we humans inevitably improve until there is no longer room for improvement, the same can be said for natural selection.
You're sort of right about inevitability. Particular mixtures of biochemistry and experience make some things closer to inevitable than others- trees are an example, as they're developed repeatedly, and shifted back away from being trees repeatedly- strawberries, for example, are thought to be descended from trees. Similarly, having high-reproduction cells inside of bones is almost inevitable when there's a radiation problem and moving the most vulnerable cells into the bones won't cause problems.
I don't buy it. It's an infinite improbability issue. Even if it's 1 in a trillion chance to get a brain, there's so many other planets that it's basically guaranteed that some other planet has evolved brains.
@@absalomdraconis yes, to take an easier example - carbon based life. It's almost inevitable that life would be carbon based, given the chemistry of the elements. It's similar with more complex structures. That's one of the reasons I believe that there's not really free will but that's a bit too far related.
You had a great professor! It's generally felt today that the Cambrian Explosion is more an artifact of the sparseness of the fossil record in rocks of Early Cambrian and Late Pre-Cambrian age. The Ediacaran Faunas of Australia and other Pre-Cambrian faunas hint at predecessors or the Burgess Fauna and the Pre-Cambrian appearance of hard parts, segmentation, notochords and other Cambrian features
Indeed. We know a huge amount about the top metre or so of the planet. Below that sweet FA! Probably the most important point made in the first geology lecture I received at university.
Anton, a detail: Years ago I listened to the audiobook version of Gould's "The Panda's Thumb," narrated by Gould himself. He pronounced Anomalocaris as animuh-LOCK-ris.
I am indebted to Dr. Gould’s “Wonderful Life” for stimulating my geology teaching career, but his views in the book are not mainstream anymore. Dr. Simon Conway Morris wrote a followup book about the same Burgess Shale biota called “Crucible of Creation” where he emphasized convergent evolution, which is when life evolves similar traits across many branches in response to similar circumstances. So it is less likely that life would evolve into new ways as Gould emphasized in his book, according to the more modern interpretation of Conway Morris.
Recently found your channel and have fallen deeply in love with it! Somehow you make the explanation of all the various topics so fluid and easily absorbed. Thank you for taking the time to explain the sciences to the world! :D
I would assume that brains are essential for processing sensory information. I suppose they are not necessary to gather sensory information but inorder to process it in either a non random nor alternatively automated manner a brain is going to be necessary for some decision making. I think if you took the solar system back in time to the late heavy bombardment to let time play forward to today and do that a 1000 times. I think you are basically going to see brains and intelligence evolve 1000 times.
Reading some of the comments, the evolution of my thoughts deposited me, well, don't know where. It looked like Ghostbuster land and someone was about to answer the question, "Are you a god?" Love it every time!
The middle eye of anomalocaris may well have been to track daylight/moonlight time - there are examples in other marine animals. I think alien life would have brains - nervous systems - sense organs - they kind of come together as a package.
Parietal eyes are not uncommon - many lizards have them to some degree. Triops seem to use them for orientation; they will do aquabatics in response to a moving flashlight. Alien life may be quite common. And it may be quite boring. Life on Earth apparently developed literally as soon as conditions permitted. And it was a quite different, and very alien Earth at the time. However, multicellular life took its sweet time making an appearance. Most of the history of life on Earth is bacterial. Which, if we do a random sampling of exoplanets, is probably the level of life we are most likely to find.
That was my initial thought as well. Vision and a certain amount of neurons associated with it to me implies active vs an ambush predator. But that foes not mean I think these animals had sophisticated enough vision to differentiate between prey and non pre. I think it likely the eyes were detecting motion primarily.
@@47f0 My two cents. Yes most life in the universe is probably bacterial or things similiar. Yellow, orange and red drawf stars are long lived enough to allow life to get started given the right conditions. And allow it to develop. F class stars are iffy on the development side IMO. O and B class stars are simply too short lived IMO. The night question in my mind is what types of worlds are most likely to support life. Earth may be an outlier. With most life beating worlds being icy moons with interior oceans. Such world will out number those similiar to Earth by a wide margin.
