Greta wrote: ↑December 10th, 2020, 4:18 pm
SimonP wrote: ↑December 10th, 2020, 10:11 am
How did tribolites act as agents of destruction and subsequent renewal?
Half a billion years ago, trilobites dominated the oceans. Any such domination in the natural world works to destroy and renew.
But the focus should be on cyanobacteria - they are the analogous species top humans in terms of terraforming Earth.
You are rather out of date, the idea that tribolites dominated the cambrian oceans was based simply on their abundant presence in the fossil record which favoured them due to their shells. It is now widely accepted that they played only a minor role among lots of other anthropod groups which had bodies much less likely to be fossilised.
However you have a bigger problem here and that is that you conflate the taxanomic ranks all the way from phylum to species, as species. The tribolites are not a species but a group under the phylum arthropoda and cyanobacteria are a phylum. To give you an idea of what a phylum is we, homo sapians are in the same phylum as a sea pineapple which most people would consider resembles a human even less than a tribolite!
Getting back to agency, and your original claim:
We think we are outside of "the system" when we appear to simply be the geobiosphere's current major agent of change. Other species have fulfilled that role in the past.
You now make the point that tribolites didn't need agency to be agents of destruction and renewal which essentially dismisses human agency, turning full circle. I have to ask you if you seriously think there is no essential difference between human beings considering sweeping changes in their way of living to combat climate change brought on by their recent past behaviour, mostly motorism, and whatever misconceptions you may harbour about changes to the "geosphere" brought on by tribolites?
Going a little further back in the topic you make another science populist claim that the earth is smoother than a billiard ball, it's actually about as smooth as a billiard ball with a sandpaper surface with a grit of 320 used to roughen up the surface between coats of paint to improve adhesion. Billiard balls that rough would be a game changer making it possible for just about anyone to shoot complete circles!
The focus needs to be on critical thinking and confirmation bias.