WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Briefly, if I had the time, I would rewrite the JFK section of my site:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/cover-up.htm#wean

The basic information and conclusions would not change, but I have periodically dipped my nose into new evidence as it has arisen, and I have thirteen more years of writing experience, a lot of it writing technical business documents. If I only had time.

The bottom line is that every new piece of important evidence that has come out since the 1980s, when Gary first published his book (and arguably since the early 1970s, when Gary wrote most of his book, as he tried to survive what the Ventura County gangsters were serving up), has only confirmed Gary’s story. The best evidence continually points at the CIA and its Castro fetish being where the plot hatched that got JFK killed. Ferrie, the Cuban exiles, Ruby, Operation Northwoods, Hunt’s involvement, Oswald’s background and “defection,” and his very curious pals such as de Mohrenschildt, all point at covert activities being involved, revolving around Cuba and the mob. Where I think so many researchers and others miss the boat is trying to solve the crime. That will never happen, just like 9/11 will never be officially solved, other than serving up some patsies with wobbly evidence.

According to John Tower’s testimony to Audie Murphy, Bill Decker, Gary, and his partner:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/cover-up.htm#tower

the operation backfired by being interposed from the inside. Just who all was involved will never be unraveled, but that is not the point. Every single government-led “investigation” into efforts like that always served up some scapegoats and never seriously tried to solve the crime. IMO, that should be the lesson of JFK, 9/11, and the like. You can’t trust the government! However, my experience is that the government is not really where the power is, as they are just taking orders from their private-interest patrons. Every time that Dennis was wiped out, it was obviously that way; the government wielding the club on behalf of its private-interest patrons. That kind of stuff is why nobody on Wall Street went to prison or even lost their jobs in the wake of 2008-2009, but got trillions in bailouts instead, a bailout that is ongoing, with the Fed printing money as fast as it can. The “system” is not legitimate and is not worth listening to, especially where the big wealth and power issues are concerned. It is all about greed and a lust for power, and none of it approaches justice, truth, love, etc. That is just how it is today. That is why it is time for the fifth epochal event!

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

There won’t be much of it in my essay, just as there is not much of it on my site, but a little humor here and there might make it. I am currently writing about the Carboniferous Period, and am writing about the gigantism of the period, which is generally believed to have been due to the record-high oxygen levels of the period. The largest freshwater fish all of all time lived then:

http://www.prehistoric-wildlife.com/.../rhizodus.html

I have drafted the following, which might not make it past my editor, but we will see…

“I can imagine a scene with Roy Scheider reprising his Jaws scene (https://youtube.com/watch?v=8gciFoEbOA8 ), but in a rubber raft on a lake, with a fisherman’s hat, watching that apex predator swim by, maybe bumping the raft, and Scheider saying, “I need a bigger raft.”:

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Robert J. Niewiadomski]

Wade, you have found The Loch Ness monster!
(it lived in the area of present day Ireland and Scottland according to page linked by you)

If Latimeria could survive to our times, why not Rhizodus? Latimeria has evolved ~400 mya to the present form. Right about the time of Rhizodus according to geologic time scale. And Latimeria was believed to go extinct "just" ~60 mya. Though Rhizodus officially went extinct "just" ~300 mya. ~100 my after Latimeria evolved.

[Wade Frazier]

Ha ha, Robert:

Actually, it could not have, because Nessie would have been under ice not too long ago. Living fossils need continual conditions that they can survive, and it sure seems like the luck of the draw at times. The nautilus survived when the ammonites all went extinct probably because it laid eggs that took a year to hatch, and they laid them deeply, so some eggs survived the Cretaceous extinction. Coelacanths found oceanic niches that never entirely disappeared, and nothing else could really exploit them like they could. What makes the coelacanth even more fascinating is that our ancestor was a lobe-finned fish:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcopterygii

that grew those lobes into limbs. The coelacanth is a cousin to the ones that split and became land vertebrates.

Studying living fossils can be fascinating:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_fossil

Before that voice spoke in my head:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice

I was probably heading into the life sciences, but I can think of many ways that that could have turned out very badly, in our materialist age. What makes the study of ancient life harmless and even salutary is that scientists do not have to kill anything to get their information. I have been taking a journey into life’s past, both human and other life, for several years now, even if it is mostly study and not digging in Mesozoic strata. What I have seen in many life science professionals is them coming away from it with a reverence for life; all life. They often get past human egocentrism and the Genesis stuff, and they see all life as fellow travelers. Studying the human lineage, going back billions of years, can be a very inspiring experience, and the idea of ranking some life forms higher than others sure begins to seem silly. In the zero-sum-game world, that approach can make sense, as scarcity and survival is the lens that all is seen through. But what if the lens was abundance? I submit that the view would change, and radically, in all directions that one looks.

I see it as just one more way that everything changes with abundance. It is one more way that I think that what FE and abundance can mean is truly unimaginable for people mired in scarcity. I doubt that any of us can really understand what it means, but I think it would be fun to learn, to put it mildly. Visits such as Michael Roads’s:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post672748

are just the tiniest glimpses. I believe that for those who truly desire it, lifetimes in those realities beckon, for starters, and what we do here, and now, is what attracts us to our futures. Again, even imagining a world of abundance is one of the hardest tricks on Earth today. I have almost never met anybody who really could. I know it is worthy work, and may be critical to manifesting that world. But the practical effort to get there is what my work is really about. But we have to understand the goal and realize that only actions in alignment with the goal will get there, because the means become the ends:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/visions.htm#idealist

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am going to be pretty quiet until December, but I’ll throw out a section that I recently drafted. Again, without links, references, and the benefit of reading previous sections, it is going to be a little disjointed. We will see what the final product looks like.

Best,

Wade

Complex Life Colonizes Land

With the extinction at the Cambrian period’s end, animal life’s greatest period of innovation was finished, but the next geological period, the Ordovician, still had dramatic changes. The Ordovician would not see any new phyla of note, but the Ordovician was a time of great diversification, as new niches were created and inhabited, which reached modern levels of abundance and diversity. Food chains became complex, and could be called food webs. More so than the Cambrian Explosion, the Ordovician “explosion” was an adaptive radiation.

The continental configuration when the Ordovician began was similar to the Cambrian’s, with shallow hot tropical seas. The Tethys Ocean began forming in the Ordovician. The first reefs that would impress modern observers were formed in the Ordovician, with different animals building the corals (1, 2, 3) than Cambrian reef builders; but there were no schools of fish swimming around them, as the Ordovician was before the rise of fish. Fish existed (1, 2, 3), but they were armored, without jaws, and lived on the seafloor. The first sharks may have appeared in the Ordovician, but because they have cartilaginous skeletons, the fossil record is equivocal. Some fish had scales, and an eel-like fish might have even had the first teeth. Planktonic animals became prevalent, which were key aspects of the growing food chains. Trilobites and brachiopods thrived, but Ordovician marine life’s most spectacular development might have been the rise of the mollusk. Bivalves exploded in number and variety, and nautiloid cephalopods became the apex predator of Ordovician seas, and some were gigantic, with one species reaching more than three meters long, and another reaching six meters or more. The largest trilobite yet found lived in the late Ordovician.

Gigantism is a controversial subject. Islands often produce giant and dwarf species, and both are the result of energy dynamics; in general, large species tend to get smaller and small species tend to get larger on islands. A landmark study of polar gigantism among modern seafloor crustaceans concluded that the oxygen level was the key variable. Recall that colder water can absorb more oxygen. Size is a key “weapon” used in evolution’s arms race. The bigger the prey, the better it could survive predation, and the bigger the predator, the more likely it would kill a meal. Since the 1930s, there have been continual controversies over size and metabolism, energy efficiency, complexity, structural issues such as skeleton size and strength, and so on. In evolution’s final cost/benefit analysis, complex life decided that bigger was better, and the Ordovician saw much larger animals than the Cambrian did. Bigger meant more complex, and more complexity meant more parts, usually more moving parts, and that took energy to run. Whether increasing size was due to more oxygen being available, more food availability, greater metabolic efficiency, reduced risk of predation, or increased predatory success, it was always a cost/benefit analyses whose primary parameter was energy; how to get it, how to preserve it, how to use it.

Peter Ward has suggested that the superior breathing system of nautiloids led to their dominance. Nautiloids do not appear in the fossil record until the Cambrian’s end. Only one family of nautiloids survived the end-Cambrian extinction, and they quickly diversified in the Ordovician to become dominant predators, replacing arthropods atop the food chain. During the Ordovician, nautiloids gradually developed a sturdy build and they likely began spending time in deep waters, where their superior respiration system enabled them to inhabit environments that would-be competitors could not exploit.

While the Ordovician’s shallow seas were fascinating places of biological innovation, of perhaps more interest to humans was the first colonization of our future home: land. Land plants likely evolved from green algae, and while molecular clock results suggest that plants first appeared on land more than 600 mya, the first fossil evidence of land plants is about 470 mya, in the mid-Ordovician, which would have been moss-like plants, and they seem to have predated land animals by 40 million years or so.

The Ordovician was characterized by diversification into new niches, even creating them, but those halcyonic times came to a harsh end in one of the Big Five mass extinctions: the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction. The event transpired about 443 mya, and was really two extinction events that combined to comprised the second greatest extinction event ever for marine animals. Around 85% of all species, nearly 60% of all genera, and about 25% of families went extinct. Today, the ultimate cause was likely the drifting of Gondwana over the South Pole, triggering a short, severe ice age. As the current ice age demonstrates, ice sheets can advance and retreat in cycles, and they appeared to do so in the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction. There is evidence that the ice age was triggered by the volcanic event that created the Appalachian Mountains. Newly exposed rock from volcanic mountain-building is a carbon sink due to basalt weathering (as contrasted with silicate weathering – volcanoes spew basalt) of that fresh volcanic rock. The combination of Appalachian volcanism ending and subsequent sequestering of atmospheric carbon dioxide apparently triggered an ice age. The ice age waxed and waned for thirty million years, but the first event was calamitous.

Two primary dynamics drove the first phase of the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction: the sea level dropped drastically and the oceans became colder. When sea levels fell at least fifty meters, the cooling shallow seas receded from continental shelves and eliminated entire biomes. Many millions of years of “easy living” in warm, shallow seas abruptly halted. Several groups were ravaged, beginning with the plankton that formed the food chain’s base. About 50% of brachiopod and trilobite genera went extinct in the first phase, with cool-water species appearing to fill the newly vacant niches. Bivalves were largely found in seashore communities, and were scourged when the seas retreated, losing more than half of their genera. Nautiloids were also hit hard, and about 70% of reef and coral genera went extinct. The retreating seas somehow triggered the extinctions, and whether it was due to simply being exposed to the air, or changing currents, nutrient dispersal patterns, ocean chemistry, and other dynamics did it, is still debated, and those extinction events are currently subject to intensive research.

After as little as half a million years of bedraggled survivors adapting to ice age seas, the ice sheets retreated and the oceans rose. The thermohaline circulation of the time also likely changed, and upwelling, anoxia, and other dramatic chemistry and nutrient changes happened. Those dynamics are suspected as being responsible for the second wave of extinctions. There also seem to have been hydrogen sulfide events. Oxygen levels may have fallen from around 20% to 15% during the Ordovician, which would have contributed to the mass death. Seafloor anoxia seems to have been particularly lethal to continental-shelf biomes, possibly all the way to shore. While it took the ecosystems millions of years to recover from the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction, basic ecosystem functioning was not significantly altered in the aftermath of these extinction events, which is why a mass extinction during the Carboniferous has been proposed as a more significant extinction event.

The Silurian period, which began 443 mya, is short for the geologic time scale, lasting “only” 24 million years, ending about 419 mya. The Silurian was another hot period with shallow tropical seas, with Gondwana still covering the South Pole, but the ice caps eventually shrank, which played havoc with the sea level and caused minor extinction events (1, 2, 3), the last of which ended the Silurian. Reefs made a big comeback, extending as far as fifty degrees north latitude (further north than where I live in Seattle). According to the GEOCARBSULF model, oxygen levels skyrocketed during the Silurian, rebounding from a low in the mid-Ordovician, and may have reached 25% by the early Devonian, which followed the Silurian. Coincident with rising oxygen levels, more giants appeared. The scorpion-like eurypterids were the largest arthropods ever, with its biggest specimen reaching nearly three meters near the Devonian’s oxygen highpoint. The first land-dwelling animals - spiders, centipedes, and scorpions - came ashore in the Silurian between 430 and 420 mya, and the first insects appeared about that time. Arthropods became dominant predators once again, although cephalopods patrolled the reefs as apex predators. Brachiopods reached their greatest size ever at that time. As oxygen levels rose, trilobites lost segments and, hence, gill surface area, which may have been an ultimately extinctive gamble. When the Devonian extinction happened during anoxic events, trilobites steeply declined and thereafter only eked out an existence until the Permian extinction finally wiped them out. Fish began developing jaws in the Silurian, which was a great evolutionary leap and arguably the most important innovation in vertebrate history. Jaws, tentacles, claws… prehensile features were advantageous, as animals could more effectively manipulate their environments. On land the colonization began, as mossy “forests” abounded, with the first vascular plants making their appearance, although they were less than a hand-width tall when the Silurian ended.

Oxygen levels appeared to keep rising into the early Devonian and then declined over most of the period, which lasted from about 419 mya to 359 mya. The Devonian marked the dramatic rise of land plants and fish, and that period saw the first vertebrates that enjoyed a terrestrial existence. Armored fish supplanted arthropods and cephalopods during the Devonian as the new apex predators, weighing up to several tons, and sharks began their rise. Rising oxygen levels have been proposed as causing the spread of plants and large predatory fish, and a school of thought challenges high-oxygen reasons for many evolutionary events, with Nick Butterfield a prominent challenger.

Bony fish (both ray-finned and lobe-finned) first appeared in the late Silurian and thrived in the Devonian. All bony fish could breathe air in the Devonian, which provided more oxygenated blood to their hearts. Ray-finned fish largely lost that ability and their lungs became swim bladders, which aided buoyancy, similar to gas-filled nautiloid shells. Ray-finned fish can respire while stationary (unlike cartilaginous fish, sharks most famously) and are the high-performance swimmers of aquatic environments, comprising about 99% of all fish species today, although they were relatively marginal fish during the Devonian.

Today’s lungfish are living fossils that first appeared at the Devonian’s beginning, demonstrating that the ability to breathe air never went completely out of fashion, which was fortuitous, as one class of lobe-finned fish developed limbs and became our ancestor about 395 mya. The first amphibians appeared about 370 mya. In the late Devonian, lobe-finned and armored fish were in their heyday. The first internally-fertilized fish appeared in the Devonian, for the first mother that gave birth. A lightweight descendent of nautiloids appeared in the Devonian, and ammonoids subsequently enjoyed more than three hundred million years of existence, often playing a prominent role, until they were finally wiped out in the Cretaceous extinction. Nautiloids retreated to deep-water ecosystem margins and still exploit that niche today as a living fossil.

