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LUMPY RIDE. “The diversity of organismic form has evolved nonuniformly during the history of life.” https://lnkd.in/e4G_gYd View in LinkedIn

THE RUB. “There has been controversy between more traditional views of increased biodiversity through a cone of diversity with the passing of time and the view that the basic pattern on Earth has been one of annihilation and diversification.” https://lnkd.in/efCSXC8 View in LinkedIn

POINTY END OF A CONE. “What we see today is the standing diversity—the net difference between cumulative speciation (births) and extinction (deaths)—which is a minute fraction of all the species that have ever lived.” https://lnkd.in/e5XfdvZ View in LinkedIn

WIPEOUT TRAIN. “More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct.” Would you voluntarily board this train with its reckless driver? https://lnkd.in/efCSXC8 View in LinkedIn

DEAD CLADE WALKING. “Clade survival is no guarantee that preextinction trends will persist or be reasserted in the postextinction setting. Each extinction has examples of clades that survived the extinction event only to fall into a marginal role or eventually disappear (dead clade walking).” http://www.pnas.org/content/98/10/5393.full/Donnie) View in LinkedIn

INEXORABLE MARCH. “The cumulative fossil record can give the impression that the diversity of life has increased inexorably through time, although punctuated with occasional mass extinction events.” (PS: See Figure 1). https://lnkd.in/e5XfdvZ View in LinkedIn

MINOR SETBACKS. “Other trends suffer setbacks—presumably owing to the contrast between mass extinction and “normal” selectivities—but then resume their long-term trajectories.” https://lnkd.in/epHhn4i) View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE grapples with two opposing viewpoints of evolution: that life is on a linear march towards increased diversity and complexity, versus the view of evolution as a highly destructive boom and bust pendulum. Explosive biodiversity has been the hallmark of the Cambrian period, while five mass extinctions have endangered the very crucible of life on planet earth. View in LinkedIn

THE NON-DISRUPTED. “Some large-scale patterns withstood one or more of the Big Five extinctions with little disruption. These include the continued dominance of reefs by rugose and tabulate corals and stromatoporoid sponges across the Ordovician-Silurian boundary, the escalation of morphological responses seen in molluscan shells to increased predation intensity across the end-Cretaceous boundary, the prolonged Paleozoic decline of trilobites, and the onshore-offshore expansions and retreats of a number of post-Paleozoic marine orders.” https://lnkd.in/epHhn4i) View in LinkedIn

SUICIDE AND NATURAL SELECTION. "The idea that self-inflicted organismal death could be adaptive sounds, at face value, absurd. An adaptation is a trait that is suitable (apt) for the current circumstances or environmental challenges, and archetypal examples include traits that promote survival. Natural selection is the mechanism that produces adaptations." https://lnkd.in/ecP3KMX View in LinkedIn