194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions

has Stephen J. Gould himself famous, he said, with regard to rerunning the take of life, well, next time we did it, it would end up with probably animals and plants and things like that, but they wouldn't be in any way familiar. But in point in fact, when we look at the endpoints of evolution, we find that almost nothing is unique. And the reason is of course that things have evolved again and again and again.

And this again is not rocket science, it's because they are very good adaptations. And I always find it slightly paradoxical, why Darwin? Only makes, I think, passing reference to convergent evolution. And I'd rather think that it was as much to do with his emphasis, you think, of the famous figure at the end of the origins species, of diversification.

What he wanted to do is explain how the biosphere was filled with forms. So the more different they were from his point of view, the better things are in general. Whereas convergence, actually, if you like reverses that idea and says, well, it doesn't really matter where you start, I'm terribly sorry, you're gonna end up with a camera eye, or you're gonna end up with a compound eye. Yeah, you're allowed other sorts of eyes, of course, we mustn't be greedy, but if you're gonna do proper seeing, one of those will do.

Greetings, future fossils. Wow, what a week. This is the episode of Simon Conway Morris, esteemed paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, someone who's working on first through Stephen J. Gould's wonderful life, Simon is an aerudite scholar of the history of life on this planet.

And we get into some profound questions in this conversation, but before we begin, I would like to thank everyone who has been supporting the show on Patreon and also Substack, including John Kirk, James Fairbairn, Katie Kelly, Michael McRaughey, Peter Bakker, Roger Tundis, I apologize for mingling in your names. You and all of the other folks who are supporting the show, I thank you immensely, fully listener supported, no paid ads. Okay, here's a deep, deep dive, far-ranging conversation with Simon Conway Morris, enjoy. Well, Simon Conway Morris, it's a pleasure to have you on future fossils.

This show is strangely less explicitly connected to evolutionary biology and paleontology than one would expect from the title, but whenever I get someone interested in these areas on the show, it's like a special treat for me. Very good, thank you. So we are here today to discuss, and this is not, I'm not sharing the video, but I'm still gonna show the book for no reason, from extraterrestrials to animal minds, Six-Miths of Evolution. Now, I wanna say that my interest in this is rather selfishly focused on only a handful of these myths, because I think that even though the things that you have to say about extraterrestrials in animal minds or the lack thereof are fascinating, that the thing that I admire most about your thinking and find most pertinent to my own longstanding questions about general evolutionary theory are more about the statements that you make on the constraints on evolution and the role of mass extinction and all of that.

So, just to set the frame for this, before we get started, could you give us a little bit of background? Could you introduce yourself and give us a bit of an autobiography, please? It'll be most of the short, so my name is Simon Conway Morris for the confusion of all this, everybody in the United States, Conway Morris is a surname, and then to add to the mayhem, it does not have a hyphen, so that may be all, but on the other hand, Americans, I have to say, have all sorts of juniors and number three's off their names. I think we'll sort of be level pegging on this one.

So, I'm speaking from the University of Cambridge, I'm now retired, they're grandi called an Emeritus Professor, and I've been in Cambridge pretty well in my academic career with four years in the Open University quite some time ago, and I've been extraordinarily lucky with the work I've done, especially on the Burgess Show, many, many years ago, and more recently in China, and also Greenland and a few other places as well. So, as one gets older, bits and pieces you begin to fall off, but on the other hand, one's mind sometimes becomes more wide-ranging, and in the last 10 years, I've been thinking about all sorts of topics like the ones you alluded to very briefly, such as why all the no-extricials discuss, or for example, our animal minds really the same as ours discuss, but there are other areas to do with general evolutionary theory, and areas of received wisdom, which in my opinion, such as mass extinctions, might be, as we say, in England, long overdue for a really good kicking, or more politely, re-examination. So, just to unpack this, just a little bit more, because again, this is an area of personal curiosity, how did you become a paleontologist? What got you into this in the first place?

Because I feel that there's often an interesting link between what animated a person to pursue a particular set of questions in the first place, and the way that they think about those questions, the way they've addressed them in their work. Well, back to Vienna and onto the couch. I mean, literally, it was a very young boy, I've probably not seven or eight, and as a story I've told too many times about my mum, who gave me a stamp album in as much as I had pretty pictures of extinct animals, and you had to transfer the stamps from the back of this little volume into the appropriate box. So, I suppose it was mentally pretty demanding for my age, and we got through that.

And that somehow triggered, I think, my own Michelin imagination, and I became determined to become a paleontologist for the federal worst, from really about the age of 10, I think, so we used to go all around the country, even to a place like France, and collect fossils, which we loved doing. And then, subsequently, when I went to Cambridge, to work with Harry Whittington on the Burgess Shale, I suppose that's a more immediate set of inquiries, which led me, first of all, to think that, like Stephen J. Gould, who may come up yet in conversation, that evolution was pretty well open-ended, but as my many early mistakes were revealed by people more competent myself, especially with respect to the Burgess Shale, I began to think more and more about the possible importance of what we call evolutionary convergence, and that is a constraint on evolution. And then, in turn, of course, the Segway to all sorts of other areas of inquiry.

And the great thing about this, as I've said many times in the past, is that, as they say quite softly, in some of the London clubs, none of this is my own work, so based on other people. So, it's much more reliable than what I can do. So, more seriously, in this essay, it's a vast amount of reading, a high speed, trying to arrive at sort of, if not a synthesis, at least a slightly bleak view of some areas, as mentioned, to proceed with some. So, a couple of things there, one, is I'm delighted.

I'm glad I asked this particular question, because I'm actually working through one of those sticker books with my own daughter right now. Oh, great. And there is something really satisfying. Hers is dragons.

There's something really satisfying for me, as somebody who's a puzzler, and really enjoys reassembling. That was the thing about paleontology, where it was finding how the pieces fit together. And so, it's been fun to watch her initiate herself into that particular thing. It makes me wonder the impact.

And to the point of historical contingency, and what are these landmark events that then determine the future evolution of a system, or are perhaps weighted too heavily in our accounting of that evolution? I think it's a good place to speak well of the dead, and just say that I, as a child, reading Stephen J. Gould, as I think a lot of people first encountered your name and your work through his. And it's been one of the more interesting feuds in the field.

The way that both of you have become almost synonymous with these two different positions, these two different interpretations of Earth history and of life history. And this is where I'd love to invite you to actually dive into your critique of the first of these myths, the myth of no limits. And to give people unfamiliar with this debate, a little bit of grounding for the common misinterpretation that you claim pervades the conversation around life history. Yeah.

Well, actually, I should say, in for instance, that perhaps one part of my specific interest in convergent evolution was ironically triggered by Stephen J. Gould in one of his set of essays called Bully for Bronte Saurus, which I actually reviewed for a London literary journal. And in those chapters, I think he used to talk about a key wheel or something. He actually refers to convergence.

And I think it's fair to say that probably triggered a specific interest. It wasn't the only one that I was at a conference years ago in Cold Spring Harbor where people were talking about similar things. So it's not a shred of originality in what I'm saying. And with regard to the limits, the constraints, if you like, versus convergence, they are almost opposite sides of the same coin.

But very briefly, with constraints, I don't think anybody would actually disagree about this because one's dealing with sort of physical parameters. And one of the examples I refer to briefly from my book is working in a fluid. Of course, we tend to think of water, but as a fluid as well. But in the case of water, of course, there's a wonderful relationship between the size of the organism and its experience as to whether it's living in a technical viscous medium, whether it's something which it will engender turbulent flow.

As the whales live in what we call a high Reynolds number and bacteria live in low Reynolds numbers and so on and so forth. But that result is that the experience in invertecomers is just radically different at either end of this. It's impossible for us to put ourselves into the place of the bacteria in terms of how it moves through this medium. It's utterly up the a-entuous.

But it's there. It's very well understood. And you can do very clever scaling experiments and all the rest of it. And this I think extends pretty well with regard to chemistry.

What are you going to use, please? Who's available in a periodic table? You're not going to know that. Carbon, yes, please, and also phosphorus.

And those two probably, along with a few other things, nitrogen, yes, please, and so on, really are essential. And I think are irreplaceable. And I would extend that argument really in as many directions as I care to take them. And say that ultimately there are limits, for instance, to the intricacies of the symbiotic associations.

And there's a wonderful example of insects, not preserval and fossil record, because these are little bacterial hotels. And what they do is they provide a lot of metabolic machinery. And why do they need that? Well, of course, these insects have decided to go down death through and not suck sap out of a plant, which is nearly all sugar.

That's bad enough. Some of these jokes actually go for what we call a xylum. That's a water, almost drinking pure water. Now, who are we going to do a thing like that?

