A New History of Life

Life is stranger than fiction. Recent investigations hint at episodes in the history of life on Earth that rival the most imaginative movies. For example: Could our planet have been seeded with life from elsewhere? Did the development of life create conditions that threatened to poison the biosphere? How have natural forces conspired, over and over, to remove most traces of life from the planet? And how has life itself responded with determination to survive and thrive in a multitude of astonishing forms?

The story of our world and the different living things that have populated it is an amazing epic with millions of species both familiar and strange, exotic settings, planet-wide cataclysms, and surprising plot twists. Humans are only the latest characters in this long-running drama, which has always been utterly unpredictable, since periodic mass extinctions are inevitably followed by life rebounding in unexpected ways. Indeed, life and the planet have developed together, each driving the evolution of the other.

Equally intriguing are the details of how scientists know what they do about the past. It is a detective story as riveting as any forensic thriller, with paleontologists and geologists taking the most unassuming pieces of evidence—a bit of fossil bone, a sequence of layers in rock, a geochemical test—and reading a rich narrative of past events. And by drawing on tools from other disciplines, such as biology, meteorology, and astrophysics, the scenes they describe can be truly monumental in scope, encompassing the entire Earth and even phenomena beyond the planet.

This multidisciplinary effort to understand Earth as a whole, as a system composed of many interacting parts, is called Earth system science, and it has given us an unprecedented understanding of the planet and the unfolding panorama of life.

A New History of Life tells this all-embracing story of life on Earth—its origins, extinctions, and evolutions—in 36 lavishly illustrated lectures that assume no background in science. At half an hour per lecture, you cover the entire 4.54-billion-year history of Earth in 18 hours, averaging 70,000 years per second! Professor Stuart Sutherland of The University of British Columbia gives a gripping account, showing why he is an award-winning and nationally recognized teacher.


Look also:

High School Level - Early Amer...icans through the Forty-Niners

Historical Jesus

History of Ancient Egypt

History of Christianity in the Reformation Era

History of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts

History of Hitlers Empire, 2nd Edition

History of Russia: From Peter the Great to Gorbachev

History of Science - Antiquity to 1700

History of Science: 1700-1900

History of the Bible

History of the English Language, 2nd Edition

History of the Supreme Court

History of the United States, 2nd Edition

History of World Literature

How Music and Mathematics Relate

How to Become a SuperStar Student, 2nd Edition

How to Grow Anything: Container Gardening Tips & Techniques

How We Learn

Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations