num_pages: 391
description: Charles Darwin's theories first published more than 150 years ago still set the paradigm of how we understand the evolution of lifebut scientific advances of recent decades have radically altered that understanding. In fact the currently accepted history of life on Earth is flawed and out of date. Now two pioneering scientists one already an award-winning popular author deliver an eye-opening narrative that synthesizes a generation's worth of insights from new research. Writing with zest humor and clarity Ward and Kirschvink show that many of our long-held beliefs about the history of life are wrong. Three central themes emerge from the narrative. First the development of life was not a stately gradual process: Catastrophe argue Ward and Kirschvink shaped life's history more than all other forces combinedfrom notorious events like the sudden extinction of dinosaurs to recently discovered ones like Snowball Earth and the Great Oxygenation Event. One startling possibility: that life arrived on Earth from Mars. Second life consists of carbon but three other molecules have determined how it evolved: oxygen carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide are carbon's silent partners. Third ever since Darwin we have thought of evolution in terms of species. Yet it is the evolution of ecosystemsfrom deep-ocean vents to rainforeststhat has formed the living world as we know it. Drawing on their years of experience in paleontology biology chemistry and astrobiology Ward and Kirschvink tell a story of life on Earth that is at once too fabulous to imagine and too familiar to dismiss. And in a provocative coda they assemble discoveries from the latest cutting-edge research to imagine how the history of life might unfold deep into the future.
language: English
title: A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth
publisher: Bloomsbury Press