While Wonderful Life is a landmark book in terms of the ideas discussed in it, note that we have now a better understanding of the Cambrian explosion and its drivers. Nowadays, virtually all the Burgess Shale type fossils have been identified as part of the stem groups of modern lineages. The idea that they are so different and alien, and that these lineages are very distinct from modern taxa, is artificial. Yes, in some lineages there was quite a lot of evolutionary 'experimentation', but that experimentation wasn't a hit or miss in terms of survival. Each of those body plans wasn't lucky to survive due to a random combination of features, but well-adapted to its surroundings. It can be argued that here is nothing inherently special about the Cambrian explosion either. It just happened to be a diversification of body plans due to a combination of relatively 'new' evolutionary arms races (i.e., the rise of predation and anti-predatory strategies), as well as an increased availability of atmospheric oxygen and of trophic resources. While in the Ediacaran there hadn't been much opportunity for diversification (sessile organisms on bacterial mats in a low-oxygen environment don't really have much incentive to diversify), the slow rise of predatory behaviours and bioturbation made it so that when the Cambrian came around, the apparent effect was an explosion of body plans, which had actually been in the making for millions of years.
Indeed… My first biology lecturer called species “a good faith guess” and was a useful term we use when discussing different organisms. However, it wasn’t until Aristotle (marine biologist par excellence) first introduced the term species and so we continue to do so almost 2,500 years later.
Yes, Gould was a brilliant populariser and full of creative ideas, but his leagcy has rather overshadowed mainstream evolutionary theory. We've come a long way since "Wonderful Life"
On the other hand, brains developed in so many different ways, in so many different animal phylums, maybe it's hard *not* to grow a brain -- like the way eyes developed independently and repeatedly, in so many different ways across the animal kingdom. Nervous tissue seems to have appeared earlier though [maybe as a distributed network of simple reflexes, before they coalesced into a central processor], since insects, octopuses, vertebrates, and others use many of the same neurotransmitters.
I feel compelled to recommend the book "To be taught if fortunate" by Becky Chambers. It is about an expedition to four different planets with wildly different life. The tone is a tad sad, but also gives a terrific sense of wonder.
Oh man. That is so exciting. I live in Wyoming so there's a lot of dinosaur bones and stuff like that. This military brat I didn't want to move to the freezing cold tundra but as soon as I heard there were dinosaur bones I was all in °~•.☆.•~°
Hi Anton. I hope you and your family are doing well and staying safe. This Video is Amazing ! You did an Amazing job with this ! This is probably one of the most fascinating , if not THE most fascinating Topics and Videos I've ever seen. This Discovery is obviously going to add a lot of info to the Bank of Research that our Scientists have to help us understand our Evolution. Again , so Amazing !! Thanks for sharing this. Stay safe , Dude. 🎸
The universe is so vast i think if any form of life is created, as long as it has time, will evolve endlessly as species of every size do on earth. Just look at all the life earth created
This episode was really intriguing. Intelligent life in the cosmos seems to be rare. And even if they are others in our galaxy it would be incredibly difficult to detect them or catch any signals that they might have send out.
Wouldn't it be more like a weighted chance? That is, if a given trait is more likely beneficial for survival, then it's more likely than others to be passed along to descendants, to survive and evolve. Sure, there are all kinds of random events outside of evolution that shape it, and there are all kinds of random chance within the evolutionary process. But if a given trait tends to make an individual creature better adapted to survive and pass on its genes, then doesn't that create a weighted random chance? That said, other traits may be indirectly beneficial but also get passed along, right along with totally random mutations, as well as traits that are neither particularly beneficial or maladaptive. In other words, you'd still have multiple things going on at the same time for any given individual and across species or life as a whole. But outside factors like which mating partner meets up, who is rejected or accepted for mating, or accidents in the environment, all sorts of outside factors, also come into pay. You might have really great genes but you get eaten by a predator, for example, or you don't meet that partner for you. And factors like taking care of your relatives' and friends' and group members' offspring also contribute, even if the individual isn't as prone to reproduce. At least a nearby, somewhat related or allied creature does.
