Free Republic

A new out-of-this-world theory links mass extinctions with exotic astrophysics and galactic architecture Every once in a great while, something almost unspeakable happens to Earth. Some terrible force reaches out and tears the tree of life limb from limb. In a geological instant, countless creatures perish and entire lineages simply cease to exist. The most famous of these mass extinctions happened about 66 million years ago, when the dinosaurs died out in the planet-wide environmental disruption that followed a mountain-sized space rock walloping Earth. We can still see the scar from the impact today as a nearly 200-kilometer-wide crater in...

Charles Darwin's theory of gradual evolution is not supported by geological history, New York University Geologist Michael Rampino concludes in an essay in the journal Historical Biology. In fact, Rampino notes that a more accurate theory of gradual evolution, positing that long periods of evolutionary stability are disrupted by catastrophic mass extinctions of life, was put forth by Scottish horticulturalist Patrick Matthew prior to Darwin's published work on the topic... When Darwin published his Origin of Species nearly three decades later, he explicitly rejected the role of catastrophic change in natural selection: "The old notion of all the inhabitants of...

March 9, 2009 — The Permian extinction – one of the most dramatic events in the history of life on Earth, in which some 90% of species went extinct...is now being interpreted as a “nonevent” by four geologists. ... Robert Gastaldo and two geology colleagues from Colby College in Maine, and geologist Johann Neveling from Pretoria, studied the Permian-Triassic boundary in the Karoo Basin of South Africa and published a paper in Geology this month,1 titled, “The terrestrial Permian-Triassic boundary event bed is a nonevent.” ... Well, isn’t this an upset.  How much lag time will it take to change...