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Well, might as well take the opportunity to hop on my hobby horse since when the hell else am I gonna get to talk about this on the the motte?
I'm pretty well convinced the oxygen catastrophe never happened, not in the sense that there was no oxygen spike but rather there was no mass extinction caused by this. When you look into the evidence for such a oxygen caused mass extinction, there really is only two peices, deduction that changes in environment cause mass extinctions and an apparent mass extinction happened 2.1-2 billion years ago. However I have 3 serious objections to this line of logic, first being the timeline. Oxygen started accumulating 2.4 billions years ago, so life existed just fine with high oxygen for 3-4 hundred million years before suddenly going extinct? Secondly, we recently discovered the gabonionta, apparent multi-cellular life from about 2.2-2.1 billion years ago. Theres been a lot of debate over whether these even are fossils or not but recently the tide seems to be turning that they are. That means there was on the contrary to the oxygen catastrophe hypothesis, a flourishing of life. Okay, but also there was also undoubtedly a mass extinction around this time, so what happen?
Did you know that the largest crater on earth is the vredefort crater? Thats it's 2-3 times the size of the chicxulub crater? And that it impacted about 2 billion years ago? I wonder if that would cause a mass extinction or not?
Unedited quickly typed out cause I'm gonna be late for work if I don't leave it here.
It's always a bit tricky to figure out what happened a long time ago, so I freely concede the error bars are enormous. Still, from first principles and basic biochemistry, the GOE does make a lot of sense -- which is how the hypothesis rose to such prominence in the first place.
From first principles and basic biochemistry the dinosaur doldrums made a lot of sense and it was dead wrong. From first principles and basic biochemistry the ediacaran biota being immobile jelly filled nutrient absorbers made a lot of sense. From first principles and basic biochemistry orthogenesis made a lot of sense. History has shown this repeatedly to be a bad way to do paleontology.
"First principles" here means the balance between (an)aerobic respiration and photosynthesis. That's like 8 orders of magnitude more "first principles" than ediacaran biota.
People can say "the honeybee can't fly by appeal to first principles", but that's just an empty syntactic reference to first principles because it sounds cool, not an actual argument from first principles.
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