As a boy growing up in east Edmonton I used to play in the hills and ravines near my home. We used to find fossils of sea creatures all the time as, eons ago, the entire area was an inland sea. As teh region is now some 250m above sea level and 1100 kilometres from the coast, it must have been from an era before the formation of the Rocky Mountains, and even before the age dinosaurs!
Thank you, Anton. I have had the pleasure of visiting the Royal Ontario Museum several times. During one of those visits I managed to lose $200 US. which I had hidden in my shoe; thereby proving that my brain is little more advanced than those of the Cambrian epoch!
Shales are laid down on low-energy seafloor environments devoid of oxygen, such as deep-sea trenches. The lack of scavengers and their resultant bioturbation leaves perfect specimens buried in silt, that become mineralized in sedimentary shale. BTW, If shales are deeply buried and heated, they become metamorphic slate, with the destruction of fossil details.
@@ridethecurve55 computations can be wrong and carry preconcieved biases of the designer of the alogarithm they do this alot with monkey humaniod fossils which are later debunked they want the monkey to be the missing link so badly that they tweak the alogarithm to arrange the bones to tell them what they want to hear which of course is later uncovered and has to be rejected! my point is be very careful with evolution, it has become a religion
Marvelous topic, Anton. Former sonarman, here. Can't stop noticing how much this Stanlycaris fellows nose looks acoustically transparent. Is it a coincidence, or is it a sonar dome? Can you think of someone who might know a way to find out?
Complex even for back than ? It shouldn't be surprising , since these little critters evolved for millions of years , that they reached this level of complexity seems totally natural to me and not surprising at all . This cambrium explosion of life with the great amount of different species is one of the most amazing natural events in Earth's history
One day, one little critter was swimming about, going about it's daily business, met it's end, became fossilized, and by chance was dug up 500 million years later and it's picture was shared and discussed amongst millions of wonderful beings.
All the receptors microtubules switches the cells seem like an information processing system the brain is not a computer but a network of computers and cells ourselves are computers
I'll be that critter 500 million years from now!
ok
@@coreymiller6717 Not if you get cremated.
Well 8.1K so far
Note that most insects actually have five "eyes": two big compound eyes and three ocelli in front of them. I think some crustaceans have this also and something similar occurs in horseshoe crabs.
And try 2 rationalize the relative eye-chaos of caterpillars...
Don't forget triops and fairy shrimp
@@2degucitas Yep. Insects may be part of the group that includes Triops.
Spiders, up to eight eyes I believe?
@@inyobill Yes, they do.
When I was a kid my famiky stopped into a knick-knack shop in Massachusetts. Among the bric-a-brac was a collection of signed Stephen J. Gould books. My father was a fan of Gould's articles and asked the owner why she had autographed copies of his books for sale. It turned out she was his mother. We talked to her for a bit, mostly regarding his health as he had recently been ill, and my we bought 3 or 4 of the books.
Maybe I’m living under a rock, but this is the first video I’ve seen from you that had to do with ancient sea life. Wow! I’m all in. 🔥
Rock meet @Noel McGinnis.
I thought he only did space stuff 😂
You're not living under a rock. That the Burgess Shale findings (or Gould's contributions) aren't widely taught, even viewed as controversial in pop culture, can be explained largely by opposition from religious/creationist groups. Hopefully this video will help at least somewhat.
The Cambrian “explosion” took place from 541 mya to 484 mya. It was less of an explosion and more of a steady emergence of 63% of all biological classes and most of the major modern animal phyla appeared. Most notable events were the appearance of burrowing and diversification of skeletonized animals which was absent or rare before the Cambrian. Most life was aquatic at this time and mostly on the sea floor or near it. After the Cambrian comes the Ordovician after an extinction event, and is just as important as the Cambrian due to what’s known as G.O.B.E., the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event. The Cambrian explosion was important because it created most of the modern phyla, but the GOBE is just as important because it was the filling out of the phyla with the modern classes and lower level taxa.
