A (Very) Short History of Life On Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Chapters

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As a senior editor at Nature, Henry Gee has had a front-row seat to the most important fossil discoveries of the last quarter century. In eukaryotes, by contrast, each parent produces specialized reproductive cells as vehicles for a highly choreographed exchange of genetic material. Especially the very last page, where the author gives a pretty big nod towards Olaf Stapleton’s Star Maker!

billion years ago, when, for reasons still unclear, the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere at first rose sharply—to greater than today’s value of 21 percent—before settling down to a little below 2 percent. O nce upon a time…’ The opening words of Henry Gee’s new book give notice that what follows will be a story – and a dazzling, beguiling story it is, told at an exhilarating pace. At the same time, gases such as methane and carbon dioxide were scrubbed from the air, absorbed by the abundance of newly formed rock. Dat is te zien aan zijn notenapparaat, waarin denk ik driekwart van de referenties bestaan uit Nature-artikelen.Cyanobacteria specialized in harvesting sunlight and became chloroplasts—the bright green specks now found in plant cells. You'll find almost all the creatures mentioned in "live representations" there and have the most natural choice of personal selection, which one you want to see and learn more about! In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien place—in constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions.

One thing that would have improved the book is a few drawings — even just one on the opening page for each chapter would have been helpful. This book also shows that humans, as the last of their species, and almost the last of the monkeys in general, may not survive long.The Earth’s heat, radiating outward from the molten core, keeps the planet forever on the boil, just like a pan of water simmering on a stove. For the first time, they ventured away from the sea and colonized freshwater ponds and streams inland. Well, I don't want to spoil it too much, but he goes into if the Earth continues on its trend that it has for all time, likely we humans won't see some of the truly big cataclysmic events (definitely not in my lifetime anyway). Although these membranes were leaky, the environment within them became different from the raging maelstrom beyond. Life’s evolutionary steps – from the development of a digestive system to the awe of creatures taking to the skies in flight – are conveyed with an up-close intimacy.

With authority, humor, and detail, Gee, a paleontologist and senior editor of Nature, traces the progression of life on earth from its initial stirrings. As the Cambrian period occurred, trilobites, which were anthropoids, and had jointed limbs began to emerge.

Ich liebe es etwas über die Geschichte der Welt zu erfahren und auf der Suche nach einem neuen (leicht verdaulichen) Buch bin ich auf diese kurze Erzählung gestoßen. It had been burning for millions of years; now the fusion furnace at its core had no more fuel to burn. If you have already watched David Attenborough’s Life/Origin of life or Neil deGrasse’s Cosmos docuseries like me, then this book will act as a fantastic recap of the complex history of life on earth. A high-octane biography of our planet, A (Very) Short History of Life On Earth dishes out interesting nuggets apace while reinvigorating your awe of deep time. We find many of these memories of evidence from all the history of the time in the Burgess Shale, which has given us a greater understanding of the past.

Perhaps most striking -- and, in a way, amusing -- is that the current "human-caused carbon spike will be high but very narrow -- perhaps too narrow to be detectable in the very long term. billion years ago, spreading from the permanent dark of the ocean depth to the sunlight surface waters. It began with small spores of microorganisms, moving onto land on occasion and slowly around the Devonian period they began to disrupt the sand and began to grow roots and nutrients and turn the sand into soil.A brief history of life on Earth by Henry Gee is a short history of life on earth, concise but wonderfully told. He is a Senior Editor at the science journal Nature, and lives in a small seaside town in England with his family and numerous pets. This was haphazard at first but gradually became more predictable as a result of the development of an internal chemical template that could be copied and passed down to new generations of membrane-bound bubbles.