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

Cairns-Smith. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life. Davies, The Fifth Miracle. Dyson, Origins of Life. Why did the arguments of Ha ...

Lecture 16: Life on Earth—Single-celled Organisms Life on Earth—Single-celled Organisms......................................... ...

chemical reaction found, today, in all plants and plant-like organisms that contain chlorophyll. Organisms capable of photosynth ...

Lecture 16: Life on Earth—Single-celled Organisms creation of multi-cellular organisms, though in the case of eukaryotes all the ...

Brown, Big History, chap. 2. Christian, Maps of Time, chap. 5. Fortey, Life: An Unauthorised Biography. Gould, The Book of Life. ...

Lecture 17: Life on Earth—Multi-celled Organisms Life on Earth—Multi-celled Organisms .......................................... ...

conditions improve. None of these species count as multi-cellular organisms. Nevertheless, the growing interdependence and speci ...

Lecture 17: Life on Earth—Multi-celled Organisms The second major transition on the road to modern humans is the appearance of t ...

years ago. This mass extinction may have been caused by an asteroid impact, though at present this is by no means certain. Anoth ...

Lecture 17: Life on Earth—Multi-celled Organisms Alvarez, T. Rex and the Crater of Doom. Gould, The Book of Life. Lovelock, Gaia ...

Hominines......................................................................................... LECTURE Many of the crucial d ...

Lecture 18: Hominines The “great apes” are a “family” within the “order” of primates. They are large, intelligent, tailless prim ...

though they may still have used trees as refuges. They were shorter than humans, the tallest being less than ¿ ve feet tall. At ...

Lecture 18: Hominines Brown, Big History, chap. 3. Christian, Maps of Time, chap. 6. Fagan, People of the Earth, chap. 2. Johans ...

Evidence on Hominine Evolution ...................................................... LECTURE It gives you some sense of the ext ...

Lecture 19: Evidence on Hominine Evolution Study of the pelvis and the base of the skull proved that she was bipedal. In quadrup ...

A second vital type of evidence for understanding hominine evolution comes from studies of closely related species that are stil ...

Lecture 19: Evidence on Hominine Evolution Christian, Maps of Time, chap. 6. Fagan, People of the Earth, chap. 2 Johanson and Ed ...

Threshold 6—What Makes Humans Different? ................................ LECTURE [Big history] encourages us to think seriously ...

Lecture 20: Threshold 6—What Makes Humans Different? thousand chimps (and their numbers are dwindling rapidly). But there are 6 ...