It's astonishing to me that the length of time this diversification continued for is not much shorter than the amount of time that has elapsed since the dinosaurs vanished. Mind boggling spans of time
I expect the term Cambrian Robotics will become common in the next few decades. Robots for everything.
A much better term would be The Cambrian Radiation. Its more modern term than often deliberated misrepresented Cambrian Explosion.
@@carpetbeetle8349
And detonation is cooler yet. But it's still the wrong word.
I can tell you have studied well
It seems to me that the development of brains carries such an evolutionary advantage that they are likely to develop. Look how different cephalopods are from us and yet they have very good brains.
Yes. Every organism has sensory systems and they are concentrated on one end of the body, which becames frontal. This is likely to evolve convergently across all planets inhabited by life.
My thinking exactly. The animals most likely to survive an extinction event are those with better capabilities for actively searching food and shelter and evading predators. And having a brain increases your capability to do that.
Right, but thats after the fact. Not challenging you personally but what would we have thought needed to happen standing on the edge of the “brain era” in order for additional niches to be filled?
I think we need to re-think the idea of “niche”. Niche implies that the Spot was there and was Pre-constructed. It seems thar evolution does not find a niche as much as it creates an new method.
@@asage5801 A niche is a potential livelihood for an organism with appropriate adaptations to exploit. The wonderful thing about ecosystemic evolution is that once a niche is occupied, it’s not ‘total of niches minus one’, but ‘total niches plus x more niches’.
@@asage5801
Niches are simply opportunities for making living. They exist without any need for a pre-construction. Rocks have top and bottoms, two different niches but rocks are not constructed. Life simply evolves to fit the environment and there are many environments which includes other evolving life.
It took billions of years for nature to become aware of its own existence - it takes just decades for mankind to throw it all in the bin. I will forever remain fascinated by the self-limiting factors that make up life.
Jeesh. I think it's likely you're right. A parsimonious explanation for the 'Fermi Paradox' is that all civilisations implode. Old UK duffer here, enjoying the ride :)
TY Anton for showning us that it's not the size of the brain that matters as much as there is any brains at all to begin with. 🤯
The entire universe is a brain
@@dooflydetailguuy4349 evidence?
@@proloycodes theory
@@dooflydetailguuy4349 hypothesis*
@@proloycodes debatable
Hyped to learn about this
2:00 this creature deserves a tribute
I love anomalocaris.
Great topic Anton, you rock! My childhood was spent around the Canadian Shale, and it's topic has followed my interest and study. We need more children discussing what these findings could be as functional, as they're innocence begets genius. Understanding where/when on our DNA evolution as to the beginning of "brains" or other cellular organizations (including when emotions first came onto our timeline) will allow us to understand so much more about life in the universe, and even tech here on earth. Thanks again Anton... wonderful!
Once again great vid Anton!
Simon Conway Morris’ 1977 reconstruction of Hallucigenia is central to “Wonderful Life” and I thoroughly agree with your assessment over the importance of this work. I have read it several times, always with great relish, since its original publication. Conway Morris’ reconstruction was, “so peculiar, so hard to imagine as an efficiently working beast” Gould speculated that Hallucigenia might be “a complex appendage of a larger creature, still undiscovered.”
BUT I do recommend it be read in conjunction with Conway Morris’ own writing, in particular “Life Everywhere”. It’s possible to interpret the data in more than one way and Morris does an excellent job of doing so. Also to (mis)quote Lynn Margulis: “Random just means we haven’t discovered the relevant law yet”. And in an infinite universe a tiny percentage could still be a _very_ large number.
Hallucingenia was likely imagined by Morris, upside down. He had the spines as legs. The image in the video has the spines on top, the present best guess for it. Not much of a guess really as it pretty obvious, now but not then.
I think this is one of your best videos yet, Anton
At least I really enjoyed it. I studied Zoology at uni, so it is particularly interesting to me.
I agree that the 'rare Earth' hypothesis is a real possibility, or even probability.
However I do tend to think natural selection acted as a relentless filter to the random variations that repeatedly arose in the genetic code as it was passed down from each organism to its progeny.
