A new formal perspective on ‘Cambrian explosions’

The ‘Cambrian explosion’ 500 Myr ago saw a relatively sudden proliferation of organism Bauplan and ecosystem niche structure that continues to haunt evolutionary biology. Here, adapting standard methods from information theory and statistical mechanics, we model the phenomenon as a noise-driven phase transition, in the context of deep-time relaxation of current path-dependent evolutionary constraints. The result is analogous to recent suggestions that multiple ‘explosions’ of increasing complexity in the genetic code were driven by rising intensities of available metabolic free energy. In the absence of severe path-dependent lock-in, ‘Cambrian explosions’ are standard features of blind evolutionary process, representing outliers in the ongoing routine of evolutionary punctuated equilibrium.