But the Devonian development that humans might find most interesting was land colonization. The adaptations invented by aquatic life to survive in terrestrial environments were many and varied. Perhaps most importantly, the organism would no longer be surrounded by water and had to manage desiccation. Nutrient acquisition and reproductive practices would have to change. Also, moving on land and in the air became major bioengineering projects. Breathing air instead of water presented challenges. The pioneers who left water likely led both aquatic and terrestrial existences. Amphibians had both lungs and gills, and arthropods, whose exoskeletons readily solved the desiccation and structural support problems, evolved book lungs to replace their gills, which were likely book gills.

All such developments had to happen in water, first, for a successful move to land. But plants had to make the move first, as they formed the base of the terrestrial food chain. Along with desiccation issues, plants needed structures to raise them above the ground, roots, a circulatory system, and new means of reproduction. Large temperature swings between day and night also accompanied life on land. Plants developed cuticles to conserve moisture, a circulatory system that piped water from the roots up into the plant and transported nutrients where they were needed, and plant photosynthesis needed water to function. Vascular plants pumped water through their tissues in tubes by evaporating water from their surface tissues and pulling up more new water behind the evaporating water via the “chain” of water’s hydrogen bonds. The last common ancestor of plants and animals reproduced sexually, and sexual reproduction is how nearly all eukaryotes reproduce today, although many ways exist to reproduce asexually. The first vascular plants are considered to have attained their height in order to spread their spores. The Rhynie chert in Scotland is the most famous fossil bed that records complex life’s early colonization of land.

The early Devonian was a time of ground-hugging mosses and a strange, lichen-like plant that towered up to eight meters tall. The oldest vascular plant division (“division” in plants is analogous to “phyla” in animals) still existing first appeared about 410 mya, and today’s representatives are mostly mosses. In the late Devonian, horsetails and ferns appeared and still exist. The first trees appeared about 385 mya (1, 2), could be ten meters tall, and formed vast forests. Seed plants also developed in the Devonian, which enabled plants to quickly spread to higher elevations and cover the landmasses. The Devonian was the Cambrian Explosion for plants, and it paved the way for animals to colonize land. One of the most important plant innovations was lignin, which is a polymer whose original purpose appears to have been creating those tubes for water transport, and was also used to help provide structural support so that trees could grow tall and strong. Without lignin, there would not have been any true forests and probably not much in the way of complex terrestrial ecosystems. That lignin was also responsible for forming the coal beds that powered the early Industrial Revolution, but that coal-bed formation would not happen in earnest until the next geologic period, the aptly-named Carboniferous. It took more than a hundred million years for life forms to appear that could digest lignin. A class of fungus gained the ability to digest lignin about 290 mya, and by that time, most of what became Earth’s coal deposits had already been buried in sediments. And as with other seminal developments in life’s history, the ability to digest lignin seems to have only evolved once. The enzyme that fungi use to digest lignin has also been found in some bacteria, but fungi are the primary lignin-digesters on Earth.

From a biomass perspective, the Devonian’s primary change was the proliferation of land plants. Land plants comprise about half of Earth’s biomass today, with prokaryotes providing the other half. Terrestrial biomass is five hundred times greater than marine biomass, and terrestrial plants have about a thousand times the biomass of terrestrial animals, so animals constitute less than 0.1% of Earth’s biomass. The ecologies of the marine and terrestrial environments are radically different. Virtually all primary producers in marine environments are completely eaten, being the food chain’s foundation, while less than 20% of land plant biomass is eaten by animals.

Creating the huge biomass of land-based ecosystems meant that carbon was removed from the atmosphere. Also, root systems were a new phenomenon, with dramatic environmental impact. Before the rise of vascular plants, rain on the continents ran to the ocean in sheets and braided rivers. Every rainfall just ran off into the oceans in a flash flood, as happens in deserts today. Plant roots stabilized riverbanks, forming the rivers that we are familiar with today. Also, roots broke up rock, accelerated weathering, and created soils. Vast nutrient runoffs from land into the ocean were stimulated by the colonization of land by plants, which in turn stimulated life in the oceans. Plants and trees created a “boundary layer” of relatively calm air near the ground which became the primary abode of most land animals.

But forests were a radical innovation that has not been seen before or since. Trees were Earth’s first and last truly gigantic organisms, with the largest trees dwarfing the largest animals. Why did trees grow so large? It seems to be because they could. Land life gave plants opportunities that aquatic life could not provide, and plants “leapt” at the chance. Lignin, first developed for vascular transport, became the equivalent of steel girders in skyscrapers. In the final analysis, trees grew tall to give their foliage the most sunlight. The limits of Earth’s tallest trees is an energy issue; the ability to pump water to the treetops. Arid climates are why trees do not grow tall, or even grow at all. Energy availability limits leaf size, too. The great biomass of forests was primarily a huge store of energy, with trees allowing for prodigious energy storage per square meter of land.

Going back to how energy enters ecosystems, primarily via the photon energy captured by photosynthesis, only so much sunlight hits Earth, and photosynthesis can only capture so much. The energy “budget” available for plants has constraints, and the question is always what to do with it. Plants faced the same decisions that societies face today: consumption or investment? Only with an energy surplus can there be investments, such as for infrastructure. Plants invested in trunk-and-branch infrastructure to place their energy collecting equipment in the best possible position. Plants race for the sky, and trees represent a huge energy investment. In the early stages of forest development, most energy goes for building plant infrastructure, and in “climax ecosystems,” when the building limits have been reached, most energy is consumed to run life processes within the infrastructure. When humans began building cities and urban infrastructures, the basis process was the same.

As with previous critical events, such as saving the oceans and life on Earth itself, life helped terraform Earth. But the late Devonian is an instance when the rise of land plants may have also had Medean effects. That greatly increased nutrient runoff into the oceans may have initiated huge algal blooms that caused anoxic events near shore. According to the GEOCARBSULF model, oxygen rose and carbon dioxide fell in the late Devonian, which would be expected if forests began blanketing the continents. Carbon dioxide sequestering, which reduced the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide concentration by up to 80%, may have cooled Earth’s surface enough so that an ice age began.

Most marine phyla were unable to manage the transition to land and remain aquatic to this day. Arthropods found a way, with scorpions, spiders, and millipedes being early pioneers. The first insects probably appeared in the Silurian, as did fish, which became the first amphibians, and those clades are the most successful terrestrial animals today. Gastropods made it to land, mainly snails and slugs, as did several worm phyla, but the rest of aquatic life generally remained water-bound. Also, many animal clades have moved back-and-forth between water and land, usually hugging the shoreline, sometimes in a single organism’s life cycle, which blurred the terrestrial/aquatic divide at times. The first fish to venture past shore seem to have done it in the mid-Devonian, and colonizing land via freshwater environments was a prominent path of development.

The first insects appeared in the fossil record about 400 mya, and were fairly developed, meaning that they likely have an older lineage, beginning in the Silurian. The first land animals would have been vegetarians, as something had to start the food chain from plants, and early insects were adapted for plant-eating. Plants would have then begun to co-evolve with animals, as they tried to avoid being eaten.

When life colonized land, global weather systems began impacting life, as land plants and animals would be at the mercy of the elements as never before, with forests and deserts forming. The continents also began coming together and eventually form Pangaea in the Permian, and converging plates meant subduction and mountain-building. Mountains of the British Isles and Scandinavia were formed in the Devonian, and the Appalachians became larger. Mountain ranges would have great impact on weather systems during terrestrial life’s future, also profoundly influencing oceanic ecosystems.

As already noted, in the late Devonian, carbon dioxide levels fell, apparently coincident with oxygen rising, and the rise of land plants is the primary variable. Those plant-based dynamics may have undermined Earth’s ecosystems, as they are the prime suspects in precipitating the second of the Big Five mass extinctions. A bolide impact has been invoked in some scientific corners, but the evidence is weak. As with the Ordovician extinction, the primary cause seems to have been rising and falling sea levels, likely associated with growing and receding ice caps, as Gondwana still covered the South Pole. Ocean anoxia again made its appearance. Unlike the short, severe Ordovician events, the Devonian extinctions may have stretched for up to 25 million years, with periodic pulses of extinction.

The late Devonian extinctions meant the end of armored fish, the near-extinction of the new ammonoids (perhaps only one genus survived), oceanic eurypterids went extinct, trilobites began to make their exit as seafloor communities were scourged, coral reefs were again devastated and permanently altered, and lobe-finned fish reached their peak influence. On land, in ways it was similar to the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods in being a time of great innovation and failed experiments. Trees first appeared during a plant diversity crisis, and the arrival of seed plants and ferns ended the dominance of the first trees, so the plant crises may have been more about evolutionary experiments than environmental conditions, although a carbon dioxide crash would have impacted photosynthesizers. The earliest woody plants that gave rise to trees and seed plants largely went extinct at the Devonian’s end. But what might have been the most dramatic extinction, as far as humans are concerned, was the impact on land vertebrates. During the Devonian extinction about 20% of families, 50% of genera, and 70% of all species disappeared forever.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Again, these are very early drafts that will look a lot different by the end of the editorial process. Just today, I decided that what I put up earlier was the place for me to bring in some new energy dynamics. Below is an early version of what I added into the previous post, too.


"But forests were a radical innovation that has not been seen before or since. Trees were Earth’s first and last truly gigantic organisms, with the largest trees dwarfing the largest animals. Why did trees grow so large? It seems to be because they could. Land life gave plants opportunities that aquatic life could not provide, and plants “leapt” at the chance. Lignin, first developed for vascular transport, became the equivalent of steel girders in skyscrapers. In the final analysis, trees grew tall to give their foliage the most sunlight. The limits of Earth’s tallest trees is an energy issue; the ability to pump water to the treetops. Arid climates are why trees do not grow tall, or even grow at all. Energy availability limits leaf size, too. The great biomass of forests was primarily a huge store of energy, with trees allowing for prodigious energy storage per square meter of land.

"Going back to how energy enters ecosystems, primarily via the photon energy captured by photosynthesis, only so much sunlight hits Earth, and photosynthesis can only capture so much. The energy “budget” available for plants has constraints, and the question is always what to do with it. Plants faced the same decisions that societies face today: consumption or investment? Only with an energy surplus can there be investments, such as for infrastructure. Plants invested in trunk-and-branch infrastructure to place their energy collecting equipment in the best possible position. Plants race for the sky, and trees represent a huge energy investment. In the early stages of forest development, most energy goes for building plant infrastructure, and in “climax ecosystems,” when the building limits have been reached, most energy is consumed to run life processes within the infrastructure. When humans began building cities and urban infrastructures, the basis process was the same."


Attached is a pic from my neighborhood, that I took today on the way back from a hike. It was taken literally a block away from my house. That was a three-or-four point buck.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am hard at work on the essay, working on the rise of reptiles and dinosaurs. As usual, it is an energy tale, where metabolisms and adaptations to changing environments and ecosystems comprise the framework that paleobiologists work within. In the seas and on land, early periods are called “Golden Ages” for various animals. The Devonian was the Golden Age of fish, and the Carboniferous was the Golden Age of sharks. On land, the Carboniferous was the Golden Age of Amphibians, and the Permian was the rise of reptiles, which led to the Age of Dinosaurs after the Permian extinction, which was Earth’s greatest extinction ever, so far. The Devonian was the “Cambrian Explosion” of plants, and like with the Cambrian, once their respective explosions were over, plants and animals never changed much afterward. The die had been cast, and all innovations afterward were made within the original frameworks. But they were all primarily energy frameworks.

As I think about the rest of the essay (it will be book-length, weighing in at around 200 pages, it seems at this stage), I also think about what I will be doing afterward as I try to recruit and train a choir. Avalon has been a good experience in that regard, as my threads have seen an almost continual stream of newbies who stumble in and advocate those many failed paths to FE, such as inventor-itis, the hero’s route, the sneak-past-them strategy, the chat up one’s friends, family, and colleagues strategy, the stampede strategy, the beseech the rich-and-powerful strategy, and all of those other dead ends that I have lived through and seen over the years.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#potholes

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6

All of those approaches reflect deep-seated delusions, and I really don’t want to spend all that much time on them, as those perspectives keep dragging it all down the lowest-common denominator states, reflecting how deeply-baked scarcity is in their awareness. I am trying to do something different, so radically different that I have yet to see hardly anybody really understand. That is both good and bad. Good in that it is truly untrodden territory that almost nobody can comprehend, but bad in that almost nobody can comprehend it or even seem willing to, as they continually chase down those blind alleys.

I see that I am still going to have to devote more time and effort than I want to, even for the nascent choir, to help them shed those delusions. They are potentially deadly delusions in this field, and the choir cannot be mired in them if they are going to get any good work done.

Best,

Wade

[Delight]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
Hi:

Briefly, if I had the time, I would rewrite the JFK section of my site:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/cover-up.htm#wean

The basic information and conclusions would not change, but I have periodically dipped my nose into new evidence as it has arisen, and I have thirteen more years of writing experience, a lot of it writing technical business documents. If I only had time.

The bottom line is that every new piece of important evidence that has come out since the 1980s, when Gary first published his book (and arguably since the early 1970s, when Gary wrote most of his book, as he tried to survive what the Ventura County gangsters were serving up), has only confirmed Gary’s story. The best evidence continually points at the CIA and its Castro fetish being where the plot hatched that got JFK killed. Ferrie, the Cuban exiles, Ruby, Operation Northwoods, Hunt’s involvement, Oswald’s background and “defection,” and his very curious pals such as de Mohrenschildt, all point at covert activities being involved, revolving around Cuba and the mob. Where I think so many researchers and others miss the boat is trying to solve the crime. That will never happen, just like 9/11 will never be officially solved, other than serving up some patsies with wobbly evidence.

According to John Tower’s testimony to Audie Murphy, Bill Decker, Gary, and his partner:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/cover-up.htm#tower

the operation backfired by being interposed from the inside. Just who all was involved will never be unraveled, but that is not the point. Every single government-led “investigation” into efforts like that always served up some scapegoats and never seriously tried to solve the crime. IMO, that should be the lesson of JFK, 9/11, and the like. You can’t trust the government! However, my experience is that the government is not really where the power is, as they are just taking orders from their private-interest patrons. Every time that Dennis was wiped out, it was obviously that way; the government wielding the club on behalf of its private-interest patrons. That kind of stuff is why nobody on Wall Street went to prison or even lost their jobs in the wake of 2008-2009, but got trillions in bailouts instead, a bailout that is ongoing, with the Fed printing money as fast as it can. The “system” is not legitimate and is not worth listening to, especially where the big wealth and power issues are concerned. It is all about greed and a lust for power, and none of it approaches justice, truth, love, etc. That is just how it is today. That is why it is time for the fifth epochal event!

