Change, American Culture, Trilobites, Humanity's History, and the Big Picture

A tick or two of the cosmic clock, posts about humanity's development, and what's happened on Earth for the last 4,500,000,000 or so years:

• "Fishface! Ancient Fish with a Jaw, Cheekbones, and Beady Little Eyes"
  (September 27, 2013)
• "Another - Thing - From the Burgess Shale"
  (July 5, 2013)
• "Another 17,000,000 Years on the Coelacanth Timeline"
  (April 16, 2012)
• "Lemming Tracks: Fire; 1,000,000 Years of Sizzling Steaks and Burned Fingers"
  (April 9, 2012)
• "That's the Size of It: Eames Video of the Universe"
  (February 27, 2012)
• "Chimps, Genes, and Reading Past the Headline"
  (October 31, 2011)
• "Nutcracker Man,' Big Teeth, and - - - Grass?!"
  (May 6, 2011)
• "Apex Chert: Microfossils, Microfractures, or Maybe Both"
  (April 23, 2011)
• "Snakes Don't Have Legs: There's an Explanation For That"
  (February 8, 2011)
• "Life is On the Clock - And Has Been for a Very Long Time"
  (January 29, 2011)
• "New Clue in Human Evolution: It's All in the Wrist"
  (January 28, 2011)
• "Neanderthal: Big Nose, Big Mystery"
  (January 15, 2011)
• "Winery in Armenia: Earliest Found So Far"
  (January 11, 2011)
• "Forgotten for 14,000,000 Years, Waiting Under the Ice"
  (January 8, 2011)
• "Autism, Childhood Vaccines, Bogus Research, and the Lemming"
  (January 6, 2011)
  Particularly
  • Change Happens: Deal With It
• "Teeth: Human, Very Old, and in an Unexpected Place"
  (December 29, 2010)
• "Ecological Disaster - a Quarter of a Billion Years Ago"
  (December 14, 2010)
• "Climate Change is the New Global Warming?"
  (December 6, 2010)
• "Mastodons, Mammoths, and Wood That's Been Chewed"
  (November 20, 2010)
• "Lemming Tracks: Ice Age, Global Warming, Climate Change, and Living Scared"
  (November 19, 2010)
• "Growing Up Neanderthal: Another New Look"
  (November 15, 2010)
• "Growing Up Neanderthal: A New Look"
  (November 8, 2010)
• "Very Old, Quite Small, Lamprey: A Big Deal for Scientists"
  (November 3, 2010)
• "Really Big Dragonflies: Oxygen's What Does It"
  (November 3, 2010)
• "Early Life, an Asteroid, Ice, and Fossils"
  (October 19, 2010)
• "Evidence of Human Compassion: 500,000 Years Ago"
  (October 13, 2010)
• "Gliese 581g, Space Aliens, and the Canals of Mars"
  (October 12, 2010)
• "Gliese 581g, Alien Angst, and the Lemming"
  (October 4, 2010)
• "Nuclear Weapons, Space Aliens, Conspiracy Theories, and Getting a Grip"
  (September 24, 2010)
• "Cambrian Explosion Evidence: Burgess Shale Fossils aren't Alone"
  (September 12, 2010)
• "Ecological Disaster - a Third of a Billion Years Ago"
  (September 30, 2010)
• "Two Thirds of a Billion Years Ago: Earth's First Animals?"
  (August 18, 2010)
• "Earliest Known Tool Use: 3,390,000 Years Ago"
  (August 12, 2010)
• "Age of the Earth, Illustrated: Almost A Century Ago"
  (August 10, 2010)
• "Himalayan Frogs Shake Up Geologists' Assumption"
  (August 9, 2010)
• "Ötzi the Iceman's DNA"
  (August 6, 2010)
• "Sea Sponge Genes: More Interesting Than You'd Think"
  (August 5, 2010)
• "Fire Ants, Stress, and Twitchy Lizards"
  (August 3, 2010)
• "Asteroid 1999 RQ36 Won't Hit Earth in 2182: Probably"
  (July 30, 2010)
• "Mississippi River, Glaciers, and a Whacking Great Earthquake"
  (July 30, 2010)
• "Four Legs, a Tail, and Tracks a Third of a Billion Years Old"
  (July 26, 2010)
• "People in Britain 800,000 Years Ago: Pollen, Mammoth Bones, and Tools"