But in point of fact, there are trace amounts of nutrients and in conjunction with these bacteria, and sometimes you have incredibly intimate genomic associations between the bacteria themselves. That, to my way of thinking, is just an example, which could be extended wherever you care to look, as to the absolute limits of what ultimately is possible. So I don't think there's any particular rocket science in that. And the other side of that coin, so to speak, as Stephen J.

Gould himself famously, with regard to rerunning the take of life, well, next time we did it, it would end up with probably animals and plants and things like that. But they wouldn't be in any way familiar. But in point of fact, when we look at the endpoints of evolution, we find that almost nothing is unique. And the reason is, of course, that things have evolved again and again.

And this again is not rocket science. It's because they are very good adaptations. And I always find it slightly paradoxical, like Darwin only makes, I think, passing reference to convergent evolution. And I rather think that it was as much to do with his emphasis, you think of the famous figure at the end of the origin species of diversification.

What he wanted to do is explain how the biosphere was filled with forms. So the more different, they were from his point of view, the better things are in general. He was trying to explain the origin of species. Whereas convergence, actually, if you like reverses that idea, it says, well, it doesn't really matter where you start.

I'm terribly sorry. You're going to end up with a camera eye. We're going to end up with a compound eye. You're allowed to have other sorts of eyes, of course, of course, you know, we must be greedy.

But if you're going to do proper seeing, one of those will do. So there's two things in there that I find of note. One is the point that you make in this chapter, looking at various forms where they appear rather fully articulated. The first time you see them in the fossil record, you've got a complete thing.

We tend to tell this story, broadly, as though there is a incremental, stepwise, complexification of forms. And so rather, you say, on page 11 of the hardcover, the shift towards relative simplicity turns out to be a more general feature of evolution. So I host this other show for the Santa Fe Institute, Complexity Podcast. I just had Caleb Schard find that show.

And we were talking about the way that much like you're talking about these metabolic symbiosis between sapsucking bugs and the germs that live inside of them, that we have kind of become the endo-symbiote of our technological infrastructure. And that there's this question about the decline in the volume of the human brain case over the last 50,000 years as we have invented writing and then computation and data processing. And so as we rely more and more on our associations with other human beings, our embeddedness in a social frame and in a technological frame, then if you think about evolution as ultimately a process of dissipation or people who talk about the minimization of free energy, making the most of available calories, then there's inherent laziness in evolution. And so things are constantly looking to reduce themselves.

And so it's like, I think you mentioned earlier in this also the way that people were surprised, you look at like a jellyfish genome, and it's enormous. And then so we were expecting that we would find the genomes of more so-called advanced animals to be bigger when in fact they're actually much smaller. And so there's something about that. But then there's a paradox that I'd like to hear you explore here, which is that this is only happening by virtue of again the diversity of life forms means that you have the, even as the individual organisms kind of come into being self-contained and then we know themselves down into more and more efficient and interdependent forms that the whole thing is getting more and more richly symbiotic and specios over time.

And so this is one of those things that seems to be true. And a lot of the ways that complex systems science investigates the stuff that the historical fault in terms of the flaw in people's way of seeing this stuff seems to be about a confusion between activity at one level of organization and activity at another level. And that there's always this tension where maybe, I mean this is like rampant speculation, but one could imagine were there extraterrestrials or if humans spread beyond this planet that one might imagine Earth itself becoming simpler as it involves itself in a more and more richly interconnected meta-individual of life forms cross pollinating between planets. So again, there's some nuance there that I'd love to hear you unpack about.

In precisely what ways we see evolution selecting for simplicity and in what ways we see it selecting for more and more diversity and more and more complex form. Oh well, you give me a vast amount to try and unpack. I don't mind that. Please.

Obviously, no, no, that's what we're trying to do. I thought right at the beginning, I thought you were going to gently try and show me the question sign argument. I knew you would be so naughty. And of course, I wouldn't even be interested in taking the bait.

Thank you very much, indeed. I might even use words which are not allowed in public. But with regard, as you say, to the general notion is, and I think that would be a Darwinian conceit, is that things are cripplingly simple to start with and by aggregation they get more and more complex. And to a certain extent, that must be true.

And I've written several places, you know, that once there were bacteria, now there's New York, well, some people might choose another city, but that pass. But if you take a particular example, I came across which struck me very forcibly, this is to do with the eukaryotes, okay? These are the more complex cells which are precursors necessary of malcellularity. And then you look at their sort of genomic components and you can infer from their living descendants what the common ancestor possessed.

And there's a whole bag of stories here, as you can work backwards into what the earth form had and infer its genome. And of course, you can do clever things in that and indeed infer their genetic sequences and engage in so-called resurrection. So you can actually sequence something and put it back into an organism and see how it would express itself. And an animal which would be extinct for 200 million years, all very clever stuff, I don't doubt.

But the point is that if you look at these eukaryotes, in point to fact, they've got everything they need right at the beginning. And of course, you can take that argument further back and say, well, they came from prokaryotes. Some people say, well, that's a huge leap. But again, this would be a different conversation.

Probably that's not quite as complicated as people think in as much as you said yourself. That evolution is lazy. And one of the things it is very good at in this society, I believe, to the main point is co-option and taking on more things which are hanging around for some other function. And we see this very clearly in the case of the prokaryotic transition, things like the cytoskeleton.

But then again, the question is, to what extent do these things self-organize themselves? To what extent is there, if you like, a matrix of possibilities which predisposes organisms to configure themselves in a particular way? And isn't that wonderfully vague? Isn't that a typical came-to-de-academic talking at high table?

And I can't articulate it very much better than that. But then given that we see or infer that the first you carry was, indeed, extremely complex. And I'm not saying you have to take that all the way back to the origin of life. I really don't know.

I mean, once you go past pre-Luca, no, you've got a focused idea for all intents and purposes. But link to that, as you indicate, of course, is that relative simplicity you might identify, or I prefer to say streamlining. The point of fact is, these things are dazzling and more complicated. But you must be misled by appearances.

So they might, as you say, with a godsate to a sponge or an Iderian genome, have maybe five times as many genes. Probably what they're doing is sort of form a one-to-one basis. There's Fred down the line. He's saying, oh, I'll do that bit of protein.

Oh, don't worry. Oh, boy. Whereas in us, if you've got trillions of cells, you can do things like a brain, for example, then you don't have time for the genome to wake up and do all the heavy lifting for you. It's done by all sorts of other mechanisms.

You can't do it without the genome. But in particular, if you think of brain development, as it happens, it's got some very intriguing similarities. I also mentioned that this seems a bit of an aside, but maybe not, to the way our immune system works. The adaptive immune system, not the innate one.

And of course, the trick here is that things got to make a decision very quickly, otherwise you're dead. And correspondingly, in a brain, you've got to get all those axons and neurons and things connecting to each other very, very quickly indeed. There is a time to go back to the genome and ask for their guidance. So within that system, once we see that in its sort of full potentiality, we are amazed.

And so it is exceedingly complex. And I'm fascinated, although this is way on the edge of my thing, but from where I'm talking, or knowing people won't see, there's lots and lots of books because I'm very old fashioned. And I like reading and I like handwriting. And that's the way I do my thinking.

But the fact of the matter is that, in a sense, almost all we have now is outside our brains. It is there. It's a very useful 20 years ago. Because I certainly couldn't have got a hold of all that literature.

I'd have worn a ladder out in the libraries, get up and down the bare stacks. So that's hardly a proper response to what you're arguing for. But it is a warning, perhaps, or at least a suggestion, rather than a warning, that I don't want to get to diverse non-extrestrials. But perhaps, if we were to find them, we would be thinking of the completely the wrong thing.

We'd be thinking of ourselves vaguely bipedal and all that sort of stuff. And no doubt in their evolutionary history, that was exactly the same case. But in point, in fact, it may be, and people have argued this, and this is really too far off-peace to worry too much about. What, as you say, might lie in the future?

Well, I have no better idea than you have in that area. So that's another thing argument. It's not trying to suggest there's something deeply mysterious about complexity. It seems to be inherent in the system.

But one of the best things you can do is, actually, I've never been to Santa Fe, and I probably wouldn't be allowed within 20 miles a bit. But he's sort of sitting people down after 20 gin and tonics. And look, I'm in the eye. I'll try to say, now, can you tell me, what exactly is complexity?

And with any luck, there'll be a sort of distant gargling sound, you know, and a sound of ice being crushed in the mouth, and all the rest of it. We don't know what it is, but define it. Not so straightforward. Yeah, actually, there's a great document that I love sharing with people, because this topic comes up a lot.