Best,

Wade

Dear Wade,
Thanks for your volumes of information. Personally, the JFK assassination was something that shaped my own life and all that i have been thinking since. Though I was 8 years old when it happened, I was immediately shocked and unable to believe the way things were portrayed.

My parents were very focused on politics so I overheard many conversations. There were many strange paradoxes presented in how they made sense of events. I was always thinking about "right" and "wrong" myself, trying to understand "evil". There seemed to be much more to everything than politics and religion that I did not understand.

When the Warren Commission came out, the "case" was closed as far as my parents were concerned and I recall that was a shock to me as even as a kid, the whole episode made no sense. However, it was years before more information was available to me. The sense of shock at the un-reason shaped my attitudes in a large way.


My mother was an ardent anti-communist and also involved in civil rights. She vacillated wildly in her opinions about 'civil rights" players according to how everything fit with "Communism" as the central threat.

My father was an intellectual who studied history. Unfortunately I was a child of divorce and he left us when i was 13 so I am not sure what he came to understand later.

While I was growing up, my mother thought that much I considered "progress" was a communist conspiracy. Her stance shaped my "rebellions" and I decided to be aligned against her stance until I gave up politics all together. Such is the way opinions from reaction operate.

The 50th anniversary of the event has reawakened my personal interest to give me some greater understanding. I am left today with certainty that the event was a major cross roads for the US and that behind all the details is a larger conspiracy that I cannot really grasp. However, I have decided that whatever has happened, I want to claim something great and beautiful in human capacity.

I gather from you the central idea that we have to work from a different deep mind set that is one of "Abundance" and I too have that idea. How I have been translating that may be mistaken but I ardently want to sing in your choir.

Thanks very much for your efforts to make all the layers more available. Personally, I am thinking along the lines that I would not like to plan for an ELE that takes us back to a primitive state. If it happens, that is out of my control. It is my intention to support technology that harmonizes in the biosystem of many varieties of sentient life.

Personally I feel that I am in a web of consciousness that is much different than the web out of which the JFK assassination (and all the later events of distortion) evolved. The major insanity that still shapes the world is based on fundamental liearchies and ideas of purpose.

Thanks for the opportunity to speak here in your thread! Maggie

[Robert J. Niewiadomski]

From today's NewScientist website news: Early life built Earth's continents
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...l#.UpNEp8S9Sq4

Scientists Tilman Spohn and Dennis Höning of the Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, Germany, have created a computer model of Earth's evolution taking up into account the process of biological weathering and it's impact on below surface processes. Conclusion: "lifeless Earth would be unrecognizable water-world with very few continents, if any at all".

Submitted for peer-review:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...32063313002663

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Robert:

Thanks. That might even make it into my essay. I write plenty that life helped terraform Earth, including saving our oceans. That it may have helped hydrate the mantle, leading to the lightweight granitic continents, is a new one to me, but is consistent with the recent trend in findings and hypotheses.

Hi Maggie:

Great post. We will see just what the choir looks like. At minimum, all members will have real names and faces, and there may be different aspects of it. One part for scholarly writings, one part for “banter,” and maybe some other aspects, but the “banter” will need to be along the lines that you see me do. My posts are rarely terse, but thought out, with often long and complex thought lines. That is what comprehensive thinking usually entails.

For Americans, the JFK hit was a watershed event, in that the dysfunction in our system began to become obvious. Again, the series of assassinations and attempts in the generation after JFK were likely all related, with no true “lone nuts” for any of them. Yes, viewing the world through ideological lenses, then inflicting such views on others, sure can lead to cognitive dissonance and other reactions. I was raised with the anti-communist catechism, too, as were virtually all American children. It was all a crock, of course:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/mcgehee.htm#saigon

and we were simultaneously trained to worship a flag:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#flag

Breaking out of nationalistic indoctrination is an important part of becoming truly sentient, but our conditioning extends to other “isms,” too:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#dominant

and what they all have in common is a foundation of scarcity-based assumptions. Shedding the assumption of scarcity is the hardest part of thinking abundantly, which is why learning the song and singing it will be so hard.

Thanks for writing,

Wade

[ulli]

Asking myself if growing legs to roam around on terra firma was not
what initially triggered the scarcity mindset.
Although hunger was still the driving force, even then, in those oceans.
Eat. And be eaten.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Ulli:

Cute cartoon. It has always been energy scarcity that did it. All of those animal “Golden Ages” were due to new biomes being inhabited/created, which was always because more energy became available. The “Golden Age” never lasted long, as others came to the table, “demanding” their share, or, in the case of humans, the energy source was burned through and gone, then it was game over and back to the ragged edge of survival, fighting over the scarce, energy-based resources. The falls of civilizations were like that, from Sumer onward through Rome to the Mayans and many others. We are in the early stages of the collapse of industrial civilization, as nations such the USA invade and slaughter millions of people to steal their energy supply, Iraq most infamously:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post652292

but far from the only instance, and is really only the latest in a century of invasions and manipulations by the West in Hydrocarbon Country.

With FE, there would be, for the first time, an abundant, inexhaustible, and environmentally harmless energy source (practically inexhaustible, although some want to debate how deep that well is, even though it could power human civilization on a galactic scale, if that was our intent, although our neighbors will not allow it, particularly since humans are presently such barbarians), and what could come from that is something that looks a lot like heaven on Earth:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#advanced

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I’ll throw up a couple of chapter drafts, again without links and references. Again, the final product will look different, but here is how it looks today.

Best,

Wade

Early Life on Earth

Above all else, life is an energy acquisition process. All life exploits the potential energy in various atomic and molecular arrangements, or captures energy directly, as in photosynthesis. Early life exploited the potential energy of chemicals. The chemosynthetic ideal is capturing chemicals fresh to new environments that have not yet reacted with other chemicals. The currently dominant theory has life first appearing on Earth about 3.5-to-3.8 bya, probably in volcanic vents on the ocean floor. The earliest life forms took advantage of fresh chemicals being introduced to the oceans. Life had to be opportunistic and quick in order to capture that energy before other molecules did.

Today’s mainstream science has nothing to say about any intent behind the appearance of life on Earth. Today’s science pursues the physical mechanism. When life first appeared on Earth, the evolutionary process that led to humanity began. The United States is Earth’s only industrialized nation where there is significant doubt about evolution among the general population, and that is primarily because Biblical literalism is still strong here. In all other industrialized nations, there is virtually no controversy over evolution being a fact of existence, and those nations view the controversy over evolution in the USA with befuddlement. Enlightened scientists will state that science’s story of evolution is one of process and history, not intent, and really has nothing to say about a creator.

There is no scientific consensus regarding how life first appeared, but it is currently thought that all life on Earth today descended from one organism, a creature known today as the Last Universal Common Ancestor (“LUCA”). The reasoning is partly that all life has a preference for using certain types of molecules. Many molecules with the same atomic structure can form mirror images of themselves. That mirror-image phenomenon is called chirality. In nature, such mirror images occur randomly, but life prefers one mirror image over the other. In all life on Earth, proteins are virtually without exception left-handed, while sugars are right-handed. If there was more than one line of descent, life with different “handedness” would be expected, but it has never been found, which has led scientists to think that LUCA is the only survivor that spawned all life on Earth today. All other life forms died out, or they may have all descended from the same original organism. As we will see, this is far from the only instance where such seminal events are considered to have likely happened only once. Also, the unique structure of DNA and many enzymes are common to all life, and they did not have to form the way that they did. That they came from different ancestors is extremely unlikely.

The critical feature of earliest life had to be a way to reproduce itself, and DNA is common to all cellular life today. The DNA that exists today was not likely a feature of the first life. The most accepted hypothesis is that RNA is DNA’s ancestor. The mechanism today is that DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes proteins. DNA, RNA, proteins, sugars, and fats are the most important molecules in life forms, and very early on, protein “learned” the most important trick of all, which was an energy innovation: facilitate biological reactions. If we think about activation energy at the molecular level, it is the energy that crashes molecules into each other, and if they are crashed into each other fast enough and hard enough, the reaction becomes more likely. But that is an incredibly inefficient way to do it. It is like putting a key in a room with a lock in a door, and shaking up the room in the hope that the key will insert itself into the lock during one of its collisions with the room’s walls. Proteins make the process far easier, and those proteins are called enzymes.

Enzymes speed up chemical reactions, and they do it similar to if a person entered that room, picked up the key, and inserted it into the lock. That took far less effort than shaking up the room a million times. Enzymes are like hands that grab two molecules and bring them into alignment so that the key inserts into the lock. The lock-and-key analogy is the standard way to explain enzymes to non-scientists. Enzymes make chemical reactions happen millions and even billions of times faster than they would occur in the enzymes’ absence. Life would have never grown beyond some microscopic curiosities without the assistance that enzymes provide. Almost all enzymes are proteins, which are generally huge molecules with intricate folds. The animation of human glyoxalase on Wikipedia’s enzyme page depicts a standard enzyme. Enzymes look like Rube Goldberg-ish contraptions when their function is considered: huge molecules are used to make small ones interact. Those intricate folds are mainly kept in place with hydrogen bonds. The enzyme’s pair of “hands” are like those of a robot on an assembly line, putting two parts together and passing the assembly to the next stage. An enzyme can catalyze millions of reactions per second. All of today’s life on Earth would cease to exist in the absence of enzymes. Other than the ability to reproduce itself and produce proteins, speeding up reactions by millions of times is life’s most important “trick” and its greatest energy innovation.

The immediate source of energy for all life processes on Earth is ATP. The human body produces its own weight in ATP each day. Poisons and drugs generally work by disabling enzymes, by plugging or wrecking the “lock” so that the intended “key” will not fit. Cyanide kills by disabling a key enzyme that produces ATP. Cyanide induces an energy shortage at the cellular level.

Another vital invention of life is creating the “room” where those reactions can take place. The “rooms” of the first life forms were created by membranes, which are comprised of proteins and fats. As with the first RNA, DNA, and proteins, the first membranes likely did not resemble today’s very much. Membranes define life, keeping it separate from other molecules in Earth’s brew.

There are two primary aspects of life, and what can be observed in human civilization are often only more complex iterations of those aspects, which are:

1. Life harnessed energy so that it could manipulate matter to create itself;
2. Life created information so that it could reproduce itself.

One aspect manipulated matter and energy, and the other was the “program” for manipulating it. Matter and energy could be manipulated to either build a living structure or operate it (or disassemble it), and the life form always made the “decision.”

Entropy is another important concept for this essay. Entropy is, in its essence, the tendency of hot things to cool off. The concept is now introduced to students as energy dispersal. While science really does not know what energy is, it can measure its effect. In practice, entropy is the tendency of mass to become disordered over time, as the random motion of matter spreads in collisions with other matter, until the interacting matter has the same temperature. Life had to overcome entropy in order to exist, as it brought order out of disorder and maintained it while alive, and it takes energy to do that. The prevailing theory is that net entropy can only increase, and life has to create more entropy in its surroundings so that it can reduce entropy internally and produce and maintain the order that sustains itself.

Of those key elements necessary for life as we know it, the most diverse is carbon, with that half-filled outer electron shell. Carbon provides the “backbone” for life’s chemistry, and is the foundational element of DNA, RNA, sugars, proteins, fats, and virtually all other components of life. Carbon can form, one, two, three, and fours bonds with itself, forming by far the most diverse bonds with itself of all elements, and an entire branch of chemistry is devoted to carbon, called organic chemistry. Organic molecules are by far the largest known to science. During my first day of organic chemistry class in college, the professor observed that because the primary use of hydrocarbons was burning them to fuel the industrial age, we were living in “the age of waste,” as hydrocarbons are a treasure trove of chemical raw materials. In the eyes of an organic chemist, burning fossil hydrocarbons to fuel our industrial world is like making Einstein dig ditches or making Pavarotti wash dishes for a living.

Nitrogen and phosphorus are the most vital elements for life after carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. In its pure state in nature, nitrogen, like hydrogen and oxygen, is a diatomic molecule. Hydrogen in nature is single-bonded to itself, oxygen is double-bonded, and nitrogen is triple-bonded. Because of that triple bond, nitrogen is quite unreactive, preferring to stay bonded to itself. In nature, nitrogen will not significantly react with other substances unless the temperature (activation energy) is very high. Most nitrogen compounds in nature are created where the nitrogen and oxygen that comprise more than 99% of Earth’s atmosphere react under lightning’s influence to create nitric oxide, which then reacts with oxygen to form nitrogen dioxide, and atmospheric water combines with that to make nitrous and nitric acids, which then fall to Earth’s surface in precipitation. Certain kinds of bacteria “fix” the nitrogen from the acidic rain into biological systems. Also, some bacteria can fix nitrogen directly from atmospheric nitrogen, but it is an energy-intensive operation, using the energy in eight ATP molecules to fix each atom of nitrogen. For the earliest life on Earth, nitrogen would have been essential, and some nitrogen is fixed at volcanic vents, where life likely first appeared.

The nitrogen cycle is one of life’s most important, where some bacteria fix nitrogen for biological use and others release nitrogen back to the atmosphere. Nitrogen’s relatively inert nature, and preference for being bonded to itself, is why it is the dominant atmospheric gas, at 78% of the atmosphere’s volume, and it has held that dominant status for billions of years.

Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, has been generally decreasing as an atmospheric gas for billions of years, and has consistently declined for the past 150 million years. The geophysical process is similar to nitrogen in that atmospheric water combines with carbon dioxide to form a weak acid, which then falls to Earth in precipitation. But carbon is in the same elemental family as an abundant crustal element: silicon. The carbon replaces the silicon in crustal compounds, turning silicates into carbonates in a process called silicate weathering. Most of Earth’s primordial carbon dioxide was probably removed by this process, although the exact mechanisms are in dispute. In all paleoclimate studies, carbon dioxide is a prominent variable, if not the prominent variable, in determining Earth’s surface temperature. But perhaps as early as three bya, life became a significant source of carbon removal from the atmosphere, as life forms died and sank to the ocean floor, were subsequently buried by sedimentation, and tectonic plate movements further buried them into Earth’s crust and mantle.

More carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere by those processes than was reintroduced to the atmosphere by volcanism and other processes. That removal and reintroduction of carbon to Earth’s surface is called the carbon cycle. As carbon dioxide keeps getting removed from the atmosphere, life will have a harder time surviving, to eventually go extinct, as first plants, then animals decline and go extinct, and it will be back to microbes ruling the Earth until the Sun’s expansion into a red giant destroys Earth. The earthly end of complex life’s reign may be a billion years away, but might come much sooner.

