Ten Pulses of Evolution & the Surprising Nature of Evolutionary Time

This work offers a novel way to map evolutionary time from life’s origin to the first humans. Rather than using a traditional, linear scale in which events bunch up toward the end, a logarithmic scale will be employed that expands our resolution as we come to the present. Such a scale will allow us to detect patterns that would otherwise be invisible. The basic concept of logarithms is not complicated, as we will simply halve units as we move from the deep past to more recent times. Thus, the start of life is placed at four billion years ago, the nucleated cell at two billion years ago, complex multicellularity at one billion years ago, and so on. Remarkably, we find the major events in evolution, along with their supporting evidence, is pulsed with logarithmic regularity––in which each node of change reveals a leap in consciousness, mobility, and social connectivity. Come, journey with us and discover the surprising pattern of evolutionary time, changes that would seem to have no end.