Contributions of Professor Martin Brasier to the study of early life, stratigraphy and biogeochemistry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Understanding early life has been one of the hottest topics in palaeobiology for many years, attracting some of the finest palaeontological minds. Three of the most fundamental innovations in the history of life were the appearance of the first cells, the evolution of multi-cellularity and the evolution of animals. The MOFAOTYOF principle (my oldest fossils are older than your oldest fossils) commonly clouds discussions around the oldest fossil evidence, requiring a rigorous and critical approach to determining which fossils are reliable and should form the basis of our understanding of early life. In addition, evidence for early fossils must be considered within their spatial context; we need to understand the conditions under which they were preserved and how they were preserved. This book summarizes recent progress in the fields of: (1) the cellular preservation of early microbial life; and (2) the early evolution of macroscopic animal life, including the Ediacaran biota. Deciphering the evidence for early life requires some degree of exceptional preservation, employment of state-of-the-art techniques and also an understanding gleaned from Phanerozoic lagerstätte and modern analogues. This integrated approach to understanding fossils, combined with adoption of the null hypothesis that all putative traces of life are abiotic until proved otherwise, characterized the work of Martin Brasier, as is well demonstrated by the papers in this book. Supplementary material: A chronological listing of all Martin Brasier's publications is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.3727696
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".