This was most likely Gehling’s most damning criticism, since Seilacher was a number one skilled within the science of fossil preservation. However no much less severe have been his allegations that Seilacher misinterpreted the fossils themselves, maybe as a result of he was not sufficiently acquainted with them. Writing of Dickinsonia, Gehling noticed that “[e]xamination of a number of hundred specimens of this taxon reveals the presence of a number of traits that the ‘air mattress’ mannequin can not accommodate” (Gehling 1991, 195, emphasis added). For instance, most specimens present a transparent distinction between their back and front ends, opposite to Seilacher’s claims. Some specimens additionally exhibit a crinking of particular person segments suggestive of muscular contraction and the opportunity of locomotion. In Gehling’s view, these options “level to Dickinsonia as a functioning coelomate-grate [animal], capable of react to sensory enter” (198). Related difficulties hooked up to different of Seilacher’s interpretations, main Gehling to conclude that it’s “[o]nly with a really broad brush [that] all Ediacaran organisms [can] be represented as fractal progress variations primarily based on the identical models of building” (202).
Regardless of these criticisms, the vendobiont speculation “initially attracted appreciable help from paleontologists (Dunn and Liu 2019, 513). Arthropod specialist Jan Bergström noticed in 1991 that “lots of the [Ediacaran] organisms… most likely belong to a bunch of ‘quilted organisms’ which might not be animals and exhibit no shut similarity to bilaterians” (Bergström 1991, 32). Man Narbonne made the same declare in 1998, arguing that some Ediacarans most likely represented “a failed experiment in Precambrian evolution” (Narbonne 1998, 1). These remarks present that sure parts of Seilacher’s interpretation discovered uptake amongst Precambrian paleontologists. But arguably a extra vital impact of Seilacher’s work was to “flip the dialogue of Ediacaran affinities from a monolith [into] a free-for-all” (Narbonne 2005, 431). Within the fifteen years following (Seilacher 1989), members of the Ediacaran biota have been interpreted as protists, lichens, fungi, colonial prokaryotes, and extinct photosynthetic “metacellulars” (the final suggestion was McMenamin’s). On the identical time, the vendobiont speculation “stimulated analysis in comparative biology, taphonomy, and ecology in an try to deduce the affinities of those pivotal fossils.” This has undermined the vendobiont speculation in something resembling its provocative, authentic type. Nonetheless, what is maybe extra vital is that analysis on numerous facets of Ediacaran biology stays a going concern. In the present day there are extra researchers finding out Ediacaran fossils than ever earlier than, and this appears unlikely to alter any time quickly.
* * *
A lot for the outrageous hypotheses. In Half 2, I’ll overview some current philosophical work on hypothesis in geohistory and develop my account of “well-controlled” and “harmful hypothesis.” Then, I exploit these assets to investigate the reception of the outrageous hypotheses and to extract some provisional epistemic conclusions.
* Discover a hyperlink to Half 2 right here (when obtainable)…
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