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The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia.
Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth is a book about natural history by British paleontologist Richard A. Fortey. It was originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers, under the title Life: An Unauthorised Biography. Fortey used this book to explain how life has evolved over ...
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
A variation of this analogy instead compresses Earth's 4.6 billion year-old history into a single day: While the Earth still forms at midnight, and the present day is also represented by midnight, the first life on Earth would appear at 4:00 am, dinosaurs would appear at 10:00 pm, the first flowers 10:30 pm, the first primates 11:30 pm, and ...
The Vital Question is a book by the English biochemist Nick Lane about the way the evolution and origin of life on Earth was constrained by the provision of energy.. The book was well received by critics; The New York Times, for example, found it "seductive and often convincing" [1] though the reviewer considered much of it speculative beyond the evidence provided.
This book was well received with positive reviews from nonfiction book critics. "An extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth" [ 3 ] "A stirring, eye-opening journey into deep time, from the Ice Age to the first appearance of microbial life 550 million years ago, by a brilliant young paleobiologist."
Even though it is fundamentally an earth-bound concern, and therefore of great geobiological interest, getting at the origin of life necessitates considering what life requires, what, if anything, is special about Earth, what might have changed to allow life to blossom, what constitutes evidence for life, and even what constitutes life itself.