And in fact, that was the aggressive question that one of my advisors put back to me when I first encountered this stuff. And I started thinking that they're as an undergraduate and started thinking that this discipline offers a lot of potential insight into some of the fundamental questions of evolutionary biology. And I said, I wanted to study it in grad school. And the guy just says, explain to me what complexity is before you tell me that you are going to pursue this as a grad student.

But then there's Seth Lloyd, MIT, came up with a PDF that I'll link in the show notes, where he offers 30 different ways to measure complexity. And so it's one of those things that, to me, there's a poetry in the fact that, much like the species concept itself, rather than converging on one explanation, one theoretical framework to rule them all, that the longer these fields go on, the more that the concepts within them speciate in the same way that the organisms they're describing seem to speciate. I mean, my response to that critic would be that we're actually in a better standing, in terms of our understanding of this material, because we have 30 different valid ways of looking at this rather than just one. And so you see a more resilient theory.

Anyway, so that's just a side. I think I came across that article in fact. I did write a chapter on complexity, once back during New York, did. I don't sure it did me any good, it said it didn't do anybody else any good, it's all that sort of certain.

But I enjoy trying to get my mind around it, it's published quite a few years, fortunately. But that's a fair point. I mean, you could, without being excessively negative about this, to say what you say is actually correct, and in a way you dissected it, not to murder necessary, but you know, try to tease it apart a bit, like a piece of shredded pork or lamb, and I sort of a couple of forks working with it. And that, of course, reminds me, it's a horrible sense of philosophy, where there are a whole defined fields, which are coherent themselves, and yet have always nothing to say to anybody else.

And I don't have any problem with that, but I've called it to our philosophers. And I have to say, I say, I will, because they tend to belong to this school or that school. So a friend of mine introduced me quite recently to Arthur North and Whitehead, a whole people who quit shining next to nothing. And I'm still pretty ignorant about it.

But so I mentioned his name to some other people, who sort of knows an audible silence. And yes, yes, process theory, yes, yes, yes, yes. And so forth. There's nothing wrong with this, it's all part of our thinking.

But in the end, and perhaps it's a delusion, to think there are there's only some fabulous synthesis. And perhaps that's why Darwin is still such a grail. He never goes away. And you could say, well, we just reinvent him, and I don't have any quarrel with that particularly.

And indeed, in terms of his ability to hint at things which turned into major discoveries, he's almost unrivaled. I'm not in any way trying to demean this particular story. But sometimes when it gets to a stage where you sort of think, well, if we're gonna have 30 different schools, and if you use the analogy with philosophy, and you think of, you know, victims, sign and hide, I don't know much about these people, I'm afraid, that's all great fun. I have no quarrel with that.

But sometimes you might have to simply say, well, you know, this is a sheet of paper these names on. I'm now gonna have scrumpled up in front of you and put it in a waste paper basket or trash can, sorry. Yeah, so all good to talk to and talk about. I'm not in any way being negative about it.

If my book in a certain sort of sense, however, I'm adequately trying to do anything, it's trying to say, can we just actually stop moving the mirrors around? Can we actually just throw it in the window and try and look back in the room rather than spending our time looking at this sort of role in this landscape? Well, that's interesting because in bringing up Alfred North Whitehead, you know, one of the things that I talk about on the other show a lot is this paper that was led by David Crack, our SFI president, and the information theory of individuality. And they apply, you know, Elia Prigazin talking about dissipative structures, you know, gives these examples like a whirlpool or a tornado that are to most people's intuition, not living, or not, they're not individuals.

And yet they come up with this formal framework. They extend gratitude to Whitehead and process philosophy where they say that there's a kind of individuality exists on a kind of continuum where on the one hand, the structure is scaffolded entirely by its environment. It has no inherited information. There's no genome for a tornado.

But it's based entirely on structural relationships with the physics of its surround. And then you move through like colonial organisms or bug bacterium associations that you're talking about where there is some kind of, you know, like humans, you know, like the nature and culture are in balance for us. And so we're not actually individuals in the way that we conventionally think of individuals, which would be something more like a rabbit or something. But like, you know, on either end of these, their point was that basically there is no true, perfectly singular unto itself individual with no environmental scaffolding.

And in a way, an equally kind of bold and radical claim to be made about the world pool. If you think about the way that an environment and its structure may not be coded genetically, but is nonetheless inherited moment to moment, there's something about the landscape persists due to the physical relationships of rocks and the atmosphere and so on. You know, I'm not actually trying to bait you into a conversation on intelligent design because it's radically implausible. But there is something about the way that that thinking poses that intelligence itself and life itself may not be like a binary thing where like suddenly we find a moment in the fossil record that they exist and they didn't before.

But David Krakauer talks about, he's working on a formal theory of natural selection where selection is an interpretation based on an observation of evolutionary novelty and that interpretation is being made by the environment itself. And so it's a provocative framing where you get something like intelligent design back, but it's emergent. It's not imposed externally through some sort of transcendental agent. So anyway, I don't know, that's a huge long rant, but it's just funny that you brought up Whitehead because in this sort of shifting of mirrors back and forth between seeing things as objects or seeing things as processes.

And to me, it seems like there is a way to give people that recognize that something doesn't add up about this idea that life and intelligence just suddenly emerge out of nothing. There's a way to give them back a kind of fundamental intelligence in the world, but in a way that would be deeply satisfying to them, but also addresses some of the more sticky and persistent questions that are left on both sides of that debate. I don't know what your thoughts are on all of that. Well, very restricted, I'm afraid, because the friend I referred to you very briefly is Chapel Gordon Miller who's spent a little bit of time in Cambridge and not very likely listening to Spock.

I don't mean that person of course, you know, just for all busy boys. But he's been very kind to me and saying a bit about this. I should mention in parentheses, if anybody else is interested in this here, I'm just reading one book he very kindly gave me, but listen, a philosopher called David Griffin. And if you want a sort of more accessible introduction to Whitehead, then Griffin's your man.

He's also got some other very terrestrial ideas, which I'm certainly not going to mention on this podcast. No, no, no, but collectively, my intuition is, you know, has ever been an arrogant Cambridge scientist. I don't think anything's actually going to work at all the way, I think that the answer line is completely orthogonally to that. But I've been so often wrong in the past, so I'm very happy to go down that path yet again, I'll be tripped up by something like Whitehead.

But in essence, as you hint, the question is, in the end, is there are agencies of creation, you know, what I think we call either pantheism or panentheism, which is not quite the same things. And corresponding, as I believe Whitehead argues, in the sense that the naive philosophers say, well, we're going to take our eyes, something like that. We understand the world because we can see it. And it turns out to be extremely unlikely.

Of course, we sense things. But how we make sense of them is actually a completely different question. And again, I think they are, at least, as against the 30 philosophers, we mentioned in passing. Here, we might actually narrow it down to two or three contenders.

And deeper down, this is, you know, ranting on now. It's not impossible in fact. Well, they're all saying the same thing in a slightly different way. And I guess this is way, way beyond my pace scale.

So I've got to shut up straight away. But I take your point. You know, these are things which we can talk about outside science. To loop it back into science a little bit.

And thanks for indulging me there on my rants. But a moment ago, you brought up the brain and this notion, one of my favorite terms, against a nod to Gould. And the entire field is exaptation. You call it co-option.

The way that adaptations recruit materials that are already lying around. And you made a comment about this process of simplification, moving in the genes and the way that they code anatomy, from one to one function mappings to multi-function mappings. So that's how over time we find the words in our language come to mean more than one thing. And so we can remember fewer words.

But then each word has plurisignative. You know, to use a James Joyce kind of thing. So there's an interesting link to this that I don't think I actually, well, I didn't make it through all of your footnotes. Or your intranial book.

It's quite a bit like that. I would go and see a doctor if he wanted to give you to say that starts. You know, see something. See how much he had better clicks quickly.

I just want to give you credit to say that this book has like 150 pages of end notes. And it's an enormously rich resource for people who want to do follow up research. And to your point about these are not my ideas. I'm synthesizing.

I have to really give you credit as a synthesis, such diligent citations. Thank you. But yeah, so I didn't, I'm not sure if he was actually mentioned in this book. But Audie Livknot in Israel talks about there being a relationship between the, like, fire together, wire together of the forming of neural networks in the brain.

And there being a kind of a similar thing going on at the genome, where the genome simplifies through the mechanism of genes that are being expressed at the same time through an organism's behavior and interactions with this environment. Ending up fusing together into one gene. And so I'm curious, you know, how you think about this. There's Lamarck, another 19th century evolutionary thinker, is typically dismissed because, oh, it's not what Darwin was talking about.