  (July 8, 2010)
• "Putting the Bite on an Old Assumption About Human Jaws"
  (June 29, 2010)
• "Neanderthals, Teeth, Us, and an Ongoing Puzzle"
  (June 25, 2010)
• "Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes, 'Dominant' Faces and a New Mystery"
  (June 17, 2010)
• "Our Sun's Sunspot Cycle Isn't All That Predictable"
  (June 16, 2010)
• "Early Earth Didn't Freeze: Why?!"
  (June 6, 2010)
• "Asteroid Crater Under the Timor Sea: It Could Happen Again"
  (June 3, 2010
• "Homo Gautengensis: Big Teeth, Tiny Brain, Fire, Stone Tools; and a New Puzzle"
  (May 21, 2010)
• "Neanderthals and Me: New Data About Old Relatives"
  (May 7, 2010)
• "Tanning Beds, Addiction, and Pale Mutants"
  (April 21, 2010)
• "Earth Day, 2010 - or - We Won: Deal With It"
  (April 22, 2010)
• "East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit: Science Okay; Reporting, Not So Much"
  (April 16, 2010)
• "Animals That Don't Need Oxygen - It Gets Weirder"
  (April 9, 2010)
• "New Member of the Human Evolutionary Family: Or, Not"
  (March 25, 2010)
• "Utah Dinosaur Buried Alive? Bad News for Dino, Good News for Paleontologists"
  (March 24, 2010)
• "Dinosaurs, Runaway Volcanism, Change, and Evolution"
  (March 24, 2010)
• " 'Snowball Earth,' Evolution, and Really Old Rocks"
  (March 16, 2010)
• "Etched Ostrich Eggs and Being Human"
  (March 3, 2010)
• "Earthquakes, Nuclear Winter, the End of the World, and All That"
  (February 28, 2010)
• "Something Was Crawling on the Precambrian Mud"
  (February 19, 2010)
• "Exploding Star: Not, I Think, a Jor El Moment, But Interesting"
  (January 5, 2010)
• "Homo Erectus, Kitchens, and Human (Pre)History"
  (December 21, 2009)
• "Frail, Delicate Little Mother Nature?!"
  (December 20, 2009)
• "Global Warming: on Pluto. And Mars"
  (December 14, 2009)
• "Lemming Tracks: NYT 'People Of Color' Gift Guide, Racism, and Getting a Grip"
  (December 9, 2009)
• "Global Warming and Lost Documentation: 'Please Pay No Attention' "
  (December 8, 2009)
• "Global Warming and Lost Documentation - Or, Change Happens: Deal With It"
  (December 1, 2009)
• "You Mean Germans, Japanese and Kenyans aren't All Alike?!"
  (October 29, 2009)
• "Trilobites, Arthropods, Evolution, and Why Mothra Isn't Real"
  (October 17, 2009)
• "Laacher See Supervolcano Eruption: You Think You Had a Bad Day?!"
  (September 26, 2009)
• "The Unchanging Sun and Earth's Climate"
  (August 28, 2009)
• "There Weren't Many Neanderthals - Which is Why They Died Out?!"
  (July 17, 2009)
• "Early Humans: Climbing/Walking Tradeoff Pushed Back"
  (April 30, 2009)
• "Hurdia Victoria: Cambrian Supercritter of the Burgess Shale"
  (March 20, 2009)
• "Ötzi, Tattoos, Acupuncture, and Things We Don't Know"
  (March 5, 2009)
• "Silly Science: Hourglass Figure Not Good for Women"
  (December 17, 2008)
• "That Was Close! Human Race Down to 2,000 Population"
  (April 25, 2008)
• "World History Timeline"
  (March 30, 2008)
• "Neanderthals Didn't Look Like Us: and it Didn't Matter"
  (March 24, 2008)
• "Africans, Europeans, Asians, and Other Ethnic Groups: Humanity's Family History Gets Updated (Four Articles and an Abstract)"
  (February 23, 2008)
• "Agriculture as a Mistake"
  (October 29, 2007)
• "A Useful Appendix, and the 'Hygiene Hypothesis' "
  (October 23, 2007)
• " 'Journey of Mankind:' 160,000 Years of Ups and Downs"
  (November 1, 2007)
• "Language, Verbs, and How Our Brains Work"
  (October 17, 2007)

