Great revolutions in the history of life

Evolution is a historical process. Like human history its course is unpredictable, because it results from the response of organisms and their biographies to changing outside conditions. Yet it makes perfect sense in retrospect, because every move was conditioned by the previous one. Another characteristic of historical changes is that they proceed gradually on the one hand, but are accentuated by events on the other. With regard to human history, one has always emphasized the events, such as wars and political revolutions; only recently historians got also interested in the more gradual changes in everyday life during the intervening periods. In evolutionary biology, emphasis was reversed. Darwinian theory focuses in gradual transformations, because this is what we can directly observe in natural and domesticated populations. Therefore the breaks that paleontologists noted in the fossil record were for a long time considered as preservational artifacts. Today we know that they reflect real evolutionary cascades induced by environmental perturbations of higher order. We are also becoming aware that the impact of our own species on the global environment could mark such a break which a few million years later will be taken as the end of the Cenozoic and the beginning of a new era, the "Anthropozoic". With such perspectives in mind we shall now study the patterns of the great revolutions in the history of life, back to the greatest of all, the "Cambrian Explosion".