3 ms·
The air was never unbreathable in any meaningful sense - it was altered in a way that provided an abundant new resource that permitted the evolution of new form
by yarg 3y ago
The air was never unbreathable in any meaningful sense - it was altered in a way that provided an abundant new resource that permitted the evolution of new forms of life.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chasil 3y agoThe "oxygen catastrophe" made the air toxic in ways that life could not evolve to cope with at that time. The wiki goes on to speculate that eukaryotes were required to solve this problem, which is an enormous amount of time for such toxicity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event During the cretaceous, oxygen increased so substantially that it would be obversely toxic to modern life, too much instead of too little.
- namaria 3y agoLife doesn't evolve to cope with anything. Life evolves as it adds variety and some of it gets cut down by the environment. Narratives implying teleology are misleading and wrong.
- chasil 3y agoRegardless, prokaryotes lacked the ability to tolerate the oxygen that they (as cyanobacteria) produced. This crushing limit lasted for billions of years, until the age of eukaryotes. This step is as much of a mystery as the Cambrian Explosion.
- smeagull 3y agoMetaphor is a common and delightful way to use language - you should try it sometime. It helps avoid the delusion that language has some inherent amount of rigor or correctness. Or that grammatical rules actually exist unchanging rather than being rules written by people making them up from the types of language and speaker that they approve of.
- namaria 3y agoMetaphors can be wrong. This one, for example, is.