Whilst you might say that the changes to the niches available over time were essentially also 'random', I would suggest that there is a measure of inevitability to the accrual of the characteristics thus selected, particularly as the organisms as a whole became more and more complex, allowing the possibility of novel complex niches not seen before.
Kind of like the way repeatedly taking the square root of a number eventually converges on 1.0.
However, that is just my intuition, and completely non-science-based
You basically described natural selection with extra steps.
Look at chess, video games, card games, etc. Over time, game theory and strategy within the limitations of the game leads to a defined meta. That is also how natural selection works. The same we humans inevitably improve until there is no longer room for improvement, the same can be said for natural selection.
Your intuition sounds remarkably sound!!
You're sort of right about inevitability. Particular mixtures of biochemistry and experience make some things closer to inevitable than others- trees are an example, as they're developed repeatedly, and shifted back away from being trees repeatedly- strawberries, for example, are thought to be descended from trees. Similarly, having high-reproduction cells inside of bones is almost inevitable when there's a radiation problem and moving the most vulnerable cells into the bones won't cause problems.
I don't buy it. It's an infinite improbability issue. Even if it's 1 in a trillion chance to get a brain, there's so many other planets that it's basically guaranteed that some other planet has evolved brains.
@@absalomdraconis yes, to take an easier example - carbon based life. It's almost inevitable that life would be carbon based, given the chemistry of the elements. It's similar with more complex structures. That's one of the reasons I believe that there's not really free will but that's a bit too far related.
You had a great professor! It's generally felt today that the Cambrian Explosion is more an artifact of the sparseness of the fossil record in rocks of Early Cambrian and Late Pre-Cambrian age. The Ediacaran Faunas of Australia and other Pre-Cambrian faunas hint at predecessors or the Burgess Fauna and the Pre-Cambrian appearance of hard parts, segmentation, notochords and other Cambrian features
Indeed. We know a huge amount about the top metre or so of the planet. Below that sweet FA! Probably the most important point made in the first geology lecture I received at university.
Unfortunately intelligent life remains extremely rare on this planet even to this day!
It’s a tradition!
Anton, a detail: Years ago I listened to the audiobook version of Gould's "The Panda's Thumb," narrated by Gould himself. He pronounced Anomalocaris as animuh-LOCK-ris.
Read Gould a very academic writer but he always conveyed his joy & wonder at the oddness of life
Can't wait for the updates on this one. Thankyou Anton you wonderful person.
I am indebted to Dr. Gould’s “Wonderful Life” for stimulating my geology teaching career, but his views in the book are not mainstream anymore. Dr. Simon Conway Morris wrote a followup book about the same Burgess Shale biota called “Crucible of Creation” where he emphasized convergent evolution, which is when life evolves similar traits across many branches in response to similar circumstances. So it is less likely that life would evolve into new ways as Gould emphasized in his book, according to the more modern interpretation of Conway Morris.
Not just me then ;-)
One of my favorite books when I was young...probably newly published 😄
Recently found your channel and have fallen deeply in love with it! Somehow you make the explanation of all the various topics so fluid and easily absorbed.
Thank you for taking the time to explain the sciences to the world! :D
That was a great book among many of Gould's. Read them all when they first came out.
What an interesting video, Anton! I'm do glad you don't just stick to papers about stuff _out there!_ Thank you for all you do, Wonderful Person. ❤️❤️
I wonder what the first sound ever made by an animal/biological thing was
It was a sound in liquid.
i love your info… please continue, i have learned so much!!!
This is fascinating stuff to me thank you
Of all the time periods of life on earth this is my favorite....The very beginnings and ends of so much diversity!
Wow i leavened so much, amazing content sir
Amazing stuff. Thanks Anton!
Thanks Anton, I come to your channel regularly searching for well informed scientific facts. Cheers from Argentina
Hello wonderful Anton, this is person.
When I imagine predators, it aint this.... I just can't wrap my head around the itty bitty tiny Stenola Caries being big bad predators 😬😆
You're the sole highest value provider on RUclips.