When life first appeared, it was single-celled and simple, and such organisms are called prokaryotes today. Prokaryotes do not have organelles such as mitochondria, chloroplasts, and nuclei, but even the simplest cell is a marvel of complexity. If we could shrink ourselves so that we could stand inside an average bacterium, we would be astounded at its complexity, as molecules move here and there, brought inside the bacterium’s membrane, used to generate energy and build structures, with waste products ejected from the organism. Cellular division would be an amazing sight.

The most significant branch of evolution’s tree of life may have been the first, when bacteria split into two branches; one branch is called Bacteria, with Archaea being the other. Darwin’s notion of slowly accumulating differences through descending organisms gradually leading to new species is confounded at the single-celled level in particular, with microbes swapping DNA with abandon. The so-called tree of life at the microbe level better resembles a web. The classifications in the evolutionary tree of life are by no means settled, with frequent disputes and changes.

In the earliest days of life on Earth, it had to solve the problems of how to reproduce, how to separate itself from its environment, how to acquire the raw materials and make the chemical reactions that it needed. But it was confined to those areas where it could take advantage of briefly available potential energy as Earth’s interior was disgorged into the oceans. The earliest process of farming energy from energy gradients to power life is called respiration. That earliest respiration is today called anaerobic respiration because there was virtually no free oxygen in the atmosphere or ocean in those early days. Respiration was life’s first energy cycle. A biological energy cycle begins with harvesting an energy gradient (usually by a proton crossing a membrane or, in photosynthesis, directly capturing photon energy), with the acquired energy powering chemical reactions. The cycle then proceeds in steps, with the reaction products of each step sequentially using a little more energy from the initial capture, until the initial energy has been depleted and the cycle’s molecules are returned to their starting point, ready for a fresh influx of energy to repeat the cycle.

Back in life’s early days, some creatures discovered another source of energy and nutrients besides the chemical brew of volcanic vents: other life forms, and predation was born. Evolution has plenty to answer for, and opportunistically robbing creatures of their lives to eat them is perhaps evolution’s primary “negative” outcome.

The evidence is that after “only” 100 million years or so after life first appeared, it learned its next most important trick after it learned how to come into being and speed up reactions: it tapped a new energy source. Photosynthesis may have begun 3.4 bya. Bacteria are true photosynthesizers, fixing carbon from captured sunlight. Archaeans cannot fix carbon via sunlight capture, so are not photosynthesizers, even those that capture photons.

As with other early life processes, the first photosynthetic process was different from today’s, but the important result – capturing sunlight to power biological processes – was the same. The scientific consensus today is that a respiration cycle was modified, and a cytochrome in a respiration system was used for capturing sunlight. Intermediate stages have been hypothesized, including the cytochrome using a pigment to create a shield to absorb ultraviolet light, or that the pigment was part of an infrared sensor (for locating volcanic vents). But whatever the case was, the conversion of a respiration system into a photosynthetic system is considered to have only happened once, and all photosynthesizers descended from that original innovation.

Metals used by biological processes can donate electrons, unlike those other elements that primarily seek them to complete their shells. Those metals used by life are isolated in molecular cages called porphyrins.

As with enzymes, the molecules used in biological processes are often huge and complex, but ATP energy drives all processes, and that energy either came from potential chemical energy in Earth’s interior or sunlight, but even chemosynthetic organisms rely on sunlight to provide their energy. The Sun thus powers all life on Earth. The cycles that capture energy (photosynthesis or chemosynthesis) or produce it (fermentation or respiration) generally have many steps in them, and some cycles can run backwards, such as the Krebs cycle. The respiration and photosynthesis cycles in complex organisms have been the focus of a great deal of scientific effort, and cyclic diagrams (1, 2) can provide helpful portrayals of how cycles work. Photosynthesis has several cycles in it, and Nobel Prizes were awarded to the scientists who helped describe the cycles.

Chlorophyll molecules look like antennae, with magnesium in their porphyrin cages, and long tails. Those molecules initiate photosynthesis by trapping photons. Chlorophyll is called a pigment and, as it sits in its “antennae complex,” it only absorbs wavelengths of light that boost its electrons into higher orbits. The wavelengths that plant chlorophyll does not absorb well are in the green range, which is why plants are green. Some photosynthetic bacteria absorb green light, so the bacteria appear purple, and there are many similar variations among bacteria. Those initial higher electron orbits from photon capture are not stable and would soon collapse back to their lower levels and emit light again, defeating the process, but in less than a trillionth of a second the electron is stripped from the capturing molecule and put into another molecule with a more stable orbit. That pathway of carrying the electron that got “excited” by the captured photon is called an electron transport chain. Separating protons from electrons via chemical reactions, and then using their resultant electrical potential to drive mechanical processes, is how life works.

Early photosynthetic organisms used the energy of captured photons to strip electrons from various chemicals, with hydrogen sulfide being an early electron donor. In the early days of photosynthetic life, there was no atmospheric oxygen. Oxygen, being as reactive as it is, was deadly to those early bacteria and archaea, damaging their molecules by oxidizing them. Oxidative stress, or the stripping of electrons from life’s molecules, has been a problem since the early days of life on Earth. Oxidative stress is partly responsible for how organisms age, but it can also be beneficial, as organisms use oxidative stress in various ways.

The dates are controversial, but it appears that after hundreds of millions of years of using various molecules as electron donors for photosynthesis, cyanobacteria began to split water to get the donor electron, and oxygen was the waste byproduct. Cyanobacterial colonies are dated as early as 2.8 bya, and it is speculated that oxygenic photosynthesis may have appeared as early as 3.5 bya and then spread throughout the oceans. Those cyanobacterial colonies formed the first fossils in the geologic record, called stromatolites. At Shark Bay in Australia and some other places, the water is too saline to support animals that can eat cyanobacteria, so stromatolites still exist, giving us a glimpse into early life on Earth.

Oxygenic photosynthesis uses two systems for capturing photons. The first one (called Photosystem II) uses captured photon energy to make ATP. The second one (called Photosystem I because it was discovered before Photosystem II) uses captured photon energy to add an electron to captured carbon dioxide, to help turn carbon dioxide into a sugar. That “carbon fixation” is accomplished by the Calvin Cycle, and an enzyme called Rubisco, Earth’s most abundant protein, catalyzes that fixation.

Some bacteria use Photosystem I and some use Photosystem II. More than two bya, and maybe more than three bya, cyanobacteria used both, and a miraculous instance of innovation tied them together. Some manganese atoms were then used to strip electrons from water. Although the issue is still highly controversial regarding when it happened and how, that instance of cyanobacteria using manganese to strip electrons from water is responsible for oxygenic photosynthesis. Water is not an easy molecule to strip an electron from, and a single cyanobacterium seems to have “stumbled” into it, and it likely happened only once. Once an electron was stripped away from water in Photosystem I, then stripping away a proton (a hydrogen nucleus) essentially removed one hydrogen atom from the water molecule. That proton was then used to drive a “turbine” that manufactures ATP, and wonderful animations on the Internet show how those protons drive that enzyme turbine (ATP synthase). Oxygen is a waste product of that innovative ATP factory. As oxygenic photosynthesis spread through the oceans, everything that could be oxidized by oxygen was, during what is called the Great Oxygenation Event (“GOE”). The event began as long as three bya and is responsible for most of Earth’s minerals. Atmospheric oxygen stayed at a few percent until everything that could be oxidized by oxygen was and, beginning about 750 mya (and perhaps as long as 850 mya), atmospheric oxygen began its steep climb to 20% of the atmosphere and beyond.

As noted previously, atmospheric oxygen prevented Earth from losing its oceans as Venus and Mars did, which saved all life on Earth. An atmosphere of as little as two percent oxygen may have been adequate to form the ozone layer, and that level may have been attained more than two bya. The ozone layer absorbs most of the Sun’s ultraviolet light that hits Earth. Ultraviolet light carries more energy than visible light and breaks covalent and other bonds, wreaking biological havoc, particularly to DNA and RNA. Before the ozone layer formed, life would have had a challenging time surviving near the ocean’s surface. Ultraviolet light damage presented a formidable evolutionary hurdle, and proteins and enzymes that assist cellular division are similar to those that arose to repair damaged DNA. Life has adapted to many hostile conditions in Earth’s past, but if conditions change too rapidly, life cannot adapt in time to survive. Many of the mass extinctions that dot Earth’s past were probably the result of conditions changing too rapidly for most organisms to adapt, if they could have adapted at all. During the Permian-Triassic extinction event, which was the greatest extinction event yet known, there is evidence that the ozone layer was depleted and ultraviolet light damaged photosynthesizing organisms that formed the base of the food chains. From the formation of stromatolites to mass extinction events, ultraviolet light has played a role.

The GOE is widely accepted to have created almost all of the banded iron formations (“BIFs”), as the dissolved iron in the primordial oceans was oxidized from a soluble form to an insoluble one, which then precipitated it out in those vivid red (the color of rust) layers that we see today. The GOE is not the only BIF-formation hypothesis and there is a great deal of controversy, but life processes are generally considered to be primarily responsible for forming the BIFs. Most iron in the crust is bound in silicates and carbonates, and it takes a great deal of energy to extract the iron from those minerals; oxides are much less energy-intensive to refine. BIFs are the source of virtually all iron ore that humans have mined. Life likely performed the initial work of refining iron so that humans could easily mine it billions of years later.

About the time that the continents began to grow and plate tectonics began, Earth produced its first known glaciers, between 3.0 and 2.9 bya, although the full extent is unknown. It might have been an ice age, or merely some mountain glaciation. The dynamics of ice ages are complex and controversial, with numerous competing hypotheses about how the dynamics might have interacted to produce them. Because the evidence is relatively thin, there is also controversy about the extent of the ice ages. About 2.5 bya, the Sun was probably a little smaller and only about 80% as bright as it is today, and Earth would have been a block of ice if not for the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide and methane that absorbed electromagnetic radiation, particularly in the infrared portion of the spectrum. But that Venus-level carbon dioxide began declining during the Archaean eon, the GOE also removed methane from the atmosphere (a methane molecule is more than twenty times as effective as a carbon dioxide molecule in absorbing radiation in Earth’s atmosphere), which may have been created by methanogens (methane-producing archaea), and Earth’s first ice age began about 2.4 bya and lasted for 300 million years. There is no scientific consensus regarding the exact dynamics that caused that first ice age, but there is general agreement that it was ultimately due to reduced greenhouse gases. That first ice age may have been a “Snowball Earth” event, where Earth’s surface was almost completely covered in ice.

Around the end of that first ice age, another unique event transpired with enormous portent for life’s journey on Earth; one microbe enveloped another, and both lived. The currently prevailing theory is that an archaean enveloped a bacterium, either by predation or colonization, and they entered into a symbiotic relationship. Today’s leading hypothesis, called the hydrogen hypothesis, is that the archaean consumed hydrogen, and the bacterium produced hydrogen, forming the basis for their symbiosis. That unique event happened around two bya and led to complex life on Earth. That enveloped bacterium was the parent of all mitochondria on Earth today, which are the primary energy-generation centers in all animals. About ten percent of the human body’s weight is mitochondria. If not for the red of hemoglobin and the melanin in skin, humans would look purple, which is the mitochondria’s color. That purple color is likely because the original bacterium that led to the first mitochondrion was purple.

The mitochondrion’s creation had impact far beyond “only” creating “power plants” in cells; it allowed cells to grow to immense size. That first mitochondrion became, according to the most restricted definition, the first organelle. Cells with organelles are called eukaryotes, and today they are generally thought to have descended from that instance when a hydrogen-eating archaean enveloped a hydrogen-producing bacterium. That animation of ATP Synthase in action depicts a typical event in life forms - the generation of energy as protons cross a membrane - which in that instance makes the turbine rotate that manufactures ATP. For prokaryotes, the cellular membrane is their only one and the site of the process that fuels their lives. Cells are three-dimensional entities, and if spherical, the cell’s volume will increase at the cube of its diameter, while its cellular membrane only grows at the square of its diameter. If the diameter of a spherical bacterium is doubled, its surface area increases four times, but its volume increases eight times, and the disparity between surface area and volume increases as the diameter does. For a prokaryote, it means that the cytoplasm-to-membrane ratio quickly shrinks as the cell grows, so that less ATP is serving more cytoplasm. That means that with increasing size comes slower metabolism, so the cell becomes sluggish. Imagine a grown man trying to live on the calories that he ingested when he was eight years old. He would quickly starve to death or have to hibernate each day.

Prokaryotic cells are limited in size because their energy production only takes place at their cellular membranes. In ecosystems, the race usually goes to the quick, and it is very true with bacteria, where the smallest bacteria are faster and “win” the race of survival. Mitochondria increase the membrane surface area for ATP reactions to take place, which allowed cells to grow in size. The average eukaryotic cell has more than ten thousand times the mass of the average prokaryotic cell, with the largest eukaryotic cells having hundreds of thousands of times the mass (or around a trillion times for ostrich eggs, for instance, which exist as a single-cell when formed). Where an organism has the greatest energy needs, such as in muscle and nerve cells, the greatest numbers of mitochondria are found. In a typical animal cell, dotted with hundreds of mitochondria, a single mitochondrion is the size of the prokaryote that became the mitochondrion, and is representative of prokaryote size in general. That increased surface area to generate ATP allowed eukaryotic cells to grow large and complex. There are quintillions (a million trillion) of those ATP Synthase motors in a human body, spinning at up to hundreds of revolutions per second, generating ATP molecules.

It can help to think of mitochondria as “distributed” energy generation centers in eukaryotes, versus the “perimeter” energy generation in prokaryotes. While the new mode of energy production presented various challenges, it allowed life to become large and complex. Size is important, at the cellular level as well as the organism level.

The primary advantage that mitochondria provided was not only that increased surface area for reactions, but unlike other organelles that began as bacteria (such as hydrogenosomes), mitochondria retained some of its DNA. That DNA was likely retained so that mitochondria could make key proteins vital to its functioning on the spot, instead of waiting for the nucleus to get around to sending DNA “instructions.” Essentially, mitochondria provided flexible power generation, similar to a field commander being empowered to make decisions far from headquarters, quickly responding to conditions on the ground. Mitochondria move around inside the cells, providing energy where it is needed. That flexibility of decentralized power generation is likely mitochondria’s chief contribution to making complex life possible, and that in turn led to many changes that are characteristic of complex life, some of which follow.