But Livknot seems to be a bridge between what you're saying about processes of simplification in evolution and this notion of co-opting materials repurposing them. And then also, you know, if we are zoomed out as far as we typically are, then it looks like all of these mutations are happening randomly. But Livknot's kind of arguing that a lot of mutation may actually be non-random because it's the various components of a genome. Again, going kind of down this laziness slope and pursuing simpler and simpler functions.

And so, you know, it's one more point in this case where I remember 20 years ago, none of the biologists that I was talking to really gave much credit to epigenetics. And to, you know, the notion that like all of this other information is heritable through molecules in association with the DNA. I don't know, again, I'm ranting here and I'm going to stop and punt it back over to you. But, you know, there's something really profound here again in the way that it seems like a lot of the stuff that you're talking about allows for a kind of why not both attitude towards some of these fundamental debates where you can see how, you know, maybe Lamar had a piece of it, right?

If we flip things and we see them the way that you're seeing them about how novelty emerges and how efficiency operates and evolution. And yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm not, I'm not, I'm sorry, well, I'm really unfamiliar with this area completely.

So I don't think I can say anything particularly coherent about it. I mean, you know, as you say, I'd be nervous about always using the word simple, even though, you know, I understand why it's attractive. And with regard to the little I know about the epigenetics and so forth, indeed further back, what Lamar was trying to say wrong and what he's always been told to have said, which is rather different. And presumably, I think it's fair to say Lamar had this sense of a deeper organization to life.

And of course, you know, that stage in the 19th century, France, you know, how on earth could you articulate this when he knew rather this about the fossil record? Indeed, I think he largely came from his knowledge from plants, if I remember correctly. And then of course you go back again, thanks to Gordon Miller again to Gerta, actually again with this sort of an organizational system whereby things which, you know, in their own way sort of profoundly straightforward have this almost endless multiplicity of endpoints, which of course, paradoxically, don't actually converge as well. So I'm not sure I can really add anything very helpful to that.

It is, you should say, this intuition. And in a way, you can see why people who walk past the graveyard and there's a big heap of earth there. And at the end of it, it's got a little stone which says vitalism. And you can see why people sort of wish the earth's syndication tremble, you know, this and where we've killed this haven't we?

And one of the, of course, we have because there's nothing peculiar identifiable about life, which in any way, it separates it from its component parts, AKA atoms. Well, I don't know how, you know, when you see any organism itself, this degree of integration and indeed, you know, the fact that the environment makes the organism that makes the environment that makes the organism and so on and so forth, these are all sort of, you know, platitudes effectively. But what always astonishes me about embryology or, you know, the general home estate sits sort of capacity to extract nutrients like our friends, the sapsuckers and so forth, is dazzling. It's absolutely extraordinary.

I don't have any, I don't think it's an answer to that other than just to try and understand how is it that ultimately we end up, I mean, this is, you know, going way off into areas which probably beyond what anybody would want to talk about. I don't know how is it we end up with, you know, a communicating species, not just vocalizing and saying, no, no, watch out as a snake or something, but actually interrogating the world. And I think this is part of the mystery. So I'm not answering your question.

The simple reason is that, you know, most of this is not an area I'm familiar with. So I'm not going to try and bluff my way through this at all. But I can understand, intuitively, what your colleague in Israel is saying and this idea. Now, in the end, you know, that there is a fundamental identity between things.

And of course that promises to some people to be mathematically described. But when it actually gets to quite where we want to go, it's a different question, of course. So again, thanks for indulging me and also for your care and your rigor. It seems like maybe this is a good point to bump on to this question of mass extinctions again.

And perhaps I can ask you to lead us across the bridge for, I mean, I imagine most of the people listening to the show are at least, you know, at a distance familiar with this concept of the Cambrian explosion. And, you know, the fact that the, you know, the British shale in Canada and then these other shales that you've mentioned in passing now in China and elsewhere give us a snapshot into a window where it suddenly seems like you have this enormous profusion of new forms and so on. So what I'm hoping is we can get through your comments on common misunderstandings about big bangs in biology, which we've been dancing around this whole time and why we see moments where there's like a stepwise increase, right? But then also where we see what the relationship is between moments like that and moments of mass extinction and why what it is about your story and your interpretation of mass extinctions that differs from the common apprehension.

You know, this is setting us up, I hope, for some questions I have for you about the relationship. If there is one between moments of explosive, radiative diversification and moments of collapse in Earth history. And so that's, yes, please, I mean, like you take the wheel. Try to, because I've got to remember, because in America, you all drive automatic, so you start going to stick to my old stick model here.

We'll start in a second and not go too fast at the moment and like my eyesight check at some point as well. So I think that the, I wouldn't want to dwell so much on the big bangs of evolution. I mean, certainly with regards to the British, things have moved on dramatically. I think to the first approximation, it's pretty clear that it was rapid but not too rapid.

I think it's increasingly clear that the sort of you like the solution to the problem lies in the so-called ED acronym assemblages. And I have been doing some work in China, which I fear will now never come to fruition, at least in some sense, which I thought was very intriguing with regard to a few of these sort of primitive groups like sponges and so forth. But that's another story. But maybe the way then to try and join the two together is to think specifically of the end-cretaceous mass extinctions, because this is, if you like, the canonical example.

I mean, everything goes wrong. First of all, the decan of organics in India are puffing away merrily and it's an episode of mass volcanism. And there's lots of people going around with clipboards saying, oh, this is a tool, but all good. And then the next thing they see, of course, is as an enormous great hole in Mexico where an asteroid has just arrived.

Nobody wants that and that makes things worse. And there is an argument, I don't know whether it's still widely accepted, that it was a sort of seismic propagation around the planet, which then focused on the town traps, which is basically on the antipodes to the shishula impact site. And it has been argued that that actually accentuated the eruptions. It released larger amounts of magmo, which then came through and so on and so forth.

So it's all, it's bad news all around. And a dinosaur's got extinct, probably not over a weekend, but maybe in 100,000 years, who knows. And the crucial thing, which has been emphasized again and again, ad nauseam. And I think D.J.

has a keen exponent on this, is sure enough with the dinosaurs, there are little traps there, which look less interesting than guinea pigs or gerbils, but size are shrew. And there are ancestors, they're mammals, hooray. And of course, once a dinosaur's stepped down and some of the things happen in the ocean, this allows the mammals to diversify. And that's, I know, the fossil record shows that pretty clearly.

It is a major diversification and you can argue it's an ecological lease and so on and so forth. I think it's fair to say, although it's perfectly well known, it's under emphasized. It's in point of fact, the mammals themselves, first of all, originate, well, you have to go back to the Permium for the story to begin. And then you go to the Triassic, thank you very much.

And it isn't true that for the bulk of their music, their history, they're not doing anything terribly distinguished. What they do do do, fascinatingly, is actually converge on all sorts of subsequent mammals in things which approximate to a beaver or approximate to these gliding forms. And that's all very fascinating. But the take-home message is, I think, that the major groups are already diversifying in the Cretaceous.

The writing in my perspective is already on the wall. And of course, this is dependent on fragmentary material. It's undertaken by a bunch of panitologists of which I am emphatically not one. And indeed, there might be some discussion as to which of the major groups of the mammals are already present in the late Cretaceous.

But I think a majority of people would say there are at least three of these big groups are already there and waiting. And it's no big surprise, of course, that if you remove the competitors simplified dramatically, then indeed the mammals will take over. But my thesis would be that in point of fact, in all the mass extinction, and this is really going full circle back to Darwin and evolution, is that these organisms are already there in their ready to take over. And if they're given an opportunity for mass extinction and the same would apply to any of the other four great mass extinctions, to most dramatically I think the end-permium event, well actually two events, but much the same story applies there.

So that's one aspect of it. And it's just to say that, well, thank you very much. That mass extinction was very, very useful because what it does so far as the mammals are concerned is it gives you effectively 50 million years free. Instead of having to do all the grunt work and heavy lifting and working slowly, slowly, slowly to replacement.

So eventually, more socially adept, tool-making, warm-blooded creatures emerge, which decide that dinosaurs should either be put in zoos or end up in high-end restaurants, something similar to ourselves. So we'll have to wrap up and sooner or later whether you like it or not. And so in the present day, of course, we have plenty of reptiles in the tropics, lizards, most obviously snakes and all the rest of them. But if you imagine a counterfactual world whereby the asteroid misses and the decanner eruptions are not as severe as they turned out to be and so on and so forth, then what happens?

Well, any of the other things, the world begins to refrigerate. And this is going into the ice ages we present in. And ice ages are nothing to do with evolution. So then you can say, well, what's going to happen in the temperate and the polar zones?

Are the reptiles going to do really well there? No, not particularly. On the other hand, I would suggest this is an area where the mammals and the birds, which are, are agreeably convergent in many respects, would actually then take the initiative. And because simplifying dramatically, birds and mammals have bigger brains than most reptiles.

It's not the reptiles are stupid. It's not the some reptiles have quite complex social arrangements and so on and so forth. But by and large, they are more amenable to manipulation. As I mentioned, they're warm blooded and maybe some dinosaurs will warm blooded and so forth.

So that's one aspect. It is that the mass extinctions are paradoxically creative. The other aspect about it, but again, it's perfectly well known. There's nothing so mysterious about this.

But the point of fact, if you look at the Cretaceous world in many, many respects, it's modern. The rainforests have appeared, the angiosperms of flowering plants appear, well, certainly in the low Cretaceous, arguably sometime before then, depending on what you think some of the polonari back to the triacrospondingly. If you go into a late Cretaceous forest, it's alive with insects, including butterflies and all those sorts of things. And social insects are doing very nice indeed.

Thank you. Yes, and in particular. So of course, through time, really going back to the discussion about increasing complexity in inverted commas, the biosphere itself is progressively through the Jurassic becoming a more interesting place. And in a sense, the anomaly are these enormous great reptiles, the ones in the sea.

Well, what happens there is quite interesting in fact, because the ichthyosaur, the ochthyosaur, go extinct in these are the dolphin-like reptiles. I go extinct, I think, in the middle Cretaceous. They're not victims of the mass extinction. And their place is largely taken by these marine listeners, can only as a mosasaur, fascinating quite closely related to the Komodo dragon.

And blowing down one of these groups of mosasaur is actually busy re-evolving into something like an ichthyosaur. And that doesn't matter too much, because the mosasaur is getting the neck as well. There's a few stories there which could be unpacked about, never mind. But it doesn't really make any difference, because, you know, in due course, in E and C in particular, there's another bunch of dog-like creatures who sort of standing on the water edge and say, you're going to write, drop your legs, grow a flipper, get your teeth bigger, I'm going to become a whale.

And, you know, to the very first approximation, you've got these ocean-grained creatures, but this time, of course, they're mammals. And so the story goes on. So it is fundamentally, and I hope provocatively, that mass extinctions are fascinating to teach because you have to draw on so many lines of evidence. But although they are depicted almost invariably as a dry run for Armageddon, and indeed on the day themselves, they are most distressing.

In the grand scheme of things, they actually give a bias there, something like 250 million years for free, because they shave off this sort of long, long time it takes to displace a incumbent group by the new group. And it is painstakingish and slow. So thank you very much. Yeah, okay.

So this is great because you've led us directly where I wanted to ask you. You talk about the end-fertacious extinction and, you know, mammals being poised to take advantage of that. And one of the features that you describe here, you just mentioned brain size being one of them, but you also mentioned in this chapter that they have a whole toolkit now of diverse teeth, you know, like that being one of the defining characteristics of mammals. And of course, there are a couple dinosaurs that started down this path, started having kind of more specialized teeth.

But, you know, so we're not, again, as you've already said here, we're not pointing to one defining trait, but a whole suite of traits that allow them to take advantage of a bad situation. And, you know, again, this is something that comes up on a complexity podcast a lot way back in 2020 when David Krakauer and I had a conversation comparing mass extinctions to market crashes and how, you know, there's something about something that defines both of these, these collapse moments, these interregna in the history of a system is that it seems as though the beings that thrive across these, these get these punctuations are generalists, or rather than being very, very narrowly specialized and utterly dependent on one node in an ecological network that, you know, they're standing on one bridge that falls out from under them that they've got a portfolio of possible traits or functions or resources that they can depend on. And this is something that in your conversation about the end Permian extinction, you're talking about how, you know, brachiopods, which for people that are not literate in the fossil record, they look a lot like modern bivalves like clams and oysters and so on, but they're a different animal entirely. And you know, you talk about how brachiopods do one thing very well, anchor themselves to the sea floor and suck in sea water, but bivalves do a host of other things as well, including swimming and gliding for short distances, and some of them are carnivorous.

So again, it seems like part of the picture that you're painting here is that it's actually through the preparatory diversification of these lineages before a major disruption, whether it's the diversity of the teeth and the jaw of a primitive mammal or the diversification of reproductive strategies across different kinds of mammals. You know, it's the fact that so many of them are smaller and therefore less exquisitely sensitive to disruptions in the availability of caloric resources, the different kinds of bivalves and how the different strategies basically creates what in investing you think of as like a high beta portfolio, where you've got a lot of money down on these high risk startups that may or may not go anywhere, but then if the market gets whacked by a meteor, then those are the people that tend to do best or the ones that are less sort of dependent on a particular outcome. So what I'm getting around to here is this question about what it is that you feel really is the relationship between the generalists or diversity of these ultimately successful lineages broadly and the fact that they manage to make it through and thrive through these disruptions. I'm curious your thoughts on all of that.

Yeah, I'm not going to turn the microphone off, you can say, I think that's the most disappointing to you over the dynamite. I'm not going to dodge the question again, it's more, well, a certain degree of uncertainty when it comes into biology about generalists and specialists. I mean, I appreciate it. I'm in the good old days, it's called R and K and I may be still as I don't know.

The thing will be, I think, in the sort of pluritancy of the biosphere, you're always going to end up as specialist. There's always somebody who's going to fund some niche market. I don't know, maybe buy sort of grindy ups and beans, which originally came from a ravian putting in a paper cup and selling it to people on street corners and came back with a coffee bottle, I hope it helps. That's actually very comic at the moment, because Cambridge is, I don't know how it is in your body, but I think I've done extrapolation, it turned out a bit like Darwin and his elephants and in fact about 40 years time, there'll be nothing in Cambridge that's coffee bars, but we'll keep an eye on the curve.

Just in case. I haven't helped me, but I mean, with regards to the mollusks versus the brachypods, and this actually goes back to another one of Gould's famous papers. He wrote with a guy called Brad Callaway about the ships which pass in the night, and they actually care about each other. That does in a certain way sort of go back to some aspects about the organisation, the biosphere, because if they're all free players, as long as they promise not to step on each other, they're really not too bothered what the person beside him is doing.

I think the point with the mollusks is not only are they ecologically much more diverse, but also with one exception, every ecological strategy in the Permium goes through unchanging to the triassic and they might have had a hard hit of it, and it might have been nothing but smoking carcasses everywhere. But the mollusks themselves were really busy taking over the Paleozoic world long, long, even before the Permium and the like. I can well imagine in an intuitive sort of sense that if there are people which are able to feed on almost anything, then in a mass extinction they're going to be in an advantage. Indeed, I believe that's the argument which is still used as to why the freshwater ecosystem seemed to have almost no hit at all.

They come through pretty well unscathed. There's not entirely obvious why it might be the case because there's still subject to environmental stress, as anybody knows who's got a lake or a river near them. That is me. I wouldn't be so concerned about that.

Also, I do remember years ago, I think Niles Eldridge and people like that were trying to find these connections between economic theory and heaven-helver. That takes us, if you're not too careful, to a clever bearded man in Victoria London called Karl Marx. We're not going down that route either. Thank you very much indeed.

Trying to see how, even in a human sense, scale to what we see in biology. Again, I'm a little bit like the philosophers. I know enough economists are in a whole set of different versions which explains why, of course, in the West, our economists are such a runaway success at the moment, wouldn't you agree? Not apparently not, no, no.

It's just fixed, fixed. Well, the economists are by and large. As if I smacked talks this all the time, I'm still looking at economics as though it was a system seeking equilibrium. Exactly.

It's fundamentally out of equilibrium. Absolutely. And run by humans, or humans, which I thoroughly agree with, by the way, as long as they don't destroy people's economists, I'm not going to get into that. So with respect to how things go through mass extinctions, I will have ever dodged your question.

But I think I can make two possibly related observations. One is that by and large, the recovery times from the environmental insult, which primarily seem to be volcanic and only occasionally due to an asteroid impact or something similar to that, are much faster than people thought. And as often as I'm back, there's a paper I came across. I think it's a P.A.N.S.

some couple of months ago where effectively, I mean, this is not quite instantly, but immediately above the impact thing is a fish for. I think everybody's doing fine. Thank you very much indeed. And again, in a certain way, what do you expect?

Because if you're in Shishlob and you're in Ammonite, then that's it's curtains. At least in a Permium, and I think to some extent in the Cretaceous, there are actually refugia. There are areas which effectively just don't see these mass extinctions. And this is hardly rocket science because the world is a diverse place.

And for example, if you talk about climate change, well, we've got to be slightly careful what I say, but there isn't a universal story there. And we've had very hot summers this summer in Europe, toasty warm, not out, not beyond all records, but still very warm indeed. But of course, what is sometimes forgotten is that there are other parts of the world, not so far away, which are unseasonally cold. And it's not to say that you want to unseasonally cold or unseasonally warm thing, but to remind ourselves that the planet as a whole is a mosaic.

And what will cause an environmental insult close to the action versus somewhere which is remote may mean that even if people are having a really bad time across 80% of the Earth's surface, there'll be 20% of the Earth, which is actually not too bad at all. And we certainly see that in the Permium. If you go to the stratigraphic sequences in Northern Canada in particular, Vancouver and further area there, it's fairly hard push to see much severe happening. Okay, so I feel like the question I asked you a moment ago was just unbelievably baroque.

So let's follow the trend line you called for evolutionary systems and simplify this somewhat and see if it does better. PJD-8, you ask about the mammals, paradoxically, was their small size actually an escape clause and their ultimate key to future success? And I just noticed that your footnote here cites a paper by Jose Bonaparte, who I got to give a shout out to as the discoverer of my favorite dinosaur, Carnotaurus. But yeah, this is, I mean, so this is to your point about mosaicism and refugee and how animals are able to take advantage of heterogeneous landscape through a disruption.

This seems to be where, and I'm curious, am I getting this right is basically the question, that this is part of the relationship between, you know, when I studied under Robert Barker as a teenager and he made the point that you look through the, you know, the end-cretaceous extinction and he always used to say like most of what survived was like under 5 kilograms, you know, like that mass extinctions tend to carve off the top of the tiramisu, as it were. And so yeah, I'm curious, even though you kind of already said you're dodging the question, what is it about size here that you think matters in terms of understanding the characteristics of an organism at past three? What is the relationship between size and the heterogeneity that seems, because you know, elsewhere you've said in this, you're talking about how there's a different kind of mosaicism where advanced features sit cheek by jowl, sometimes literally with more primitive ones. And so you have a mosaicism even within organisms and then a mosaicism in the landscape.

And I mean, is that how much do you think those things are related in terms of the way that like recombination seems to fit into the story? Yeah. Well, I mean, I'd have to actually refresh my memory of the footnote on the bona fide paper, but we were... The immunization?

Yeah, no, that's right. I remember reading the paper. I thought, I dare not tell you how I do my research, but it's gratifyingly archaic. It uses fire cards.

I could dig out the cards and it will have about 300 words written in my new script and I could refresh my memory immediately. But with regard to small size, first of large size, and the standard argument, I don't know if this still applies, is of course population size is tens of large animals, tend to be proportionally less for fairly self-evident reasons. And therefore for that, as a result, they tend to be more vulnerable. And again, I wouldn't be too concerned about that if there was, if you like, a phylogenetic uniqueness whereby certain animals could never get to a certain size and ever were forbidden from entering some new realm of possibilities.

But that certainly is not the case. Any point about it, I think it can go, might have pointed its own. Certainly other people have reminded us many times, big animals, which, by the way, include ourselves, are actually extremely rare for pretty good reasons because metabolically, we're very expensive enough to run as it is at the best of times. And overall, most things amongst the mammals, they're all not much bigger than a fox or a dog, and a lot of great eels smaller than that, as we know amongst the rodents in particular.

So with respect to what allows animals to sneak through at one point rather than another, is a prior to that, some of them are pretty hefty size. But certainly, I think for much the Jurassic, it is fair to say that people in charge were the reptiles, and they weren't not all of them by any means, in fact, because fortunately, some of them became very, very small indeed, about the size of chicken, and decided those those four limbs could be employed for something more useful like flying so off the go. That's of course what the therapy dinosaurs do when they turn themselves into birds. So there's a whole set of possibilities there.

By the, I think, the mid-cretaceous, there's a docketont, which is a relatively primitive group of mammals, as I understand. This is the famous one, which has got baby dinosaurs in its gut. So it's not a one-way traffic, but this docketont is about the size of a dog. So it's a big animal.

And again, this gives me some confidence that some of them are later, and mammals are going to pull through and indeed take over the world because of the aforementioned social capacities and brain size and more bloodiness and all the rest of it. The thing about the mosaicism, again, the thing I was harping on about was not so much the environmental mosaic. I can well imagine, again, one of our failings is because I don't know if you've mentioned your teaching or your thoughts about dragons, and that's quite right too. So you should.

You may remember, right? So we know that was it useless was weak on dragons. We found out about that. But keep up the good work there.

It's now entirely with the mosaicism is that when we look at any group as it evolves, there is indeed, I think, invariably, not sometimes. I think invariably this mixture of relatively primitive characteristics as defined in terms of the phylogenetic tree versus advanced ones. And I probably take us too far afield. And probably in fact, I should drop my voice because sometimes people, you know, if they're children, if anybody's got children, they may not want to hear this.

Okay. So I'm just going to mention a word called cladistics. Oh, God, you know, rush the children out of no, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.

Don't you don't need to know about that. You'll at least 25 or something. This is something with sense of cladists. These are the people who use this method of cladistic analysis of derived versus primitive versus shared character and all the rest of it.

We won't unpack that, please, please don't. This ends around the bend because, of course, the thing is on the broad assumption that everybody's more is evolving, you know, continuously in the sort of dame direction. So they get more advanced. They all have advanced characters.

And there's a extremely comic example to do with one of the areas I dress in the book with regard to the transition between a fish in a divonian, the so-called sarcopter regions, the relatives of the lungfish and the sealacamp and their descendant tetraformed forms and have classic forms like tic, tic, tic, tic, tic, tic. Right. The doctrine and the cantassede and all these wonderful creatures here. But in any case, what happens is they find some new material.

I think it's probably a new species from a divonian. And they've got this clay to ground. This is a thing which I've carefully constructed over many years and they've got a fairly robust clay, gram. It's looking all right.

It's got searches here, then, everywhere. In any case, they parachute in this new species and have all the characters there and the whole thing collapses, you know, it's like a failed souff plate, you know, you get it out of the oven and this is horrible smoking mess at the bottom of the dish, you know, this have fallen apart. But why I think Mosaic is interesting is at least two reasons. One is, of course, going back to the question of, you know, what makes life life is this sort of versatility, this ability to integrate bits and pieces in not a jigsaw-like way.

I mean, you know, to use a metaphor jigsaw would be like having 12 different jigsaws, one of Canterbury Cathedral, one of the Enpassate Building, tossing it all up in the end and expecting to get a building out of it, you know, no, or even better, you know, a jigsaw of a fish or something. But the other aspect, into my way of thinking again, of course, this is why evolution is working, thank you very much indeed, and it allows it to experiment. So unsurprisingly, you have literally thousands of different combinations and you see this very clearly in the sarcopterigian-tetrable transition, you see it as clearly in the theropod to bird transition. In each and I think every case there, what one actually finds is that ultimately the chapter comes through at the end that we call an amphibian or a black bird, or from a golf perspective, just a unique end point of an unpredictable process.

And if you just took that particular lineage with all its twists and turns, you could persuade yourself, it is a highly contingent set of circumstances. But if you look at the larger picture, as is pointed out with the invasion of the air by the theropods, and there's some evidence suggested, this could have happened independently perhaps as many as eight times. Now, and all of those, of course, are active flight, some of them are gliders and all the rest of it. So there we are.

So the mosaicism is something which I think, again, with respect, oh yes, I know about that, you know, you don't even, you've any more often, some of the other bit more tonic and egynial, don't waste my time, you know, it's quite right. But actually, I think it's strangely neglected. It's sort of, it's a slight ghost of the banquet. Am I exaggerating?

Well, okay, so I'm curious whether you think I've dogleged here with my next question, or whether this nestles directly into the points that you're making here. But I was surprised, you bring up this term, which I love, this is a fabulous handle I've never heard before, that I think about these questions a lot, and you bring up this term, crisis taxon in here. There's a kind of animal or organism that thrives very well through these collapses. And I'm used to thinking about, at the end of the Permian, thinking about this organism kind of squat, pig-like thing called lisdrasaurus.

And I just wrote a piece recently where I was citing lisdrasaurus as this enormous, you know, as like the kind of thing that one should aspire to be. You know, it's like a, it's a, it's a, it's a garbage disposal, at least anything, you know, it's very squat, low to the ground, relatively small burrows, you know, so it's, it's kind of like, if you, you know, if you were to design something to make it through a complete bloodbath, you know, bet on lisdrasaurus. But you say, again, in pointing to the footnote, like let's not be so quick about this. And you mentioned, or the disaster taxon, you mentioned paper by Sean Modesto, the disaster taxon lisdrasaurus, a paleontological myth.