Nice coincidence, I just found some great fossile sea shells on my drive. I think they are younger than 500 myo but not by that much.
I would assume that brains are essential for processing sensory information. I suppose they are not necessary to gather sensory information but inorder to process it in either a non random nor alternatively automated manner a brain is going to be necessary for some decision making. I think if you took the solar system back in time to the late heavy bombardment to let time play forward to today and do that a 1000 times. I think you are basically going to see brains and intelligence evolve 1000 times.
This channel is the only reason i still beleave the internet was a good invention!
I do like your videos Anton, I know it must sometimes be a grind but thanks for the effort!
Very excited to hear 👂 more!!
Gould’s “Blueprints” was what got me on the path of Evolutionary Biology. Gould was a leader in this field.
Fantastic stuff indeed ! The Burgess Shale is So incredible. That we have so many details of these animals blows the mind.
Reading some of the comments, the evolution of my thoughts deposited me, well, don't know where. It looked like Ghostbuster land and someone was about to answer the question, "Are you a god?" Love it every time!
The middle eye of anomalocaris may well have been to track daylight/moonlight time - there are examples in other marine animals.
I think alien life would have brains - nervous systems - sense organs - they kind of come together as a package.
Agreed
Parietal eyes are not uncommon - many lizards have them to some degree. Triops seem to use them for orientation; they will do aquabatics in response to a moving flashlight.
Alien life may be quite common. And it may be quite boring. Life on Earth apparently developed literally as soon as conditions permitted. And it was a quite different, and very alien Earth at the time. However, multicellular life took its sweet time making an appearance. Most of the history of life on Earth is bacterial. Which, if we do a random sampling of exoplanets, is probably the level of life we are most likely to find.
Isn’t that similar to how some lizards have a “third eye” that acts something like an internal clock? That was my initial assumption
That was my initial thought as well. Vision and a certain amount of neurons associated with it to me implies active vs an ambush predator. But that foes not mean I think these animals had sophisticated enough vision to differentiate between prey and non pre. I think it likely the eyes were detecting motion primarily.
@@47f0
My two cents.
Yes most life in the universe is probably bacterial or things similiar. Yellow, orange and red drawf stars are long lived enough to allow life to get started given the right conditions. And allow it to develop. F class stars are iffy on the development side IMO. O and B class stars are simply too short lived IMO. The night question in my mind is what types of worlds are most likely to support life. Earth may be an outlier. With most life beating worlds being icy moons with interior oceans. Such world will out number those similiar to Earth by a wide margin.
id love to see precambrian/cambrian vids 💯
I love all of your videos. I watch them at 1.5 speed for maximum content absorption
While Wonderful Life is a landmark book in terms of the ideas discussed in it, note that we have now a better understanding of the Cambrian explosion and its drivers. Nowadays, virtually all the Burgess Shale type fossils have been identified as part of the stem groups of modern lineages. The idea that they are so different and alien, and that these lineages are very distinct from modern taxa, is artificial. Yes, in some lineages there was quite a lot of evolutionary 'experimentation', but that experimentation wasn't a hit or miss in terms of survival. Each of those body plans wasn't lucky to survive due to a random combination of features, but well-adapted to its surroundings. It can be argued that here is nothing inherently special about the Cambrian explosion either. It just happened to be a diversification of body plans due to a combination of relatively 'new' evolutionary arms races (i.e., the rise of predation and anti-predatory strategies), as well as an increased availability of atmospheric oxygen and of trophic resources. While in the Ediacaran there hadn't been much opportunity for diversification (sessile organisms on bacterial mats in a low-oxygen environment don't really have much incentive to diversify), the slow rise of predatory behaviours and bioturbation made it so that when the Cambrian came around, the apparent effect was an explosion of body plans, which had actually been in the making for millions of years.
Indeed… My first biology lecturer called species “a good faith guess” and was a useful term we use when discussing different organisms. However, it wasn’t until Aristotle (marine biologist par excellence) first introduced the term species and so we continue to do so almost 2,500 years later.
