Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity

interior. This idea explained why oceanic crust consisted mainly of volcanic basalts, and why it was so much younger than most c ...

Lecture 11: Plate Tectonics and the Earth’s Geography generate colossal heat, which can melt rock and drive up mountain chains. ...

Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, chap. 12. Macdougall, A Short History of Planet Earth. What evidence did Wegener ...

Lecture 12: Threshold 5—Life Threshold 5—Life ............................................................................. LECT ...

À ows more densely through living organisms than through nonliving entities. The complex structures of living organisms seem exq ...

Lecture 12: Threshold 5—Life Now we focus on life’s astonishing capacity to change, so as to generate new levels of complexity. ...

change. Indeed, they can be deliberately changed. Darwin quoted a famous breeder of pigeons, Sir John Sebright, who boasted that ...

Lecture 12: Threshold 5—Life What are the most important features distinguishing life from non-life? Why did it prove so dif¿ c ...

Darwin and Natural Selection ........................................................... LECTURE The result of being born into a ...

Lecture 13: Darwin and Natural Selection When Darwin left on the Beagle, he shared the orthodox belief that living species had b ...

Though his ideas had crystallized by 1838, Darwin didn’t publish for fear that many would ¿ nd them offensive. He published only ...

Lecture 13: Darwin and Natural Selection Why were these ideas so shocking in Victorian Britain? First, they implied that all spe ...

The Evidence for Natural Selection .................................................. LECTURE If you look at a lot of species, o ...

Lecture 14: The Evidence for Natural Selection such processes would have generated new species, closely related, yet each adapte ...

Third, Darwin argued that the geographical distribution of species supported his theory. Why did most marsupials live in Austral ...

Lecture 14: The Evidence for Natural Selection there are occasional errors, which create the tiny variations that provide the ra ...

The Origins of Life ............................................................................ LECTURE And it’s now very, very ...

Lecture 15: The Origins of Life During the Scienti¿ c Revolution, scientists began to test such ideas more rigorously. In 1765, ...

(where atoms are usually too far apart to react) or in solids (where atoms are locked so tightly together that there can be litt ...

Lecture 15: The Origins of Life Third, we must explain the creation of the exquisitely organized billion- atom molecules of DNA ...