Terrestrial Palaeoecology and Global Change

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Introduction xv indeed find such strict regionalism depressing. Anyway, the brave new tectonics managed to rapidly overcome the initial scepticism that was soon replaced by a boundless enthusiastic support. The believers hastened to proclaim it the only scientific global model that explains everything worth explaining. Actually the model only ventured to explain what happened, with no reference to how and why. It therefore soon degraded to a body of ad hoc explanations linked by special terminology alone. In any regional reconstruction there are plates to be rifted, rafted, collided, subducted and obducted, with a ridge/trench system assumed for each particular episode. A global perspective has been lost once again in the multitude of case studies. As it is, plate tectonics is not a predictive theory. The Popperian principle of testing theories by attempts at refutation rather than confirmation (Popper, 1972) has been rarely if at all applied to the plate tectonics. Yet, as the recent experience has repeatedly asserted, even the thoroughly refuted theories can be kept afloat by a series of first-aid modifications, in which the original idea is either lost or made totally meaningless. As noted in (I.1), the original idea of global change has been prompted by the finds of marine fossils on land and even now the geological record is most convincing in the case of sea-level changes. Their plate tectonic explanation as the effect of an accelerated sea-floor spreading (elevated spreading axes) is only half-heartedly accepted even by the proponents for want of anything better. The consequences of sea-level changes for the climate and biota are commonly believed to be significant, yet the specific mechanisms of interaction are but dimly outlined. There is little doubt that climate affects both geological and biological processes and is in turn affected by them. Climatic events may then correlate with biotic turnovers, evolutionary innovations, growths and declines of civilizations, a possibility tackled by generations of palaeontologists, archaeologists, ethnologists, etc. However, a comprehensive theory of climate change is wanting. There are several theories, the orbital, geographical, CO 2 , etc., illuminating a few features rather than the whole picture. The choice of a leading force (CO 2 at the moment) is arbitrary, mostly dictated by nonscientific considerations. Of all geological evidence, the records of climate change are the least direct. The alleged proxies are ambiguous: different combinations of climatic variables may leave similar isotopic, chemical or biotic signatures. A palaeoclimatic inference thus amounts to disambiguating the proxies for which no methodology exists so far. No wonder then that what we seem to firmly know about global climate change is not much. As for the biological aspects, it should be reminded that current evolutionary theory appeared as an organismic paradigm (Lamarck). It was then reformulated as a populational paradigm (Darwin and population genetics). Recent contributions came from molecular biology. The ecosystem level, though of primary importantce for the purposes of deciphering and predicting global change, yet remains the least explored.
xvi Valentin A. Krassilov. Terrestrial Palaeoecology and Global Change Hopefully, the period of stagnation will not be a long-lasting one. The disciplines that contribute to the conceptual foundation of the global change research may jointly overcome it by shearing a basic understanding of biosphere evolution as a multilevel top– bottom regulated process with the goal of efficient biological production, to which all the components are subordinated.
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Terrestrial Palaeoecology and Global Change

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