And so I had to pump the breaks and ask you really kind of pointedly about this one particular creature, having not read the paper that you're citing here. What am I getting wrong about lisdrasaurus? And why is that actually not such a spectacular example when I'm exploring these kinds of questions with people? Well, I'd have to literally dig out my notes again on this.

I mean, I, I've really discussed how much earlier you rely entirely on the sort of, you know, the external world to remind you of what's going on. And I certainly without getting out in the dust, you know, I've got the pile call then I certainly have a reading paper. But I think, I mean, more generally with regard to disaster tax, and I don't think I'm going to completely deflect your question. I'll make a very good go at it.

But even so, you can draw me back in in a moment. It is, first of all, there's this whole set of I might almost say a motive terms. So we have disaster tax, so we have so-called Lazarus taxor, we have Elvis taxor, as you might imagine, are those which quote come back from the dead and Elvis taxor are things which are in closer analysis are complete fakes and not that they're not king himself. They're close, close, resemblances and this is converged evolution and alike.

And the thing about, I must look at Modesto's paper again, I'm not going to interrupt the interviews, so I go and find it, I can find it about 30 seconds. But the point about this is that, first of all, as I understand it, with regard to the vertebrate record across the permatriastic boundary spanning the Permium mass extinction, there are effectively only three parts of the world with a fairly good fossil record. And it is a deeper case that if you go to South Africa, then you spend your entire time digging up bits of Listerosaurus, another one, there's nothing else here at all. And one can say that in that particular part of the world, yes, as you say, it's a dismal existence, it's a tire time showing these totally indigestible likeapods.

It's got the picture I use in my talks, it's got this sort of ominous gray sky behind it. They're looking fantastically gloomy, as you also say, when things get really too bad, too torrid for words, and they go and borrow, you know, all things thoroughly miserable. But what's happening in the other parts of the world? You know, and one can easily see how in one particular environment, there will be a short lived opportunity for a particular group to flourish.

And that's not surprising because things are bad. Notice this is confusing us for a moment. And as an example of sort of, if you like, trying to pinpoint the nature of the environmental crisis, what exactly is it? Because rather oddly, it's the best of my reading, everybody agrees that mass volcanism is very bad indeed, and most people link it to, you know, release of various volatiles into the atmosphere.

So the whole place becomes a pretty poisonous place, and it may well be dramatic climate change. Link to this. It's very, very possible. Suffered outside, bad news, global cooling, all these sorts of things, or indeed extreme global warming, which may well account some of the other extinctions later on in tricyct.

That's all, you know, that's perfectly fair. But as ever, what one's trying to do is say, well, first of all, can we stop using these emotive terms? They're great for teaching. A student will almost certainly remember disaster tax on a Lazarus tax on.

So as you say, it's a good handle, and gives you some sort of sense. But what exactly is this telling us about the grand scheme of things, and with great respect, not a great deal. I've said nothing wrong with this, you know, it's a thing. I mean, Lazarus tax, actually, I like slightly more.

I mean, sometimes you have to lean forward and say, can you bring the children back into the room now? He's not going to talk about logistics anymore. And in case of, you know, there's any residual uncertainty, this goes back, of course, to count in St John's Gospel whereby Lazarus is dead. Great friend of Jesus goes to the tomb, says, you know, you're going to say, you know, don't be stupid, you know, the body will be stinking to hire him.

And he says, no, we're going to sort this out. And he does. He cannot accept the historicity of this particular account. We don't need to get diverted into that.

But the point about the Lazarus tax, sir, is indeed that they go on holiday, join a mass extinction. No, you can find them. They've left no forwarding card and so forth, no telephone number, nothing like that. And then about 100,000 years later, half million years later, they are back smiling and saying, well, you know, looking side, you see, fish and say, well, no, no, no, sorry about this.

But this actually tells me nothing at all other than the fossil record is terrible. And it doesn't matter because in the ground scheme of things, we don't have to have every species, whichever existed. And if we did, you know, we wouldn't have time to think, but we have a sufficiently accurate representation to understand at a fairly coarse level what is happening in the general trends of evolution. So if indeed it turns out, as is, I think very likely the case that the extinction percentages were probably nothing as severe as they're usually made out to be.

But the very simple reason that, you know, most fossils are most species do not fossilize either because they're softballed or more particularly because they're relatively rare. So that's all, you know, I don't know any, you know, social quarrel about this. But it's again, the Conway Morris view is just, you know, can we step back a bit? Can we look at this from not necessarily a better angle, but at least something which is slightly orthogonal to some of the areas of received thinking.

So to that point, actually, there's a postdoc at SFI Jack Oliver Shaw, a fellow Brit who has been studying under Jennifer Dunn on the paleontological history of food webs. And I don't remember the name of his paper, but I'll find it in the show notes. He's been doing kind of inferential reconstructions of food webs. He's making exactly the point that you're making here, which is that a lot of what we have thought about the contingency of trophic networks and evolutionary history is based on a very complete fossil record.

And that actually, Jen Dunn's work actually showed how the structure of these feeding networks, all the way back to the Cambrian through the Mesozoic, into the modern ocean, the organisms themselves are very different from place to place. But the structure of the metabolic relationships between them is very well conserved. And so Jack Shaw has been looking at how we can infer from food webs, much as you talk about in this book inferring from biomolecular data, that we can actually look and say, look, we're missing fossils right here, because we know that something like this creature had to be feeding on something like this creature, but we can't find it because it's not leaving. It's soft body, or it's just, it died somewhere where we haven't dug.

And so yeah, I just thought that what you're pointing to and what they're pointing to is for somebody who's spent a life creating a crick in my neck, like looking down on the ground for a little bit of stuff, fascinating because it tickles the conspiracy theory gland for me, where you can say, like, where the lines converge on the horizon of our understanding. And you can say there must be something there, that getting all of these new techniques that weren't there when I was doing fieldwork as a teenager, where the biomolecular stuff and the trophic network stuff all seem to be really reinforcing your argument here. So thank you very much. And I'll miss remember it.

I'm afraid because this is a bit like, I think in your country, you have these things called commercial breaks on the TV. Is that correct, James? I don't have a television, you see. So I hope to come to your country about a month's time.

I'm going to have to do a lot of catching up. But there's a science fiction story and I apologize not remembering the author. I'm sorry, but I think it's American Elfenheim. I think it's called, and it is a chap who's sort of mapping out medieval villages in, I think, Germany or somewhere in that part of Europe.

And he's also thinking about the economy of how the villages are interconnected and the transport routes. And again, I'm doing a grave disservice to a very, very clever book and very enjoyable to read. And there's a village in one place which should be there, but it isn't. And he says, what is this going on?

So they start to dig around and to use what I believe is called technically a spoiler. What it turns out is, in fact, this is actually related to a visit by an alien civilization and it's spread clever. And it's got this fantastically moving bit towards the end, where in fact the aliens can't survive. I think if I remember correctly, there was a crucial nutrient, which simply wasn't available.

And they crash landed there. But they have this sort of micro sound, not trying to get the conversation into aliens, by the way, far from it. They've got this incredibly moving description when they've been to the forest and they find a deserted graveyard. And there amongst the graves are the aliens.

It's very heartbreaking, in fact. But the thing there again, as you say, is that there's a logic to the organization of these things, whereby as with the food web, and perhaps with Elton Hype, the story itself, these things are interconnected in such a way that you can predict which, after all, is what we are meant to be good at, what should be the missing components of these sorts of things. And of course, it supplies across across the world, you know, in every way. I don't know the paper about the food webs, I'm afraid.

I did many years ago construct a very elementary food web for the Burgess Shale, a completely primitive and Amazon, and Dugger, when in Rachel, wouldn't people have done much, much more sophisticated working at a particular area. But in essence, that's a stage. That's a paper was with Dugger when you. Oh, there we are.

Okay, very good. That's one. Yeah. Yeah, no, very great.

Yeah, that's right. I might have even seen it then in the corner of my eye. But the result of my very early thing was I couldn't actually find any top predators. And of course, we were in such a preliminary stage where I think I still thought a normal occurrence was a jellyfish or something.

And the whole story has blossomed. I mean, now, realize, apart from them, as especially from the Chinese material, the ecological diversity of these forms. Again, it's rocket science, we should have expected it from the beginning. But it's just so gratifying to see this huge range of different creatures, even amongst the normal of the caradlike forms doing all sorts of different ecologists, which is what they should be doing.

