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Published online 4 June 2008 | Nature 453, 717-718 (2008) | doi:10.1038/453717a
News Feature
Palaeobiology: The Cambrian smorgasbord
Animal behaviour is an endless challenge to mathematical modellers. In the first of two features, Mark Buchanan looks at how a mathematical principle from physics might be able to explain patterns of movement. In this, the second, Arran Frood asks what current models can teach us about ecological networks half a billion years old.
It began, appropriately enough for research into food webs, over lunch. And appropriately for ambitious and interdisciplinary research, that lunch in 2001 was at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, an organization famous for bringing together creative assemblages of scientists from different fields.
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A couple of items stand out here as potentially myopic. First of all, the 'fact that the patterns appear to be robust,' has a converse interpretation which is equally valid; the methodology's assumptions or level of resolution assure that key differences will not be detected. In other words, perhaps failure to differentiate is being interpreted as success to correlate. Secondly, the interpretive 'hubris' presuming the Cambrian trophic webs were less mature is unsubstantiated, but that is the basis of the surprise factor in the results. After all, life was at least a billion years old at the time. The perspective of immaturity requires demonstration that this is a short time frame in the overall scheme and that the present (3 billion?) is substantially closer to the 'end' of it. And, who's to say web structure has not regressed in the interim? Maybe we should be stunned that our imoverished world still has remnants of the old ways.