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90% of All Animals on Earth Appeared at Same Time as Humans

Wait, so fossil records and carbon dating is wrong based on this study? I am not convinced to be honest. And lol at last sentence kind of debunking original statement - "Such times give rise to sweeping genetic changes across the planet, causing new species to appear. However, the last time such an occurrence took place was 65 million years ago, when an asteroid hit the Earth and killed off the dinosaurs and half of all other species on the planet".

So after dinosaurs were wiped out only 10% of the animals appeared for whole 65 milion years on Earth but then another 90% suddenly appeared 100-200k years ago? I smell BS.
 
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I skimmed the paper cited in the article. It says nothing about 90% of animals appearing around the same time. It's just something the article's author makes up (for their presumably stupid audience).

The only mention of 90% of animals is here:

Mostly synonymous and apparently neutral variation in mitochondria within species shows a similar quantitative pattern across the entire animal kingdom. The pattern is that that most—over 90% in the best characterized groups—of the approximately five million barcode sequences cluster into groups with between 0.0% and 0.5% variance as measured by APD, with an average APD of 0.2%.
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The paper seems to argue for species classification based on mitochondrial DNA, and it demonstrates that a common mitochondrial ancestor can be found for most animals studied, making the classification useful and robust.
 
MVP said:
Wait, so fossil records and carbon dating is wrong based on this study? I am not convinced to be honest. And lol at last sentence kind of debunking original statement - "Such times give rise to sweeping genetic changes across the planet, causing new species to appear. However, the last time such an occurrence took place was 65 million years ago, when an asteroid hit the Earth and killed off the dinosaurs and half of all other species on the planet".

So after dinosaurs were wiped out only 10% of the animals appeared for whole 65 milion years on Earth but then another 90% suddenly appeared 100-200k years ago? I smell BS.
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It's called punctuated equilibrium, and something many scientists believe as opposed to Darwinian gradual evolution. It's a pretty simple concept.

But I didn't read the article and don't care.
 
idestroyedthetoilet said:
It's called punctuated equilibrium, and something many scientists believe as opposed to Darwinian gradual evolution. It's a pretty simple concept.

But I didn't read the article and don't care.
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Yeah, but that wouldn't explain the current 90% given in the article title. Haven't looked at the main paper like Siro did, but an explosion of species in a relatively small amount of geologic time isn't unheard of as a suggestion or hypothesis, even without a catalyst like a mass extinction.
 
So I read the news article, a far cry from the scientific paper I'm sure. What the article authors had no clue about is that mDNA clocks are contested and therefore the 100k/200k time estimate isn't settled. Such clocks assume a lot of steady state environmental stuff. Any kind of bottleneck event that allows a very small surviving population will create an illusion of "origination" near that time via mDNA. The onset of an Ice Age could do it. A once in a hundred million year solar flare could do it.....

so I'm callin' bs on the article title. mDNA isn't gonna prove better than nuclear DNA in regard to evolutionary science.
 
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MVP said:
So after dinosaurs were wiped out only 10% of the animals appeared for whole 65 milion years on Earth but then another 90% suddenly appeared 100-200k years ago? I smell BS.
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That actually well in line with evolutionary theory, when you add in "currently existing". As in, "90% of currently existing animal species suddenly appeared over ap eirod of time starting 200k years ago and ending 100k years ago." The expectation is that species get replaced with newer species on a regular basis.
 
One Brow said:
That actually well in line with evolutionary theory, when you add in "currently existing". As in, "90% of currently existing animal species suddenly appeared over ap eirod of time starting 200k years ago and ending 100k years ago." The expectation is that species get replaced with newer species on a regular basis.
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That is understandable but 90% seems very inflated number.... A lot species survived on Earth for 100's or more of millions of years ( horseshoe crab, goblin shark, sturgeon, hagfish, giant salamanders for example) so it would be highly unlikely that 90% of them have been on the Earth for only 200k years.
 
MVP said:
That is understandable but 90% seems very inflated number.... A lot species survived on Earth for 100's or more of millions of years ( horseshoe crab, goblin shark, sturgeon, hagfish, giant salamanders for example) so it would be highly unlikely that 90% of them have been on the Earth for only 200k years.
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Animals that breed multiple times in a year would almost certainly have undergone enough change to be considered a new species (to the extent species is well-defined across generations to begin with). That's the vast majority of insect species.

90% could be an exaggeration, but it might not be.
 
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