This is a response to the post

"I've always thought of seasonality as being critical to drive evolution. - The Artist formerly known as Scott Evil - 4/25/2007 8:26:56"
in the
"Earth-like planet, with water, around red dwarf Gliese 581? - REB - 4/24/2007 12:31:46 PM" thread below.

I felt this thought could benefit from a new thread, since it is diverging from the astronomy and I'm curious to hear y'alls comments.

Tropical rain forests and coral reefs are evolutionary free-for-alls and they have very stable, non-seasonal climates. There are also some extremely stable environments, like the abyssal plains and the deep mid-waters with very specialized, highly evolved creatures.

I don't think evolution is driven by anything except it's own meta-selection. Those taxa with the ability to evolve quickly or effectively tend to squeeze out and out-compete those that don't. In other words, evolution not only occurs at the level of individuals, populations and species, but at the genera, family, order, class, phylum and kingdom levels as well. Entire phyla have disappeared over the eons, while others (like the arthropods) have been very successful and diversified into many classes, but have also spawned taxa which have remained essentially unchanged for millions of years. From an engineering viewpoint, a good design is not only efficient, it is also easily modifiable.

There are other cases that seem to argue that this capability may also be time-limited. For example, the dinosaurs were extremely successful for a very,very long time, filling many ecological niches, then they vanished practically overnight. On the other hand, amphibians, creatures supposedly much more delicate and vulnerable and incapable of competing successfully with the dinosaurs, survived whatever killed off the latter and are still around today (although certainly not very dominant or plentiful).

It's almost as if the ability of a taxon to evolve successfully can also evolve, and perhaps can go extinct, too.