Perhaps a few hundred million years after the first mitochondrion appeared, as the oceanic oxygen content, at least on the surface, increased as a result of oxygenic photosynthesis, those complex cells learned to use oxygen instead of hydrogen. It is difficult to overstate the importance of learning to use oxygen in respiration, called aerobic respiration. Before the appearance of aerobic respiration, life generated energy via anaerobic respiration and fermentation. Because oxygen is in second place for creating the most energetic reactions, aerobic respiration generates, on average, about fifteen times as many ATP molecules per cycle as fermentation and anaerobic respiration do. The suite of complex life on Earth today would not have been possible without the energy provided by oxygenic respiration. At minimum, nothing could have flown, and any animal life that might have evolved would have never left the oceans, because the atmosphere would not have been breathable. With the advent of aerobic respiration, food chains became possible, as it is several times as efficient as anaerobic respiration and fermentation (about 40% as compared to less than 10%). Today’s food chains of several levels would be constrained to about two in the absence of oxygen.

Complex life means, by definition, that it has many parts, and they move. Complex movement needs energy to run the many moving parts. Complexity’s dependence on greater levels of energy use not only applies to all life forms, but it has also applied to all human civilizations, which will be explored later in this essay. When cells became “complex” with organelles, a tiny observer inside that cell would have witnessed a bewildering display of activity, with mitochondria sailing through the cells via cytoskeleton “scaffolding” on their energy generating missions, the ingestion of molecules for fuel and to create structures, with the miracle of cellular division, the constant building, repair, and dismantling of cellular structures, and the ejection of waste through the cellular membrane. The movement of molecules and organelles in eukaryotic cells is accomplished by using the same protein that became muscle: actin. Prokaryotes used an ancestor of actin to move, with their flagella providing their main mode of travel, to usually move toward food and safety or away from danger, including predators.

For various reasons, eukaryotes did not immediately rise to dominance on Earth, but were on a fairly even footing with prokaryotes for more than a billion years. That situation was at least partially related the continental configurations and the ocean’s currents.

The Moon has stabilized Earth’s axial tilt in relation to the Sun, making the seasons vary within a relatively narrow range. Without the Moon, Earth could have up to 90o changes in its axis of rotation instead of the 22o-to-24.5 o variation of the past several million years. If that had happened, while life may have survived, Earth’s climate would have been extremely chaotic, with part of the planet going into perpetual day, while another went into perpetual night, and other wild variations, which would have had mass-extinction effects on those portions, and the rest of the biosphere would have been extremely challenged to survive. Complex life on Earth would little resemble today’s, if it had appeared and survived at all, if Earth’s axis tilted chaotically and severely. The primary effect of Earth’s stable tilt is the planet’s entire surface receiving relatively uniform and predictable energy levels.

The primary heat dynamic on Earth’s surface is that the oceans near the equator are heated by sunlight and entropy spreads the heat toward the poles via oceanic currents. Today’s continental configuration, with three major oceans besides the polar ones, has seen a global current develop that takes water 1,600 years to travel. Where the Atlantic Ocean meets the polar oceans, the warm surface currents cool and sink to the ocean’s bottom, which is how the oceans are oxygenated. Without that oxygenation, there would be little life on the ocean floor or much below the surface; almost the entire global ocean would be lifeless. Before the GOE, this was certainly the case, but relatively recent hypotheses make the case that the oceans were anoxic for more than a billion years after the GOE began, largely related to the continental configuration and geophysical processes.

Many people are familiar with the term Pangaea, which was all of today’s continents merged into a supercontinent. Pangaea formed about 300 mya, but it was likely not the only supercontinent; it was just the only one existing during the eon of complex life. One called Rodinia may have existed one bya and did not break up until 750 mya (and reformed into another supercontinent, Pannotia, 600 mya, which did not break up until 550 mya), and there is a hypothesized earlier one called Columbia that existed two bya. There is also a hypothesis that all continental mass was contained in one supercontinent that lasted from 2.7 bya to 600 mya. The continental land masses of two bya may have been only about 60% the size of today’s. Supercontinents are generally associated with ice ages.

When the total continental land mass was small or combined into a supercontinent, there was no land to divert that diffusion of warm water toward the poles, which results in currents. During those times, the ocean became one big, calm lake, with no currents of significance. Those oceans are called Canfield Oceans today, and they would have been anoxic, as the oxygenated surface waters would not have been drawn by currents to the ocean floor, and the oceans were certainly anoxic before the GOE. While the interplay of the many interacting dynamics can be incredibly complex and lead to the multitude of hypotheses posited to explain those ancient events, a leading hypothesis today is that a combination of factors, including supercontinents, variations in volcanic output, Canfield Oceans, and ice ages, prevented eukaryotic life from gaining ecosystem dominance until the waning of the second Snowball Earth event, which was the greatest series of glaciations that Earth has yet experienced, known today as the Cryogenian period, which ended about 635 mya. The study of the Cryogenian period, which is the subject of this essay’s next section, resulted in the term “Snowball Earth.”

All animals, except for some tiny ones in anoxic environments, use aerobic respiration today, and it is likely that the early animals (multicellular heterotrophs, which are called metazoans today) also used aerobic respiration. Before the rise of eukaryotes, the dominant life forms, bacteria and archaea, had many chemical pathways to generate energy, farming that potential electron energy from a myriad of substances, such as hydrogen sulfide, sulfur, iron, hydrogen, ammonia, and manganese, and photosynthesizers got their donor electrons from hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen, arsenate, nitrite, and other variants. If there is potential energy in electron bonds, bacteria and archaea will often find ways to harvest it. Many archaean and bacterial species thrive in harsh environments that would quickly kill any complex life, and those hardy organisms are called extremophiles. In harsh environments, those organisms can go dormant for millennia and perhaps longer, waiting for appropriate conditions (usually related to available energy). In some environments, it can take a hundred years for a cell to divide.

But once the GOE reached the level where eukaryotes could reliably power their respiration aerobically, then virtually all complex life went “all in” with aerobic respiration, and all plants engage in oxygenic photosynthesis. The conventional view is that the GOE was a microbe holocaust, as most anaerobic microbes died from oxygen damage. However, there is little evidence for a holocaust. Today, it looks more like the anaerobes were driven to the margins where oxygen is scarce (underground, and in some anoxic waters such as today’s Black Sea) while aerobes quickly came to dominate the planet. Once the oxygenic photosynthesis and aerobic respiration regime was achieved around two billion years ago, the cycle of photosynthesizers creating oxygen and aerobes eating it began. The atmospheric carbon dioxide and oxygen levels have seesawed ever since the beginning of the eon of complex life, and probably earlier. For instance, the coal beds that humanity is mining and burning with such abandon today were created because trees invented lignin that allowed them to grow tall, and it took millions of years for life forms to learn how to break lignin down, and like the other big events, that trick was likely only learned once. Consequently, carbon got buried with those trees in prodigious amounts, eventually forming most of Earth’s coal beds. That time is known as the Carboniferous period, and all of that carbon being sequestered in Earth led to skyrocketing oxygen levels; the highest that Earth has yet seen. Over the billions of years since oxygenic respiration began, aerobes have consumed 99.99% of all the oxygen created by oxygenic photosynthesis. That remaining 0.01% was buried into Earth’s crust and is responsible for the generally declining atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. It has been estimated that there is 26,000 times more organic carbon buried in Earth’s crust than exists in today’s biosphere.

The times between 1.8 bya and 800 mya are called “the boring billion years” in scientific circles, because there were no dramatic evolutionary events that left a fossil record, and it was likely because the oceans were largely anoxic and rich in hydrogen sulfide, which prevented eukaryotes from attaining dominance. It is also hypothesized that a shortage of molybdenum, which bacteria use to fix nitrogen, may have contributed.

During that “boring” time before complex life appeared, key biological events happened that were critical for the later appearance of complex life, and some of them follow. About 1.5 bya, eukaryotic organisms are clearly seen in the fossil strata, but are simple spheroids and tubes.

About 1 bya, stromatolites began to decline and microbial photosynthesizers began to evolve spines, probably due to predation pressure from protists, which are eukaryotes. Eating stromatolites may reflect the first instance of grazing, although grazing is really just a form of predation. The difference between grazing and predation is the prey. If the prey is an autotroph (it fixes its own carbon, by using energy from either sunlight capture or harvesting the energy potential of inorganic chemicals), it is called grazing, and if the prey got its carbon from eating autotrophs (such creatures are called heterotrophs), then it is called predation. There are other categories of life form consumption, such as parasitism and detritivory (eating dead organisms), and there are many instances of symbiosis. For complex life, the symbiosis between the mitochondrion and its cellular host was the most important one ever.

Similar to how mitochondria were “invented,” somewhere between 1.6 bya and 600 mya a eukaryote ate a cyanobacterium and both survived, and that cyanobacterium became the ancestor of all chloroplasts, which is the photosynthetic organelle in all plants. And as with similar previous events, it appears that it happened only once, and all plants are descended from that unique event. The invention of the chloroplast quickly led to the first multicellular eukaryotes, algae, which were the first plants. The first algae fossils are from about 1.2 bya. Most algae species are not called plants, as they are not descended from that instance where a eukaryote ate a cyanobacterium. The non-plant algae, such as kelp, also have chloroplasts, from various “envelopment” events, where an algae chloroplast was eaten and the grazer and chloroplast survived.

Mitochondria, being the energy generation centers in eukaryotic cells (some eukaryotes lost their mitochondria, usually because the mitochondria evolved into other organelles such as mitosomes and hydrogenosomes), present similar issues to how industrialized humanity generates energy today. Power plants have pollution issues, and can explode and create environmental catastrophes such as happened at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The electron transport chain used to create ATP in a mitochondrion leaks electrons, which creates free radicals. A free radical is an atom, molecule, or ion with an unpaired valance electron or an unfilled shell, and thus seeks to capture an electron. Those lost electrons due to transport chain leakage create free radicals, and they will take that electron from wherever they can get it. With aerobic respiration, some of the most dangerous free radicals are created, particularly the hydroxyl radical. The more hydroxyl radicals created, the more damage inflicted on neighboring molecules. Another free radical created by that electron leakage is superoxide, can be neutralized by antioxidants, but there is no avoiding the damage produced by the hydroxyl radical. Those kinds of free radicals are called reactive oxygen species (“ROS”). ROS are not universally deleterious to life processes, but if their production spins out of control, the oxidative stress inflicted by the ROS can cripple biological structures. ROS damage can cause programmed cell death, called apoptosis, which is a maintenance process for complex life. Antioxidants are one way that organisms defend against oxidative stress, with vitamin C being a standard antioxidant. Antioxidants usually serve multiple purposes in cellular chemistry, and antioxidant supplements generally do not work as advertised, as they not only do not target the reactions that it might be beneficial to prevent, but they can interfere with reactions that are necessary for life processes. Antioxidant supplements are blunt instruments that can cause more harm than good.

While there is plenty of uncertainty and controversy regarding just how connected the issue may be, it appears that keeping some DNA at the mitochondria, in order to have more efficient and flexible energy generation, helped lead to the genetic phenomenon known as sexual reproduction. Bacteria swap DNA in reproduction and have done so since life’s early days, but the process of meiosis, where two parent life forms split and recombine their DNA to produce an offspring, is unique to eukaryotes, and that form of reproduction appeared between 1.2 and 1.0 bya. And as with the other seminal events, it seems that sexual reproduction using meiosis happened once, and all eukaryotes that reproduce sexually are descended from that one instance. Protists were the first organisms to reproduce sexually.

Again, the dates for these events are rather rough, but if the creation of a chloroplast happened once, and the creation of sexual reproduction happened once, then sexual reproduction would have needed to come before the chloroplast, as many plants produce sexually. If it turns out that the chloroplast really is 1.6 billion years old, then the current date for sexual reproduction would need to be pushed back, or the “sex was invented once” idea would have to be discarded, and biologists would likely decide that the date of sex appearing would need to be pushed back, even without fossil evidence of it.

Many principles of evolutionary theory have not changed much since Darwin, and one of them is that when one species gains the “upper hand” in the struggle of life on Earth, as there is only so much sunlight and nutrients to go around, the losers become marginalized or go extinct. Ultimately, the species with the highest carrying capacity, or ability to extract energy from its environment, wins. There are many ways, however, to attain that winning carrying capacity. Another Darwinian concept is that species adapt to their environments (which include other species) to benefit that species, not any other (and Darwin used the concept at the organism level, not the species level). Darwin’s idea of all life on Earth descending from a common ancestor is a central feature of evolutionary theory. But Darwin’s idea of gradual changes leading to speciation is confounded by the appearance of mitochondria, which led to complex life. There was nothing gradual about an archaean swallowing a bacterium and both surviving, with the bacterium eventually becoming the power plant for all animals. It was a radical change, and a chasm between simple and complex life.

Another evolutionary concept is that all changes had mechanical reasons for happening (again, today’s science has nothing to say about any intent), and each mechanical change required some purpose in improving an organism’s chances of surviving to reproduce, or at least not have unduly impaired it. And as evolution progressed, for each species, it was like taking a road, and the further down the road a species went in its development, the “lifestyle” opportunities that its biological operation created precluded other kinds of styles. For instance, trees will never become Ents. Trees went down the path of roots, lignin, growing taller than their neighbors and the like. A plant cannot choose locomotion as a way of life. It does not generate enough energy for it, for one thing. Animals went down a very different evolutionary path than plants did, and muscles, brains, livers, and the like have no analogy in plants and, by themselves, plants will not grow muscles or brains anytime soon, although humans have been making radical changes in animals over brief periods of time, such as the many breeds of dog.

The nutrient cycling that life contributes to, and the oxygen that is generated that maintains the ozone layer, was all initially performed by prokaryotes, and will continue to be performed by them long after complex life goes extinct. From the geophysical perspective of making Earth inhabitable, complex life is largely an unnecessary frill. Earth’s biomass today is about half prokaryote and half eukaryote.


I had to truncate the chapter, because of Avalon's space limitations. The end of the chapter will go in the next post.

[Wade Frazier]

Here is the end of the Early Life on Earth chapter:

During that “boring billion years,” sexual reproduction was invented, plants became possible, and the rise of grazing and predation had eonic significance. While many critical events in life’s history were unique, one that is not is multicellularity, which independently evolved dozens of times, and some prokaryotes have multicellular structures, some even with specialized organisms forming colonies. There are various hypotheses to explain why life went multicellular, but the primary advantage was size, which would become important in the coming eon of complex life. The rise of complex life might have happened faster than the billion years or so after the basic foundation was set (the complex cell, oxygenic photosynthesis), but geophysical processes had their impacts. Perhaps most importantly, the oceans probably did not get oxygenated until just before complex life appeared, as they were sulfidic Canfield Oceans from 1.8 bya to 700 mya. Atmospheric oxygen is currently thought to have remained at only a few percent at most until about 850 mya. Just as the atmospheric oxygen content began to rise, then came the biggest ice age in Earth’s history, which probably played a major role in the rise of complex life.