Yes, Gould was a brilliant populariser and full of creative ideas, but his leagcy has rather overshadowed mainstream evolutionary theory. We've come a long way since "Wonderful Life"
I remember reading Gould's Wonderful Life when it came out. It made a great impression on me.
Anton Petrov is the best! I always learn so much! Thank you!
Thanks for feeding my brain.
Thank you.
Great video. I learned a lot about recent studies of the Cambrian Explosion.
On the other hand, brains developed in so many different ways, in so many different animal phylums, maybe it's hard *not* to grow a brain -- like the way eyes developed independently and repeatedly, in so many different ways across the animal kingdom. Nervous tissue seems to have appeared earlier though [maybe as a distributed network of simple reflexes, before they coalesced into a central processor], since insects, octopuses, vertebrates, and others use many of the same neurotransmitters.
or may be life was just simply designed to fit a designed environment?
I really liked how you explained the basis of your interest in this subject* keep up the great work Anton!!!
I feel compelled to recommend the book "To be taught if fortunate" by Becky Chambers.
It is about an expedition to four different planets with wildly different life.
The tone is a tad sad, but also gives a terrific sense of wonder.
Fascinating. Thanks!
500,000,000 years is so long it's difficult to comprehend, I find. 7m lifetimes still doesn't help much. Great video.
hallucigenia was so popular it made it to one of the most popular anime/manga ever (attack on titan)
Oh man. That is so exciting.
I live in Wyoming so there's a lot of dinosaur bones and stuff like that. This military brat I didn't want to move to the freezing cold tundra but as soon as I heard there were dinosaur bones I was all in °~•.☆.•~°
Hi Anton. I hope you and your family are doing well and staying safe. This Video is Amazing ! You did an Amazing job with this ! This is probably one of the most fascinating , if not THE most fascinating Topics and Videos I've ever seen. This Discovery is obviously going to add a lot of info to the Bank of Research that our Scientists have to help us understand our Evolution. Again , so Amazing !! Thanks for sharing this. Stay safe , Dude. 🎸
Your content/channel seems like it's own Cambrian explosion! Daily uploads of high-quality original content, so cool 😎
I can just just imagine Simon Conway-Morris' reaction when he sees this.
To anyone really interested by this, I highly recommend “Contingency and Convergence: Toward a Cosmic Biology of Body and Mind” by Russell Powell.
1:57
Excited kids: Who’s that Pokémon?
Anton: The shrimp-looking Anomalocaris.”
Deflated kids: Oh.
Still cool though. :)
Amazing development. Looking forward to more.
Again good work anton and I completely agree with you on survivorship bias
imagine swimming around in the same vicinity as this unpleasant little water gremlin. really makes the world seem less bad these days
8 minutes in and 13,000 views. Your a super star Anton!!!!
Love your videos bud, keep up the great work.
That is insane 500 million years?
And fake
@@splinewalker214 You ain't even fossilized yet and your brain is already gone 💀
Give or take a few...
@@splinewalker214 totally fake indeed
i assure you its not 500 million
I really appreciated this video. Wonderful discovery and great presentation! 👍
Where is my mind...
Was wondering where that thing went, good lookin' out Anton!
Fantastic show as always, Anton! What a subject...
I read Gould’s book when it came out. Fascinating.
Love that cheeky smile at the end 😁
Happy to subscribe again, great stuff!
The universe is so vast i think if any form of life is created, as long as it has time, will evolve endlessly as species of every size do on earth. Just look at all the life earth created
This episode was really intriguing. Intelligent life in the cosmos seems to be rare. And even if they are others in our galaxy it would be incredibly difficult to detect them or catch any signals that they might have send out.