They've been reading Darwin well done. Okay, so there's one more question I really want to make sure I get to. And then I don't want to keep you too long. I've got to be way, not immediately, but it's six o'clock here, which is absolutely fine.

But please go on, we've got a bit of time, sure. Yeah, okay. So this is a question that I've posed to a couple of different paleontologists and I've never really gotten a satisfying answer or no one has bit on this. And given everything we've talked about today, you're the perfect person to ask, whether or not you feel like you have an answer because I've never seen anyone address this anywhere ever.

And it is, you know, most people think about mass extinctions in terms of, like you've already said, volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts, you know, these kinds of exogenous disruptions. But we also know, again, to draw an analogy to market dynamics that may make some people uncomfortable, or maybe seen as a stretch that market crashes often happen due to endogenous, due to the internal dynamics of the market itself that, you know, people end up in what I've heard during farmer call herd following behavior. And so everyone's trades become too correlated with each other. And so the whole system becomes brittle and it falls over on itself.

There are the five classically recognized mass extinctions, but then there's something like 13 others that are maybe a third or half the amplitude of this. And one of them that I find really interesting is the minor mass extinction, if you can call it that, at the end of the Jurassic period, where there's a kind of a regime change in terrestrial ecology. And you point out this chapter on mass extinctions in a section on the road to tulips, you're talking about the origin of flowering plants. And how you mentioned here that actually, to a point you've made earlier in this conversation, the fossil record of flowering plants actually goes way back, possibly into the triassic, way before they're kind of classically recognized as appearing on the surface.

And that what we're actually looking at at the end of the Jurassic beginning of the Cretaceous is the moment that they really kind of take over, not the moment where they first arise. It's sort of to your point about Cambrian and the Ediacaran faunas, that you know, this stuff has a pretty prequel going far far back that we're only starting to understand. But my question for you has to do with, I look at this and my intuition that I want to test here is that what happened at the end of the Jurassic is that the success, perhaps the success of flowering plants, and specifically to call to one of my mentors, Richard Doyle wrote this book Darwin's Pharmacy, Sex Plants and the Evolution of the Noosphere, where he talks about, he's kind of building on Darwin's descent of man and about the role of sexual selection to being a kind of a specific case for how the sort of utilization of attention by one organism of another, for like the way of flower harvests the attention of pollinators with folds and fancy colors to recruit it into helping that plant reproduce, that Doyle is making this case for the importance of perception. And some kind of, whether you want to call it mind in the way that you're saying animals don't have mind in this chapter, but the way of perception and of cognition and of attention in the formation of symbiotic relationships, and how, you know, that this is what allows that, you know, that by recruiting pollinators, you get this explosion of really, really specific symbiotic relationships between, you know, the one kind of moth that pollinates this one plant, this kind of thing.

And that kind of phenomenon leads to, like we were talking about earlier, you know, you end up with this enormous heterogeneity of recombinant strategies. You know, this one little thing can be associated to this thing now. And it seems to me like this may start to explain why there was such a pronounced shift from sort of like the age of stegosaurus to the age of the Cretaceous dinosaurs, that like, especially because there's, I can't remember who did this work, but there was some suggestion that, I mean, around the same time, you know, like in the Cretaceous, you start seeing psychoactive fungi, like ergot species living on flowering plants. And somebody made an argument that, you know, it may be that certain of the dinosaurs that didn't make it across the Jurassic Cretaceous boundary were not capable of digesting some of the flowering plants, the fungi that were associated with them, and that they basically got poisoned out.

And so my question to you has to do with the way that, I feel like I'm kind of asking if we can even strengthen your argument about the way that mass extinctions hasten the proliferation of previously, that these species are starting to become more and more diverse, or lineages that are becoming more diverse, and sort of, you know, to think about it in terms of like robustness, that there's like a cryptic variety that is, you know, hiding behind what looks like a stable ecosystem, and then it comes to the fore in some kind of moment of disruption. But the question is, in what ways can we think about that cryptic variety, that diversity of these primitive mammals before and Cretaceous, or whatever, as contributing to, not in all cases, right, like we know meteors and volcanoes and so we're responsible for the end of the age of dinosaurs, but like, was it possible, and how would we test the hypothesis that the cryptic variety of flowering plants and pollinators actually drove the massive regime change we see at the end of Jurassic? And I ask this because we're living right now through this, not super fond of like the, you know, Big Bang language, but we're living through this proliferation of technological quote-unquote species right now. And, you know, to me, the way that cell phones, for instance, or like the internet infrastructure, relates to us as individuals, again, to call back to Caleb Sharf, you know, who says that basically our human lives are now dominated by this compulsion to feed what he calls the data home.

You know, everything we do is writing books and recording podcasts and publishing science papers and, you know, producing television shows, and basically we're a complete service as pollinators to this information and infrastructure through these relationships with data processing and communications devices. And so to me, it seems like there's this really natural analogy here between the plant pollinator thing and the human computer thing, and yet we're living in the so-called Anthropocene where, or the Technosphere, where this rampant proliferation of kinds of technology seems to be driving, people are now colloquially calling the Six Mass Extinction, and that it's not an external thing, right? It's an internal thing, you know, humans are not some sort of weird extraterrestrial species that's landed on Earth and are like harvesting it for nutrients or whatever, but there's a syntax that's emerging here and the success of these new kind of syntactical relationships is driving the collapse of a previous order. And so I don't know, I just like, this is just the one idea that I wanted to bring to you because it really seems like if I try to connect the dots of everything that you've said in these two chapters with this book and the points about all of this, that what's lurking underneath that is that it's not simply that mass extinctions are accelerating the sort of preloaded success of certain things, but that it is in some cases anyway, the success of those diversifying forms that's driving the mass extinction, that it really is a coup on the part of flowers or on the part of computers.

Yeah, well, we all work. We held your answer. No, I should reply in four words. We're all in favor of analogies and they're always imperfect.

I mean, it's a very, very intriguing idea and I hadn't thought about it in that context directly. I walked away with that, that's good for the conversation. And undoubtedly, I think with the Andrews firms, there really is a phase change in terms of plant complexity and its interrelationship, that's all correct. On the other hand, one's got to remind myself that pollination per se is by no means restricted to the flowering plants, the pensive cycads and so forth.

There's lots of fossil record going much further back. So it's not a new trick on the thing. And undoubtedly flowers as Darwin himself, they realized are something which are very, very peculiar. Yes, you can see they're precursors and some gymnosperms and the neatales in particular show this in a convergent way, which is quite fun.

But I think it would be very strange if the biosphere did not inadvertently, if you like, stress the world. And there's an argument, I think it would be very briefly in the book, with regard to the nutrients, which by and large, the Andrews firms release because by and you know, if you're in a coniferous forest, it's pretty dull. I'm sorry, I know people who work on this, I apologize. You can write to me, I know, but you know, and there's usually this sick leaf layer of needles and and everything's a bit grim.

But once you go into the sort of humus rich Andrews firm stuff, then, you know, there's this, you know, set of feedbacks. And I think Mike Benton may have argued in this direction as well with regards to sort of the interconnections between nutrient runoff, which of course we now know about from agricultural practices in terms of its effect on the oceans. And you may well be right, but there were some dinosaurs which couldn't adapt to various fungal symbionts in the flowering plants. But on the other hand, I mean, so Mike Arisall associations go much, much further.

So plants and fungi have been in in the hoops forever, basically. So this is not in any way trying to sort of knock your argument off its perch. And I don't dispute that there are these real sea changes when the world becomes more complex. And I can imagine that there are various groups or various taxa, which do not find this advantageous.

But that to me seems to be just part of the big Darwinian story, you know, and from that perspective, we know we can't be sure who would flourish in this new environment who wouldn't. The only thing we can be absolutely sure about is that some will and almost certainly more will. And yes, it's a fascinating possibility that the end Jurassic early-potaceous mass extinction, such as it was, was indeed something which wasn't driven by some external forcing factor. And I wouldn't have any quarrel with that at all.

I know it seems to be entirely reasonable. The thing though, which has sometimes been driven into this discussion, again, I'm not up to speed in this area as with so many other areas, is that there is a sort of like an internal dynamic to this where as you mentioned earlier on about the market whereby in itself it's got a sort of chaotic aspect to it. And all I can say is that this is something which attracted a lot of attention quite a few years ago. And to the best of my reading, which is limited, has never really come up with anything very interesting.

It's something you can see why. And again, a little bit stepping back to our discussion about economics and its comparison to biology. Well, what I would say, and again, I think we're echoing each other here, which is, you know, we all live in echo, Jamie, but don't we want to be anywhere else? No, no, no.