Here is the Cambrian Explosion chapter:

The Cambrian Explosion

Until Ediacaran fossils were recognized for what they were, the Cambrian period was considered to have produced the earliest known fossils, and that situation has vexed scientists from Darwin onward. If animals just came into being from nothing, the Creationist arguments of Darwin’s time may have had some validity. Darwin attributed the lack of Precambrian fossils to the geological record’s imperfection. As can be discerned in this essay’s previous sections, scientists have filled many gaps, and Darwin’s theory has held up well.

The Cambrian period, however, is of eonic significance and still a source of great controversy. The Cambrian Explosion was unique, and was the development of the first complex, modern-looking ecosystem. Although the Cambrian Explosion is the most spectacular event in the fossil record, it is questioned whether it was really an explosion at all, and many contenders for the “cause” of the explosion have been offered, with various hypotheses falling by the wayside over the years, but the hunt for one “cause” may be futile. While one factor may have triggered the more dramatic manifestations of it, several dynamics played their roles. There are going to be proximate and ultimate causes for events such as that. First and foremost, the Cambrian Explosion was about size, which was likely enabled by oxygenating the seafloor, which interacted with developmental changes (from egg to adult) and new ecological relationships. The currently predominant hypotheses feature geophysical processes interacting with biological ones. The increase in organism size that marked the rise of complex life is today thought to be a response to predation, which led to life’s “arms race.” The competition between organisms, locked in predator/prey, parasite/host, grazer/grazed dynamics, is thought to be behind a great deal of evolutionary innovation. The Red Queen hypothesis posits that the constant battle between those competing life forms led to sexual reproduction and other innovations.

During the Cambrian Explosion, an ecosystem developed where life on the sea floor, surface, and water column all interacted for the first time. All but one of the environmental factors currently and prominently considered were energy dynamics, with the environment providing either too much or too little energy, and the nutrient hypothesis (calcium in this case) will be revisited numerous times in this essay. A lack of nutrients, mineral and otherwise, always meant that the energy-driven dynamics that delivered the nutrients were curtailed. If enough energy is applied properly, all nutrients can be abundant.

Before the rise of humanity and industrial agriculture, the interplay of life, climate, and land masses created the seasonal runoffs that fed oceanic ecosystems. However, during the Cambrian Explosion the land was largely barren, as life had yet to significantly invade land. Also, continental shelves have always been key hosts for oceanic ecosystems, as sunlight could reach the seafloor and nutrients were closer to the surface. As supercontinents broke apart or formed as the tectonic plates danced across Earth’s crust, shallow seas were often created, which were usually quite life-friendly. Those ancient shallow seas and swampy continental margins have great importance to today’s humanity, as our fossil fuels were usually created there. Earth’s coal beds were created in swampy floodplain conditions, usually near coasts, and the oil deposits were created by black shale and marlstone that formed in shallow anoxic waters. The Tethys Ocean and its predecessors (1, 2) had a half-billion-year history that began in the Ediacaran, with the Tethys finally disappearing less than twenty mya. The shallow margins of those tropical oceans, and the anoxic events that would dot the eon of complex life, formed most of today’s oil deposits, particularly Middle East oil. Numerous shallow tropical seas characterized the Cambrian period.

While the first skeletons appeared in the Ediacaran, in the Cambrian period skeletons became a key aspect of the coming arms race between predator and prey. Food chains appeared, in which about ten percent of an organism’s energy was transferred to the animal that ate it. Unlike the internal skeletons that characterized fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, the first skeletons were external. Hard shells protected from predation, and the bigger the animal, the more likely it would survive (but a bigger animal also meant a bigger energy windfall if it could be eaten). But size presented immense challenges. Similar to how complex cells needed to solve the energy generation and distribution problem before they could grow, increasing size presented numerous problems to early complex life. How could a large organism supply energy and other nutrients to its cells? Remove waste? Move? Life solved the problems by making structures and organs from specialized cells. By the Cambrian period’s end, animals had developed skeletons, gills, muscles, brains, circulatory systems, digestive and eliminative systems, nervous systems, respiratory systems, and internal organs which included eyes, livers, kidneys, etc.

Just as the aftermath of the appearance of complex life was uninteresting from a biochemical perspective, as the amazingly diverse energy-generation strategies of archaea and bacteria were almost totally abandoned in favor of aerobic respiration, biological solutions to the problems that complex life presented were greatest during the Cambrian Explosion, and everything transpiring since then has been relatively insignificant. Animals would never see that level of innovation again. While investigating those eonic changes, many scientists have realized that the dynamics of those times may have been quite different from today’s, where once again Lyell’s uniformitarianism is of limited use for explaining what happened.

Phyla consist of body plans, which scientists have used to classify all life forms, and all significant animal phyla had appeared by the Cambrian period’s end. The Cambrian Explosion has been difficult to explain, and while there is still great controversy and there are many unanswered questions, it has also been difficult to explain why significant change stopped after the explosion. Once the basic body plans appeared and biomes were filled, new plans never appeared again. Why did all fundamental change stop? The emerging view is the same for why complex life went all in with aerobic respiration and never changed since then. Not only could innovation confer great benefits, but once that path was embarked on, further travel along the developmental path made it continually less feasible to either backtrack, start over, and take another path, or choose a fundamentally different path. The history of life’s choices was ingrained into organisms in several ways, and the source of that inertia began to be understood when biology and chemistry at the cellular and subcellular levels were investigated, particularly after DNA was sequenced and studied. The fact that Hox genes have not significantly changed in several hundred million years points to the issue. Hox genes have not changed because they control key developmental steps in embryonic development. Not only do Hox genes work, there are no practical ways to significantly change them, as they lay the animal’s structural foundation. Hox genes are called regulatory genes, and the nature of gene regulatory networks seems to be why animals have not fundamentally changed since the Cambrian Explosion.

Imagine a family having a custom home built and, after it was built, they decided that they wanted a basement, four extra stories, central gas heating rather than baseboard electric heating, and a swimming pool on the third floor. It would not be feasible to renovate the home to give it those new features, especially if the family was already living in it. They would need to build a new house from scratch, with a new foundation, and they would have to find a temporary home during the construction period. But an animal has to live in its body all the time. There is no way to redesign and rebuild an animal’s foundation while it lives in its body, and the biological superstructure built on the foundation was designed for that foundation. A new superstructure would also have to be designed and built on the new foundation. A six-chambered heart, for instance, could not just be invented and put into a human chest and work, or a second brain, or a third arm. The kinds of changes that are feasible have to adhere to the basic structural and biochemical foundations that the phyla represent.

Once animals appeared on the evolutionary scene and filled most possible niches, new biological foundations could not be built, with superstructures built atop them, and hope to compete for resources that were already being consumed in the food chains. Developing the original animal body plans took millions of years. There were many other possible body plans that could have been developed in the early days of animals, which might have worked wonderfully, but those chosen ones worked well enough for survival and reproduction, and once chosen, there was no going back. There really could not be, unless all animal life was wiped out and protists could start over, as they are the last common ancestors of animals (and eliminating all animal life would lead to great plant extinctions for starters, such as flowering plants). The biological commitments to those basic modes of existence had their own inertia, and it starts at the root, with the DNA.

The primary unit of taxonomic organization is a clade, which consists of a single ancestor and all of its descendants. The study of body features has been augmented by recent findings in molecular biology, and many organisms have had their cladistic classification changed, and many more will in the future. Many common features among diverse organisms are due to convergent evolution and not ancestry, as organisms independently developed similar solutions to life’s challenges.

Ediacaran traces show that some animals were mobile before the Cambrian Explosion. The first creatures that we would recognize as animals were probably worms, crawling atop ocean sediments. As lowly as the worm might seem, it would have needed muscles, bilateral symmetry, a circulatory and digestive/excretory system, and a nervous system run by a brain; that distant ancestor likely possessed Earth’s first brain. Some early worms may have even had rudimentary eyes. And of possibly eonic importance, worms likely made the first poop. The evolution of feces-producing animals may have been a seminal event in the organic carbon burial process. Sponges may have also been largely responsible for initially removing oceanic carbon, which helped increase atmospheric oxygen and helped ventilate the oceans. Until then, organic carbon from dead life forms would not have settled to the ocean floor, but would have floated in the water column and been recycled by other life forms. Although the hypothesis is considered marginally valid today, feces sinking to the ocean floor may have been how life’s burial of carbon began, as well as robbing sulfate-reducing bacteria in the water column of their nutrients, thus enabling oceanic waters to remain oxygenated. Ediacaran fauna did not burrow into ocean sediments, but deep burrowing was characteristic of Cambrian sediments. There is debate today whether the Cambrian burrowing was a consequence or cause of oxygenating the ocean floor, in a conflict of the top-down or bottom-up models.

As with those small worms that crawled along and burrowed into the newly oxygenated seafloor (or helped oxygenate it), many small animals with shells and mineralized parts appeared in the late Ediacaran, and a misnomer was coined to account for them termed small shelly fauna. Those small animals also thrived in the Cambrian, and many of them were ancestors to their larger descendants, showing more intermediate steps in the “explosion.”

The Cambrian Explosion’s iconic animal was the trilobite. As a child, I read every paleontology text in my elementary school’s library, and I have fond memories of imagining trilobite lives. Was there love among the trilobites? Among the protists? The bacteria? To a scientist, those questions might not have any meaning, but to a mystic they could. I will not wax too mystically in this essay (I do it elsewhere), but that may well be the big question of life on Earth, and an enduring mystery to humanity. The nature of consciousness and love in the Cambrian, or the lack thereof, as much as it may always be a mystery, does not invalidate life’s arc through the evolutionary process; it only challenges materialism.

Creationist critiques of the evolutionary corpus, which all-too-often attempt to portray the Book of Genesis as literally true, often use the eye as evidence of their Creationist notions. The eye is too complex and function-specific to be some kind of evolutionary development, so goes Creationist reasoning. Even Darwin confessed to the problems that eyes posed for his theory of natural selection, stating that the notion of eyes being the product of natural selection seems “absurd.” However, the evolutionary path to the fully-developed eye appears pretty clear to today’s scientists. Eyes began with pigments similar to chlorophyll that captured photons that initiated electrical impulses through chemical cycles in a new kind of specialized cell, the nerve cell. Neurons are energy hogs, being the “high-tension electric lines” in animals. Human brain tissue uses ten times the energy that average tissues elsewhere in the body do. The first eyes probably only detected light, and perhaps even infrared light, so that organisms could remain the proper distance from life-giving/destroying volcanic vents, for instance. Hydrothermal vent shrimp today have such infrared sensors, which can be likened to naked retinas. The development of an eye with a lens was not a great evolutionary leap from rudimentary eyes, and a recent calculation shows how eyes with lenses could have developed from scratch in about a half-million years of evolution. Protozoa may have had the first precursors to eyes. Once the eye evolved, its benefit was overwhelmingly obvious, and virtually all animals that live where vision would help them have eyes. Animals that adopted subterranean existences have lost their vision and even their eyes. It is thought today that the development of eyes was a key innovation in the arms race that would soon characterize the eon of animals, and might have even triggered it. There is a gene known today as Pax6, and it is common to all animals with eyes. As with those other early-life events, that gene supports the widely-accepted idea that vision evolved only once.

The Cambrian Explosion marked the rise of the arthropods, which may be the most successful animal body plan ever, and accounts for more than 80% of all animal species today. Arthropods such as the trilobite left spectacular fossils, and were once thought to dominate the Cambrian period, but in 1909 the Burgess Shale was discovered, which might be the world’s most famous fossil bed. The Burgess Shale preserved the soft parts of Cambrian organisms, and interest was renewed in the Burgess Shale in the 1960s, as the unique fossils coming from them began to be appreciated. Mining the Burgess Shale for fossils will continue for the foreseeable future, with new and important findings expected. Recent finds in China and elsewhere have greatly improved scientific understanding of the Cambrian Explosion.

While grazing and predation far predated the Cambrian Explosion, it took on new forms as animals became large. Trilobites, for instance, rolled up like pill bugs to protect themselves from predators, and trilobites could be predators themselves. The Burgess Shale produced the first complete fossil of Anomalocaris, which is a close cousin of the bizarre-looking Opabinia, and Anomalocaris was likely the Cambrian period’s apex predator, with Chinese specimens reaching up to two meters in length; it was the leviathan of its time. It is controversial whether Anomalocaris could have preyed upon armored arthropods or shellfish, as its mouth may have been unsuited for it.

An important evolutionary principle is organisms developing a new feature for one purpose, and then using that feature for other purposes as the need arose. As complex life evolved in the newly-oxygenated seafloors, several immediate survival needs had to be addressed. Going back to the hierarchy of nutrients that a human needs, if an oxygen-dependent animal did not have access to oxygen, it meant immediate death. Obtaining oxygen would have been the salient requirement for early complex life that adopted aerobic respiration as its primary respiration process, which is how nearly all animals today respire. While animals in low-oxygen environments have adapted to other ways of respiring (or perhaps never relinquished them in the first place), they are all sluggish creatures and would have quickly lost in the coming arms war. Collagen, which is a critical connective tissue in animals, requires oxygen for its synthesis, and was one of numerous oxygen-dependencies that animals quickly adopted during the Cambrian Explosion.

Diffusion works for animals that are no more than a couple of millimeters thick, but for larger animals a respiration system was necessary. The rise of the arthropods has been an enduring problem for paleobiologists. Why was the arthropod so successful, particularly in the beginning? Segmented animals dominated the Cambrian seas, and segmentation provides for repeated features. The segments obviously became important for locomotion but, for arthropods, segmentation appears to have conferred a more important advantage, of distributed oxygen absorption. Each trilobite leg had an attached gill, and leg motion constantly drew fresh oxygenated water over each gill. Arthropods never developed the kinds of lungs that vertebrates have, or the pump gills of fish and other aquatic animals. Early arthropods breathed by moving their legs. Peter Ward’s recent hypothesis is that segments were first used for respiration, to provide a large gill surface area, and using the segments for locomotion came later. For trilobites, the same functionality that pushed water over gills was also coopted for food intake. Also, the leg-mounted gill was necessary because of an arthropod’s body armor; oxygen could not be absorbed through tough exoskeletons.

Every aerobic aquatic animal had to solve the problem of extracting oxygen from the water, and there was diversity in its accomplishment. Key Cambrian animals such as sponges and corals had very high-surface-area-to-body-volume ratios, which allowed diffusion to provide their oxygen. Immobile animals such as sponges and coral had to position themselves where oxygenated water flowed past or through them. Sponges work like chimneys, designed to passively draw water through them. The position and structure of reefs facilitated those oxygen-providing dynamics, so corals helped create the conditions that sustained them, with calcified exoskeletons of corals dissuading predation and building the reefs.

