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Mass extinctions, change, and impermanence

The_Fruit_Punch_WizaThe_Fruit_Punch_Wiza Veteran
edited November 2010 in Buddhism Today
I always was curious to know, why the mass extinctions happened once every 45 million years on the planet we live in.

Just so you know what I mean in the Devonian period there was an extinction of 70% of life on Earth, in the Paleozoic period almost 95% of all creatures on the Earth were wiped out, in the Cretaceous period there was mass extinctions of 85% of all life and after the extinctions all life started over completely different from before.

I understand all things are impermanent, but are these patterns coincidence or is there an underlying reason for it I am unaware of?

Comments

  • TheDoctorDonnaTheDoctorDonna
    edited November 2010
    Mass extiction events are the result of a number of causes, some that reoccur in cycles, like Ice Ages and "snowball Earth", and others like impact events like the K-T event 65 MYA that killed most Dinosaurs exept for the birds, that are a bit more random.

    One thing to take care with...

    Life did not just start over with new forms after mass extictions. Some species were able to survive because they happened to have traits that allowed them to live in altered enviormental conditions.

    Remember no living thing adapts to its enviroment, that is a commen misconception about evolution.

    Evolution is the result of random DNA copy errors caused by malfunctions in DNA's proof reader or as a result of radiation, chemical intake etc. Most of these DNA copy errors are ether lethal or do not allow for reproduction, a few are neurtral, and every once in a very long time a random mutation will be benifical.

    This is why over 99 % of all living things that have existed are now extinct. Evolution does not work toward a goal, it is completely blind.
  • ChrysalidChrysalid Veteran
    edited November 2010
    It's just an average. Meteors the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs hit the Earth every 50-100 million years, that doesn't mean that a meteor will definitely hit us within the next 35 million years, just that on average a meteor big enough to do that sort of damage passes through our orbit at intervals of that size.
    We're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction right now, and it's man made, the Devonion "event" was actually a series of extinctions over the course of several million years. Whereas the K-T extinction culminated in a single meteor strike that caused very rapid extinction, but also fairly rapid recovery.

    There's nothing cyclical about them, unlike ice ages.
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