I bought A Wonderful Life while visiting the shale and it is indeed a wonderful book. An excellent purchase
Wouldn't it be more like a weighted chance? That is, if a given trait is more likely beneficial for survival, then it's more likely than others to be passed along to descendants, to survive and evolve. Sure, there are all kinds of random events outside of evolution that shape it, and there are all kinds of random chance within the evolutionary process. But if a given trait tends to make an individual creature better adapted to survive and pass on its genes, then doesn't that create a weighted random chance? That said, other traits may be indirectly beneficial but also get passed along, right along with totally random mutations, as well as traits that are neither particularly beneficial or maladaptive. In other words, you'd still have multiple things going on at the same time for any given individual and across species or life as a whole. But outside factors like which mating partner meets up, who is rejected or accepted for mating, or accidents in the environment, all sorts of outside factors, also come into pay. You might have really great genes but you get eaten by a predator, for example, or you don't meet that partner for you. And factors like taking care of your relatives' and friends' and group members' offspring also contribute, even if the individual isn't as prone to reproduce. At least a nearby, somewhat related or allied creature does.
exactly right
burgess shales topic is SO GREAT, i remember it from geology class too! lol
The book "Wonderful Life" is a really enjoyable read, I strongly recommend it!!!!!
Anton, your videos are superb! 💓💗💖
I’m not sure if you played Spore or not, but this video brought back some really nice childhood memories of evolving critters exactly like these!
This was a _relatively_ cool video. Relative to the rest of your video's, which are also really cool.
So Wonderful Life was a prelude to Wonderful Person, nice.
0:56 -- Not "conjunctions" (words that join sentences and words), but "conjectures" (opinions or conclusions based on incomplete information).
As a boy growing up in east Edmonton I used to play in the hills and ravines near my home. We used to find fossils of sea creatures all the time as, eons ago, the entire area was an inland sea. As teh region is now some 250m above sea level and 1100 kilometres from the coast, it must have been from an era before the formation of the Rocky Mountains, and even before the age dinosaurs!
I recently re-read the Mountains of Madness, the lines you can draw between the Elder Things and the Cambian Explosion are a bit bone chilling.
Thanks for covering this Topic. I very much agree with you about the importance of these specimens.
HELLO WONDERFUL ANTON LOVE YOUR CHANNEL
Wow, incredible.
I'd LOVE to have seen the ancient ocean with these things and the giant scorpions swimming around.
i would to but on a screen, very far away from them lol..
Your perseverance.. Love you buddy!
Where do I get the most recent thrilling science news, presented with integrity in a perfect way? It's here 😊 Thank you for your great great work!
The bias you should be concerned about is the one that makes you think you understand bias. You're an organism telling itself it understands bias.
Thank you, Anton.
I have had the pleasure of visiting the Royal Ontario Museum several times. During one of those visits I managed to lose $200 US. which I had hidden in my shoe; thereby proving that my brain is little more advanced than those of the Cambrian epoch!
Anton Petrov for world leader, he has my vote
It's utterly amazing that certain situations can preserve brain's. They are one of the hardest part of the body to preserve.
What I find amazing is how the scientists can render fine 3D detail out of a smooshed 2D imprint!
Shales are laid down on low-energy seafloor environments devoid of oxygen, such as deep-sea trenches. The lack of scavengers and their resultant bioturbation leaves perfect specimens buried in silt, that become mineralized in sedimentary shale. BTW, If shales are deeply buried and heated, they become metamorphic slate, with the destruction of fossil details.
@@psycotria there is no lack of scavengers on the sea floor please.
infact large predators even exist as apex of a massive community!!
@@ridethecurve55 computations can be wrong and carry preconcieved biases of the designer of the alogarithm
they do this alot with monkey humaniod fossils which are later debunked
they want the monkey to be the missing link so badly that they tweak the alogarithm to arrange the bones to tell them what they want to hear which of course is later uncovered and has to be rejected!
my point is be very careful with evolution, it has become a religion
Marvelous topic, Anton. Former sonarman, here. Can't stop noticing how much this Stanlycaris fellows nose looks acoustically transparent.
Is it a coincidence, or is it a sonar dome? Can you think of someone who might know a way to find out?
Complex even for back than ? It shouldn't be surprising , since these little critters evolved for millions of years , that they reached this level of complexity seems totally natural to me and not surprising at all . This cambrium explosion of life with the great amount of different species is one of the most amazing natural events in Earth's history