The Cambrian ocean contained far less oxygen than today’s. Being newly and probably inconsistently oxygenated by oceanic currents was only part of the problem. The Cambrian oceans were warmer than today’s oceans, perhaps far warmer, such as 40oC. and higher for the tropical ones. Water’s ability to absorb oxygen declines as it gets warmer. Water heated from 10oC. to 40oC. will lose 40% of its ability to absorb oxygen. The phenomenon of warmer water absorbing less oxygen contributed to many instances of anoxic waters during the eon of complex life, particularly in the warmer, earlier periods.

Members of another phylum, Brachiopoda, which superficially resemble clams, were successful in the Cambrian, but if their shells are opened, they look very different inside. Inside the shell is mostly empty space, with ciliated tentacles that perform a dual function of filtering food and absorbing oxygen. The cilia pump water through the shell and over the tentacles, which allows such animals to be immobile.

Another winner in the Cambrian period was the mollusk phylum, which today comprises nearly a quarter of all marine animals. As with arthropods and corals, mollusks developed predation-defending armor, with their variation being shells. Mollusks include the cephalopod, bivalve, and gastropod classes. Similar to brachiopods, mollusks developed “power gills,” whereby they actively pumped water across their gills using cilia, and bivalves usually use also their gills to catch food. One early class of mollusks, which may be the first mollusks, had the repeated gill structure of the trilobites, but their gills lined the inside of their shells, which supports the idea that shells may have been developed for improving respiration first and predation-protection second. There is even evidence that a gastropod-like animal might have lived on the seashore about 510 mya, and might have been the first animal to visit land.

But the most impressive dual-use innovation in mollusks is what cephalopods invented. Their gill pump is quite muscular, and jets water over its gills. That jet is also used to propel the animal. Jet propulsion is not an energy-efficient means of transportation, but the cephalopod’s ability to pass oxygen-bearing water over its gills is unmatched. Cephalopods can thrive in waters too hypoxic for fish to survive. In the coming Ordovician period, cephalopods would be apex predators of the marine biomes and would hold that distinction for a long time. Cephalopods are today’s most intelligent invertebrates, with the octopus performing surprising feats of intelligence, and it has the largest brain-to-body-size ratio of all invertebrates. It is thought that the skills needed for predation stimulated cephalopodan intelligence. Today, the nautilus is the only survivor of that lineage of Ordovician apex predators.

But the branch of the tree of life that readers might find most interesting led to humans. Human are in the chordate phylum, and the last common ancestor that founded the Chordata phylum is still a mystery and understandably a source of controversy. Was our ancestor a fish? A sea squirt? Peter Ward made the case, as have others for a long time, that it was the sea squirt, also called a tunicate, which resemble fish in its larval stage. The nerve cord in most bilaterally-symmetric animals runs below the belly, not above it, and a sea squirt that never grew up may have been our direct ancestor. Adult tunicates are also highly adapted to extracting oxygen from water, even too much so, with only about 10% of today’s available oxygen extracted in tunicate respiration. It may mean that tunicates adapted to low oxygen conditions early on. Ward’s respiration hypothesis, where adapting to low oxygen conditions was an evolutionary spur for animals, will repeatedly reappear in this essay, as will challenges to that hypothesis. Ward’s hypothesis may be proven wrong or will not have the key influence that he attributes to it, but it also has plenty going for it. The idea that fluctuating oxygen levels impacted animal evolution has been gaining support in recent years, particularly in light of recent reconstructions of oxygen levels in the eon of complex life, called GEOCARBSULF and COPSE, which have yielded broadly similar results, but their variances mean that much more work needs to be performed before confidently placing oxygen levels on the geologic timescale can be done, if it ever can be. Ward’s basic hypotheses is that when oxygen levels are high, ecosystems are diverse, with life an easy proposition; when oxygen levels are low, animals adapted to high oxygen levels go extinct, and the survivors are those adapted to low oxygen with body plan changes, and their adaptations helped them dominate the period after the extinctions. The chart used to support his hypothesis has a pretty wide range of potential error, particularly in the early years, and it also tracked atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. The challenges to the validity of a model based on data with such a wide range of error are understandable. But some broad trends are unmistakable, as it is with other models, some of which are generally declining carbon dioxide levels, some huge oxygen spikes, and the generally seesawing relationship between oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, which a geochemist would expect. The high carbon dioxide level during the Cambrian, of at least 10,000 PPM, is what scientists think made the times so hot.

As will be explored in this essay, all of the first four major mass extinctions of complex life have anoxia as a suspected contributing cause, so oxygen is a major area of interest among extinction specialists. Whether oxygen levels were also significant contributing causes of evolutionary innovation is another area of keen interest today. Again, the vast energy superiority of aerobic respiration led to food chains. If the first animals respired anaerobically, they adapted to aerobic respiration early on and then became dependent on it. There would be no going back for animals; all except those few adapted to hypoxic and anoxic environments went “all in” with aerobic respiration.

One irony of fossilization is that conditions hostile to life usually left the best-preserved fossils, because nothing disturbed the sediments, which were anoxic and usually sulfidic. In the sea sediments that mark the geologic periods, white limestone and black shale are typical layers, with the limestone meaning oxygenated oceans, and black shales and mudstones meaning anoxic conditions. The black color means reduced carbon, where the ecosystems could not recycle the carbon and it was instead preserved into the sediments which have been the primary source of the oil and gas being burned in today’s industrialized world.

Supercontinents tend to result in Canfield Oceans, and land near the poles could help initiate an ice age. For the coming geologic periods, the configurations of the continents were critical variables for determining what kinds of ecosystems existed, whether there were anoxic oceans, greenhouse conditions, ice ages, extinction events, or adaptive radiations. Helpful animations exist to make the configurations easier to visualize.

The Cambrian Explosion had several phases to it, with explosions of life and mass extinctions, and a general atmospheric oxygen rise accompanied it, and anoxic conditions coincided with extinctions. While prokaryotes would not be that affected by what complex life was doing (although anaerobes were generally driven underground and into the seafloor), the rise of complex life led to new ecosystems. Before the rise of animals, the seafloor was smooth and “stiff,” but burrowing animals had profound impact on seafloor ecosystems, and likely played a prominent role in creating the ecosystems themselves. Corals created new ecosystems, as life terraformed Earth.

A recent study shows a more dramatic rise and fall during the Cambrian than the GEOCARBSULF model does, with oxygen levels seesawing and doubling to around 30% in the Late Cambrian. Those seesawing levels coincide with evolutionary radiations and extinctions, and big questions are if they were triggering causes for them or not. They were likely related, and many of today’s specialists suspect that they played key causative roles.

Around 530 mya, the first brachiopods, reef-building animals, and fish appear in the fossil record, and trilobites first appear in the fossil record about 521 mya, only a few million years before a mass extinction about 517 mya, which wiped out those early reef-building organisms and nearly all of the small shelly fauna. Similar to the Ediacaran fauna, those early extinctions extinguished major portions of the ecosystems. With the rise of DNA studies, scientists are trying to recover the tree of life’s lost portions, looking for “ghost ancestors.” This is a new area of study, with current findings quite speculative, but we can be confident that many clades were born and went extinct, all the way up to the phylum level and maybe even higher, particularly in the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods, without leaving a trace in today’s known fossil record. Specialists in these areas are always calling for more fossil-hunting, analysis with new tools, and the like.

The Middle Cambrian years were halcyonic for trilobites, where they reached peak dominance. It is thought that they filled vacant niches in the wake of those early mass extinctions. The early corals went extinct, and the rise of the demosponges followed it (those early corals are currently classified as sponges, although the issue is controversial). Sponge reefs would dominate in later times, and sponges have perhaps been the most successful early animal, still thriving today.

There is evidence that rising and falling sea levels, likely the result of a periodically growing and shrinking ice cap at the South Pole, as the continent Gondwana was there, contributed to the radiations and extinctions that marked the Cambrian. The trilobites went through several boom-and-bust phases in the Cambrian. Many extinctions were more local than global, but at the end of the Cambrian most trilobites went extinct and would never dominate again. They survived until the greatest mass extinction of all, the Permian extinction, and then disappeared from Earth, at least until the rise of paleontology and reconstructions to fascinate children and adults. The leading hypothesis is that rising seas caused anoxia and led to the end-Cambrian extinctions at about 485 mya. That this may have coincided with a rise in atmospheric oxygen is not necessarily contradictory; all the oxygen in the world will be useless to deep-ocean and seafloor life if there are not mechanisms, primarily currents, to introduce atmospheric gases into the oceans. Surface life can thrive in high-oxygen conditions while the seafloor dies from lack of oxygen, especially when the surface rises further above the seafloor. Oxygenation and anoxia during the Cambrian may well have been sporadic and regional, and research is ongoing, trying to unravel the dynamics. If the evidence was better, the Cambrian extinction could rank among the Big Five, but we may never know. The older the fossils, the less likely they will survive subsequent geological processes. Cambrian fossil beds discovered so far are uncharacteristically rich, with the next period, the Ordovician, relatively impoverished. It is suspected that unique geological and fossil-preservation dynamics led to the Cambrian’s gold mine of fossils.

In summary, the deadly waltz of predator and prey characterized the Cambrian, and complex ecosystems were born for the first time. Again, from a biochemical and morphological perspective, all events since the Cambrian have been relatively insignificant, but are still fascinating and led to the bipedal ape writing these words.

It can be helpful at this juncture to grasp the cumulative impact of life forming by harnessing energy gradients, inventing enzymes, inventing photosynthesis, inventing distributed energy generation centers that made complex cells possible, and inventing aerobic respiration. Pound-for-pound, the complex organisms that began to dominate Earth’s ecosphere during the Cambrian period consumed energy about one-hundred-thousand times as fast as the Sun produced it. Life on Earth is an incredibly energy-intensive phenomenon, powered by sunlight. In the end, only so much sunlight hits Earth, and it has always been life’s primary limiting variable. Photosynthesis became more efficient, aerobic respiration was an order-of-magnitude leap in energy efficiency, the oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans allowed animals to colonize land and ocean sediments and even fly, and life’s colonization of land allowed for a great leap in biomass. Life could exploit new niches and even help create them, but the key innovations and pioneering were achieved long ago. If humanity attains the free energy epoch, new niches will arise, even of the artificial off-planet variety, but all other creatures living on Earth have constraints, primarily energy constraints, that produce very real limits. Life on Earth has largely been a zero-sum game for several hundred million years, but the Cambrian Explosion was one of those Golden Ages when animal life had its greatest expansion, and one not built on the bones of a mass extinction so much as it blazed new trails.

The twin ideas of efficiency and resilience are also important to understand at this stage. Efficiency is about getting more for less, particularly energy. While aerobic respiration’s energy efficiency allowed for food chains to develop, food chains end up creating interactions and dependencies, and the entire structure can lose it resilience when compared to simpler systems. Remove one part of the food chain and the entire ecosystem can collapse. And it can be any part of the chain, from top to bottom. Making systems more efficient, as the last bits of energy are wrung from the system, reduces their resilience to the real world’s surprises. That dynamic is likely a major contributing factor to mass extinctions during the eon of complex life. Modern ecosystems studies are making the connections clear, and are being applied to the dynamics of human civilizations; the work of C. S. Holling has been seminal in this regard. Complex ecosystems pass through adaptive cycles of exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization, and three dimensions of interaction are involved: potential, connectedness, and resilience. In general, simple systems are more stable than complex ones, which is another reason why any mass extinctions of prokaryotes, if there were any, would have likely been far less cataclysmic than those of complex life.

Also, similar to how no fundamentally new body plans appeared after the Cambrian Explosion, modern ecosystems seem to be constrained by body size. Body sizes have similar “slots” and body sizes outside those slots are relatively rare. However, successful innovation usually happens at the fringes. The fringes are where survival is marginal and innovations carry a high risk/reward ratio. Most innovations fail, but a successful one can become universally dominant, such as those biological innovations which are considered to have happened only once. There have likely been countless failed biological innovations during life’s history on Earth, many of which might have seemed brilliant and helpful, but did not survive the rigors of living.

As stated previously, there are fundamentally only two things in the universe: energy and consciousness. The universe may have begun as pure energy (and even if it did not, all matter appears to be comprised of energy), and consciousness may be required for the universe to manifest at all, which may well be part of the quantum enigma. As the greatest physicists admitted, the nature of conscious is not something that today’s science is equipped to study, even though our consciousness is all we know. The rise of life was based on energy and information, and the ability to manipulate them. Similar to the foundation of complex life remaining basically unchanged since the Cambrian Explosion, energy systems form the foundations for all ecosystems and civilizations. While the superstructure can change, and seemingly radically at times, the foundation dictates what kind of superstructure can exist. A huge superstructure built on a small foundation, if it can be built at all, will not be very resilient (the first earthquake or storm levels it), and will not last long. Today, industrialized civilization is burning through its foundational energy sources a million times as fast as they were created, and will largely deplete all of them in this century at the current trajectory. On the geologic timescale, the rise and fall of humanity may happen in the blink of an eye, and create more ecosystem devastation than the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, and would it happen faster than all previous mass extinctions other than that asteroid’s effect. Arthropods may then rule the world once again.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Again, I have a very specific intention and process for what I am about to attempt. It will not look like anything anybody has tried before, which is partly why there are so many inventor-itis, “let’s be heroes,” “let’s start a stampede,” “let’s sneak past them,” and other approaches being bandied around on these “Wade-related” threads, which all reflect those inexperienced perspectives:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6

Such people are playing the “bright idea” game, but have never tried to take their bright ideas into the world. There is a universe of difference between armchair theorists with their bright ideas and those who try them out in the real world.

My approach came to me after many years, of not only being in the trenches, but also doing relatively tame stuff such as help found NEM:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#nem

and trade notes with my few fellow travelers, and there are really only a handful of them on Earth today. I am looking for singers, not soldiers, and singers first have to have singing talent, and then learn a new and unusual song. That is what my upcoming essay is all about. That song will not be intended for those near the singers (families, friends, colleagues), but will be intended for a relative handful of people around the world who will be ready to hear it, and in fact have been pining for it for their entire lives. I will be using this new technology, the Internet, to reach them. When the singers reach that handful (I hope for about 100K people, and much less will make my strategy less likely and more dangerous), then we will be ready to go “do something,” and FE is the primary goal, which will make everything after it possible. As Machiavelli noted five hundred years ago:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#machiavelli

John Q. Public will not begin to wake up to the idea of abundance until FE is delivered to his door, and that is what made Dennis so dangerous:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#sfs

and why he was taken out, repeatedly, with such extreme prejudice. As I studied the other epochal events:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post674575

I found that they were always mental/technical/social energy breakthroughs achieved by a relative handful of people, and then they spread when the benefits became obvious. This understanding came to me relatively late in my journey, such as in the past few years. I was already on my trajectory to my planned approach, but seeing how the other epochal events happened was only reinforcement to me that I may be heading in a productive direction, where that choir might help get something done.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I posted over here:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post764484

today.

