Yesterday's mathematical biology seminar saw my colleague Richard Mann talk on "Covariant evolutionary processes: a theory of the Cambrian explosion and other radiations".
The Cambrian explosion is the appearance of many different animal species about 500 million years ago (see e.g. the Wikipedia article for background). The idea of the talk is that it was not such a special event. We don't need
external environmental factors to explain it. Instead, fairly standard birth-and-death stochastic processes show similar explosions once you take survivorship bias into account. Loosely speaking, the fact that we are here means that there must have been an explosion of species in the past. Not my area of expertise at all but very interesting.
#paleontology #cambrian #CambrianExplosion #bias #SurvivorshipBias #StochasticProcesses