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OPTICAL ILLUSION. “Having such a block of time missing just before the rapid Cambrian explosion has made some people suspicious that it might not have been as much of an explosion as it appears. It would be a bit like feeling confused at the climax of a story because you had skipped the setup. A new paper in Nature suggests that far from concealing the story of the Cambrian explosion, the events that created the Great Unconformity may actually explain it.’ https://lnkd.in/dtYSB5v View in LinkedIn

DEFINITION. "Technological evolution refers to the changes over time in technology that give humans increased control over their environment." https://lnkd.in/d-EG9jg View in LinkedIn

PRECAMBRIAN GAP. “There’s a widespread gap in the rock record immediately preceding the Cambrian explosion called the Great Unconformity. The boundary is so prominent—often separating very old igneous and metamorphic rocks from the much younger sedimentary rocks above, as is the case at the base of the Grand Canyon—that all rocks older than this are often lumped together as simply "Precambrian.” https://lnkd.in/dtYSB5v View in LinkedIn

FAST ADVANCES. “We put together pieces of metal alloy and fossil fuel so that we hurtle through the sky at close to the speed of sound; we organize tiny signals from the spins of atomic nuclei to make images of the neural circuits inside our brains; we organize biological objects — enzymes — to snip tiny slivers of molecules from DNA and paste them into bacterial cells...Two or three centuries ago we could not have imagined these powers.” (W. Brian Arthur). https://lnkd.in/dBf9m3S View in LinkedIn

CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION. “The familiar Cambrian explosion, which started around 540 million years ago, was a game-changer for life on Earth. Bacteria (and archaea) had ruled the planet for over 3 billion years before multi-cellular animals came on the scene. When they did, they diversified rapidly (at least in terms of the span of geologic time). Though we’re right to be impressed by the sudden explosion of life, it’s not the only remarkable thing in that portion of Earth’s history.” https://lnkd.in/dtYSB5v View in LinkedIn

TECHNOLOGY. "The first notable attempt was made in 1954, by the philosopher Martin Heidegger in his ground breaking essay, The Question Concerning Technology. In it, he describes technology not as something we build, but as something we uncover and enframe. In other words, we are not wholly responsible for man-made wonders, nor are we entirely in control." https://lnkd.in/dZh-rjw View in LinkedIn

GLACIAL EROSION THEORY. “Erosion alone can't explain all the details of this episode, and you need something that affects the entire globe. Is there anything else that can wipe a few kilometers of rock off the Earth's face? The authors propose that three periods of epic cold snaps in the 180 million years leading up to the start of the Cambrian—sometimes referred to as “Snowball Earth” periods—could be the key.” https://lnkd.in/d3DMx6k View in LinkedIn

TECHNOLOGY. "It is vastly easier to theorize about technology than it is to measure it. It is our principal contention that patent technology codes can be used to track and characterize technological change." https://lnkd.in/dp-phxx View in LinkedIn

ZIRCONIUM DATA. “The zircons in the database span nearly the entire history of the Earth, and by far the most noticeable wiggle lines up neatly with the Great Unconformity. When they ran the numbers to see how much erosion would be required to explain a wiggle of that size, they found that it would be something in the neighborhood of 3 kilometers (or 2 miles) of rock shaved off all the world’s continents and dumped on the ocean floor.” https://lnkd.in/dtYSB5v View in LinkedIn

GLOBAL GAP. “This gap can be found all around the world, and has picked up the name the Great Unconformity. Cambrian sedimentary rocks rarely rest on anything other than much older metamorphic or igneous rock, implying that whatever rock formed in the intervening time was scrubbed away by something. This erasure of a chunk of geologic history has long been an enticing mystery for geologists.” https://lnkd.in/dtYSB5v View in LinkedIn