Earlier this week, I posted one of my favorite quotes:

About the 'laws of Nature' -

" 'Your mistake is to think that the little regularities we have observed on one planet for a few hundred years are the real unbreakable laws....' "

Grace Ironwood, Chapter 17.4, "That Hideous Strength" C. S. Lewis (1946)
(September 23, 2009)

The same day, I posted a micro-review & mini-rant about one of those standard-issue global warming articles. (September 23, 2009)

I like trees and flowers and spotted owls as much as anyone: but I know a little too much about Earth to get on the 'Earth now' bandwagon. Particularly considering the lack of unanimity among scientists who actually make their living studying climate - and the way heretics are shouted down - I suspect that global warming is as serious a threat as the runaway defoliation we're experiencing here in Minnesota.

Which I do not think was caused by my putting out extra hummingbird nectar a few weeks ago. ("The Ice is Falling! Runaway Melt Mode! And You Should See What's Happening to Minnesota Trees!" (September 23, 2009))

I don't doubt that Earth's warmed up a trifle in the last few decades. Other planets orbiting our sun have, too.¹

News Cycles, Seasonal Cycles, Change, and the Big Picture

As I wrote before, there's a reason you don't see recipes calling for fresh trilobite. Change happens.

"Americans are known to have a tough time with the concept of 'long term.' I once lived in Europe. Before leaving the United States, I was listening to an American newscast that talked about a company's future 'long term.' The news story then went on to say that, by long term, it meant the company's performance over the next five quarters - barely more than a year! Several months later, while in Europe, I was introduced to some people by my Dutch colleagues. While doing the introduction, they explained that I was in the country 'tijdelijk' - meaning temporarily. I was scheduled to stay for three years. I thought back to the American newscast and wondered how they would take that comment from my Dutch acquaintances."
("What's Your Definition of Long Term?" p. 28, "Start Your Own Home Business ... In No Time" Carol Anne Carroll, Que Publishing, Indianapolis, Indiana (2005))

I can see how people who grew up in a culture where 15 months was "long term" might have trouble thinking about changes - and cycles - that take more than a year.

American news, at least, is a 24/7/365 affair in which a story might be at the top of the news in the morning, people's reactions would highlight the afternoon news, and - if the event were enormously important - it might be mentioned the next day.

A Wikipedia article called this the 24-Hour News Cycle. Americans don't seem to have much of a problem noticing events that recur on a daily, weekly, or even annual basis.

Cycles that take more than a year - maybe not so much.

Paradoxically, in a culture where technological and social change is almost proverbially fast-paced, some American subcultures seem disturbed at the idea that life on Earth - and Earth itself - changes.

An overview of the last 4,500,000,000 or so years on Earth:

• "Hadean time: 4.5 to 3.8 billion years ago"
• "Introduction to the Archaean 3.8 to 2.5 billion years ago"
• "Introduction to the Proterozoic Era 2.5 billion to 543 million years ago"
  • "Introduction to the Vendian Period 650 to 543 Million Years Ago"
• "The Paleozoic Era 543 to 248 Million Years Ago"
  • "The Cambrian Period 543 to 490 Million Years Ago"
    • "The Tommotian Age 530 Million Years Ago"
  • "The Ordovician 490 to 443 Million Years Ago"
  • "The Silurian 443 to 417 Million Years Ago"
  • "The Devonian 417 to 354 Million Years Ago"
  • "The Carboniferous 354 to 290 Million Years Ago"
  • "The Permian 290 to 248 Million Years Ago"
• "Introduction to the Mesozoic Era 248 to 65 Million Years Ago"
  • "The Triassic Period 248 to 206 Million Years Ago"
  • "The Jurassic Period 206 to 144 Million Years Ago"
  • "The Cretaceous Period 144 to 65 Million Years Ago"
• "Introduction to the Cenozoic 65 Million Years to the Present"
  • Tertiary (65 to 1.8 mya)
    • "The Paleocene Epoch 65 to 54.8 mya"
    • "The Eocene Epoch 54.8 to 33.7 mya"
    • "The Oligocene Epoch 33.7 to 23.8 mya"
    • "The Miocene Epoch 23.8 to 5.3 mya"
    • "The Pliocene Epoch 5.3 to 1.8 mya"
  • Quaternary (1.8 mya to today)
    • "The Pleistocene 1.8 million to ~10,000 years ago"
    • "The Holocene The last ~10,000 years"
• News Time: The Last Few Days
  (Sources: University of California Museum of Paleontology and CNN)

(from "The Ice is Falling! Runaway Melt Mode! And You Should See What's Happening to Minnesota Trees!" (September 23, 2009)

---

¹ Climate Change, from Space.com

• "Jupiter's Spots Disappear Amid Major Climate Change"
  (21 April 2004)
• "Mars Emerging from Ice Age, Data Suggest"
  (08 December 2003)
• "Sun's Output Increasing in Possible Trend Fueling Global Warming"
  (20 March 2003)
• "Global Warming on Pluto Puzzles Scientists"
  (09 October 2002)

(from "Masdar City Video - Looks Cool " (September 9, 2009))