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have written a little about the damage that FE activists have suffered:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post408726

All of us on that path that have survived for long are damaged goods, to one degree or another, and it shows. Dennis relied on his religious orientation to get him through, Greer went über-warrior, Brian had his Einstein hair and Lapis Pig, and I have my impatience and other personality issues, some of which were accentuated by going through the meat grinder. But we survived and kept going. The vast majority who get anywhere near the meat grinder crumble and are often reduced to quivering piles of protoplasm, never coming close to recovery. That has been one of the sadder sights on my journey, which I never want to see again, and why when newbies advocate the “let’s be heroes” game, I can tell that they never have done it, not at the levels where Godzilla and the other predators decided to do something about it, or their “allies” skewer them as the Treasure of the Sierra Madre effect takes over.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tre...re_(film)#Plot

Very few can survive those perils, and only saints have any business even trying.

Again, I am trying to do something different, where nobody needs to play the hero, largely because almost nobody is qualified to, particularly at the level needed to help give FE a chance:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

The meat of my essay is showing how energy has powered and shaped the universe, including all of Earth’s ecosystems and all human civilizations. Then I will be getting into how the FE and related land lies, and what the potential is. That is where readers will be seeing more of my experience and less of my scholarship, but it will always be tightly aligned with my experiences and those of my few fellow travelers.

Dennis’s wild ride has provided proof aplenty about not only how the energy racket operates:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#dennis

but also capitalism in general. Brian’s experiences playing the Paul Revere of FE:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#reactions

showed how receptive scientists and environmentalists are to the idea of FE. Of course, I have had my own experiences with those two, as well as independently of them, which only added more textures to the central lessons they learned. We also had FE inventors and witnesses in common, such as Sparky Sweet:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#sweet

and my friend who glimpsed what goodies are in Godzilla’s Golden Hoard:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#underground

That was years before Greer’s Disclosure Project witnesses began describing some of those very same technologies, and when Greer reported that Godzilla had paid $100 billion in quiet money by the early 1990s:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/hooked.htm#payoff

it made perfect sense to me, as I had already experienced and heard of that many times by then:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#make

and when I went to go see some UFOs for myself, I was not disappointed:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/ufo.htm#call

Brian’s experience with the UFO issue shortened his life:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#attack

I will not be reporting much in those realms that I did not experience or my close circle experienced. If I was at liberty to put names, dates, and locations to some of the events where the participants wish to remain anonymous, readers would be impressed, but that is a limitation that comes with the territory of what I do, which anybody in these fields is well-acquainted with.

People are not going to need to take my word for much, and that is very much intentional, and I will only ask readers to take my word on issues where going to find out on their own is life-risking or the event that only happened once, and the circumstances do not lend themselves to happening again, such as my friend’s underground technology show (and you have to risk your life to be eligible for such a show). About 99% of the work toward developing a comprehensive perspective that places FE front and center does not require being stepped on by Godzilla or getting an underground technology show, but just deep study and reflection, maybe with a little help from me. What people such as Ilie and David are doing is exactly what I am looking for.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I was at the grocery store earlier today, and I saw this article at the newsstand:

http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/..._ab=-&at_pos=0

That article is just the kind of effort that I can usually count on from the “skeptics.” As I discovered long ago, organized skepticism is really only establishment apologetics:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/dennis.htm#friends

dressed up as the height of rationality and even-handed assessment of the evidence. That article’s defense of the magic bullet theory is about the worst I have seen. After becoming familiar with the evidence over the years, to see how Gary’s testimony held up:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/cover-up.htm#wean

it can be quite interesting to see how people deal with the evidence. The magic bullet was found on an unused stretcher at Parkland Hospital. That alone should have disqualified the bullet from the evidence ledgers (that it was "discovered" that way greatly bolsters the "conspiracy" angle on the JFK hit). Gary and others suspected that Seth Kantor planted the bullet (others suspect Jack Ruby), but we will likely never know. The famous autopsy photo of JFK, where the wound caused by the magic bullet (at least according to the Warren Commission) can be seen, which was used to perform a tracheotomy:

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com...photos?image=4

is the one that the debunker Skeptic article states was an exit wound, not an entrance wound (the edge of the wound can be seen at the bottom of the tracheotomy hole, and you can see why the doctors called it an entrance wound). If that is accepted, there is no way that the magic bullet could have entered JFK’s back and exited the center of his throat without passing through a vertebra. If it hit a vertebra, it would have shattered into a million pieces like the head shot bullet(s) did, not continued on its improbable path of creating several more wounds before ending up on an unused stretcher in virtually pristine shape.

These are just some of the many instances of strained logic used to defend the Warren Commission, whose findings are now known to have been avidly disbelieved by the Kennedy family:

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013...ne-gunman?lite

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/sho...l=1#post759574

but it took them fifty years to publicly voice their opinion. And if they think that no “lone nut” killed JFK, they surely don’t think that RFK was killed by one, either, but it might take more years for them to publicly admit it. Without the magic bullet, the “lone nut” hypothesis collapses, so it is interesting to see how establishment defenders try to make the magic bullet’s story seem credible.

Ruby was a mobster who once worked for Al Capone, and Gary interacted with Ruby when Ruby was hanging out with fellow Jewish mobster Mickey Cohen:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/cover-up.htm#ruby

Ruby was no two-bit gangster wannabe. Oswald was a military intelligence operative working under E. Howard Hunt’s direction to stage a fake assassination attempt to frame Castro, and somebody turned the operation from a fake assassination into a real one (which the 7/7 subway bombings and 9/11 also have in common, where official "training drills" were being enacted when the real ones happened, where fake scenarios became real ones at the same time).

I have seen Gary’s testimony called the bedrock evidence of a master theory that ties together many of the seemingly disparate threads of the JFK assassination, including the CIA, FBI, military, mob, Texas, oilman, Cuban exile, Republican, and Bush connections, among others. There were obviously many powerful players that had vested interests (even interest in their survival, if their involvement became known) in making Oswald into a scapegoat, and “free thinkers” such as that Skeptic author blithely submit to the stage-managed “evidence,” without ever imagining that something might be awry. And they call themselves critical thinkers.

That the article states that the "skeptics" were wrong about the JFK hit is Orwellian; organized skepticism has never given any credence to anything other than the Warren Report regarding the JFK hit; I have never seen any "skeptical" publication seriously question the official story of the JFK hit. The "skeptics" are the ultimate establishment defenders.

The declassified Operation Northwoods documents:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

have brought Gary’s testimony a lot more credibility over the years, with Gary’s testimony appearing in Richard Gilbride’s Matrix for Assassination, for instance.

Again, the crime will likely never be solved, but that is not really the point; the point is that the government served up the tawdry fiction known as the Warren Commission Report, and magazines such as Skeptic are still defending the Warren Commission, fifty years later. That is really the lesson of the JFK hit, to me.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The essay is going well, and it is a very iterative process, where writing new sections cause me to go back and revise previous ones. After I finish the first draft, I am sure there will be many “comprehensive” changes, where sections are revised in concert, for brevity, emphasis, organization, new connections, and the like.

Today, I will bring up a phenomenon that I have seen for nearly thirty years during my journey. Again, a few heroes can’t get it done. By far, the biggest reason for the predicament that humanity finds itself in is a sleeping and egocentric public. That is the main problem, not Godzilla and his vigilance, and not the idiosyncrasies of the few true heroes laying their lives on the line and having them wrecked or lost. Again, I lived through what the hero’s journey entails:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#hero

and not only do I not want any part of it, but I highly doubt that the approach has a prayer. There are simply not enough people on Earth like this:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

But for nearly the past thirty years, I have fielded observations such as:

“Dennis should stop talking and just do it.”

“If your team was so talented, I can’t see how Godzilla could have stopped you.”

and variations on those themes. Some observations have actually come from high-profile members and witnesses of the FE “community,” and at times I have been shocked by their naïveté and Monday-morning-quarterback criticisms, not to mention all of the people who simply lie about Dennis:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#libel

and those who eagerly repeat the lies.

Those kinds of criticisms are typical of newbies who have yet to get their feet wet, but I was surprised to hear those kinds of comments coming from supposedly worldly people. What I keep coming up against, and you can see it on the Wade-related threads at Avalon, is the state of arrested development in the FE and related fields. Thinking that the inventor of the hour has a prayer in the current environment, or that somewhere there are a bunch of heroes waiting in the wings for their chance, is quite naïve. Thirty years ago, I was influenced by such notions, as was Dennis, but we got to find out the hard way how the world really works. When I saw Dennis this past spring, he had already begun to come around to my way of thinking about the problem, but only after a dozen or so attempts using the Level 10 strategy:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level10

He certainly gave it the college try, and he is now banned from involvement with the energy industry in the USA. Brian O fled to South America after Mallove was murdered:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#portland

Those are the fates of the FE heroes in our evil system.

I am doing something radically different, which is a path informed by my experiences and those of my few fellow travelers. I don’t know if my approach will bear fruit, but nobody has tried it before.

And although my patience is tested (and I fail at it often enough, and try to get on the horse again, while also trying to limit my involvement with those who try my patience) by all the newbie posts that people have made on my threads, it strangely gives me some confidence in that it is so radical that almost nobody can even understand what I am about to try. Only a radical new approach has a prayer, not the same tired and suicidal approaches that have never come close to working (levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11 http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6 ).

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This will be another strategic post. When I saw Dennis this past spring (maybe for the last time in my life, but we will see), we talked about the old days in the 1980s. He said it before, and he repeated it, that Mr. Professor, his wife, and I were the only people to pass the integrity test in all of his years playing Indiana Jones. We did not need to be told that we passed the test, as we all had our lives wrecked as our “diploma” (and it is obvious to anybody who reads Dennis’s books), but what is depressing was how few we were. With that level of personal integrity among the general population, we just might be doomed.

Dennis went into some detail about those horrible days in 1988, especially when Mr. Texas and his dupes were at Mr. Professor’s house, where Mr. Texas:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...ell#post585787

took off his mask, at least to Dennis:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#performance

Dennis said that there was a moment of truth that day, when Mr. Stooge could have saved the day by acting with integrity, but he instead played along with Mr. Texas:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#trio

When Mr. Stooge made his move, our operation was truly doomed. It was already doomed, but Mr. Stooge just helped kill it quicker. His move had a lot to do with the ruination of my life, as he drug people close to me into his play, duping them with his nice guy act, just like Mr. Texas, and all I could do was stand by and watch, in disbelief that supposedly “smart” and worldly people could be so easily duped. As Dennis has written, he has never been screwed by a man that he did not like:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#shocked

That is what happens when people “invest” their livelihoods into an FE effort. That is primarily why the inventor/capitalist path is doomed from the start. It does not even need to get close to the level where Godzilla has to lift a claw before the entire effort collapses in a bloody mess of greed, betrayal, and the like.

Brian O founded two non-profit organizations where the people whom he invited into it kicked him out of it. They were non-profit organizations.

These kinds of events were part and parcel of the primary lesson of my journey:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#burn

It is just where humanity is these days, and it has likely always been that way, to one degree or another. So, why the heck do I think that I can make anything happen?

For one thing, the only thing that I will be asking is that the members of the group I plan to build spend time and energy in raising their awareness. They will really be investing in themselves, and who can complain about that (well, they can complain that it won’t be easy to go back to sleep, and they will have my apologies)? And none of it is going to be buying into some kind of belief system, a new mystical flavor of the day, or even very much on the fringes. People do not need to get all mystical or fringe-dwelling to realize that the “heroes” that have been presented to us via national histories and the like were generally a bunch of mass-murdering thieves:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#blueprint

and fake saints:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lies.htm#serra

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lies.htm#saint

And that phenomenon is not confined to the distant past. Mother Teresa is faring similarly:

http://articles.timesofindia.indiati...-vatican-study

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/racket.htm#teresa

And good ol’ Barack, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, is waging the war against Afghanistan into the thirteenth year, rattling his sabre at other nations, and presiding during the “shocking” revelation that the NSA spies on everybody on Earth, and I have yet to even hear him speak out against it much, kind of like, “They may be evil spies, but they are our evil spies.”

Heck, I just surfed the net and saw Obama defend the NSA just today:

http://www.boston.com/2013/12/05/oba...VHJ/story.html

The NSA admitted it did not foil even one terror plot:

http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/10/15/n...e-terror-plot/

and admitted to lying about their efforts:

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/02/nsa_..._terror_plots/

while it tracks the Internet traffic of its targets, in order to discredit them:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1...n_4346128.html

It cannot even be argued against that the USA has murdered several million people, most of them children, in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past generation:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post652292

as we expand our energy-hungry imperial footprint, and we are supposedly the leader of the world. Leader in what? Genocide? Our high moral standards?

Nationalism is pretty easy to dismantle, as is capitalism, and organized religion. They are all scarcity-based ideologies designed to manage the herd:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#dominant

The assumptions underlying today’s scientific and academic disciplines are also scarcity-based and serve to control their adherents:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/conun.htm#subtle

Probably 90% of what I am hoping to help my readers do is just let all of that garbage go. While it may sound easy, it isn’t. I know almost nobody on Earth who has relinquished those ideological teddy bears and still kept an even keel. Almost nobody even wants to.

Much of my essay is intended to be an antidote to those ideologies, but not so much by making frontal attacks on them, but drawing a big picture so that those limiting ideologies are clearly seen for what they are, without having to point it out. What I hope is that for those who take the journey and do the work, at the end of it all, I can then ask the question of how valid and helpful those ideologies are, and everybody will chuckle, it will be so obvious.

Only when all of that refuse can be left at the curb will we be able to get anything done on the pursuit of abundance.

I can guarantee that there will be some who will try to infiltrate and derail my effort, coming in like parasites to steal it (or destroy it, or both), as I saw so many times with Dennis, and I will do several things to help prevent those activities from hurting anybody. I have said it before: in this field, naïveté is a killer. Naïveté can only be shed by experience, as far as I have seen, and that is part of the problem and probably the most dangerous part of what I will be doing, as the lambs can become lambs to the slaughter if they allow themselves to be seduced by the Pied Pipers who will inevitably appear. That there will not be any money changing hands or really much of an “organization” will make that a difficult task. When people show up here and exhort people to be heroes and scale the ramparts, I will make at least ten posts to try to show how off-base such a sentiment is. In fact, the very people who will try to infiltrate and derail the effort will talk just like that, with their silver tongues. I will do my very best so that such people never make it past the front door, and we will see how that goes. It will be educational, if nothing else.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade