Seeing Eden in the Ediacaran

From 570-540 million years ago the earth was inhabited by a form of life known as Ediacaran organisms. They could be quite large. The organism named charnia—shown to the right looking fern-like—could reach five feet in length. In fact, they were the first large and complex organisms in the history of the earth. What fascinates me about these organisms is the way they get incorporated into discussions of Eden and innocence.

Edicaran organisms lived at a time when there were no predators (imagine that!). Marcia Bjornerud writes about them: “They apparently nourished themselves either by drawing nutrients directly from seawater or by hosting symbiont photosynthesizing microorganisms within their bodies” (157). They resembled modern organisms like jellyfish or sea pens, but they are thought to have gone extinct and not left any modern descendants. Given these facts it’s hard not to cast the mind back to Arcadia and golden ages. That Arcadia just falls a LONG time earlier than poets dreamed. But here, if ever, the green leaves hung unchanging in the shallow waters.

The allure of these creatures comes through in a BBC article:

Strange, gentle creatures which lived in peace and harmony with their neighbours millions of years ago may have rivalled or even surpassed Man if they had they not been wiped out by our ancestors, experts have claimed.

You may begin to see the attractiveness of this time period. Things get even more enticing when one considers the possibilities of their further development:

“Ediacarans were on a trajectory in which they would have developed into intelligent life, but it was cut short,” he said in a report published in the New Scientist magazine.

It sets one to daydreaming of a world in which predation never developed.. and our dog-eat-dog world was never known. Of course, it just takes a moment of thinking to realize that at some point resources would become scarce, and then competition would indeed ignite. But it’s nice to think that once upon a time it wasn’t like that. Our great Precambrian golden age came and went and no one ever knew it.

In speaking about the rise of predators, Marcia Bjornerud uses the analogy of monetheism versus polytheism. In that case there is an asymmetry since polytheism can tolerate monotheism but monotheism cannot tolerate polytheism. The result of the asymmetry is that monotheism wipes out polytheism (164-5). The carnivores played a game which transformed the system; before long the Ediacaran organisms were gone. But the use of the polytheism/monotheism metaphor is an example of how quickly facts about the world can get wrapped up in religious concepts.

Alas, all we have now are artists renderings of a world we would (perhaps) love to have been a part of: