author : Stuart Sutherland

This is the course guidebook that accompanies the 36 lecture “Great Course” of the same name. It is essentially an abbreviated transcript of each lecture, a few pictures, and some related reading. (I watched the lectures, which is what I am reviewing here, and am using the book simply as an aide-memoire.)

There are many books and courses on the evolution of life from the beginning of our planet to the present day. Here, Sutherland covers that journey, with an emphasis on earth systems: covering how the evolving biosphere is affected by, and affects, the coupled geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. Early life ‘poisoned’ the atmosphere with oxygen, which rusted the rocks, which changed the oceans, which affected the evolving life. Plate tectonics continually changed the positions and shapes of the land masses, which affects the climate, which affects life. Some of these changes cause mass extinctions; other extinctions are helped by events from the even wider solar system throwing big rocks at the planet. And so on. This systems approach makes it clear how it is not just a case of life evolving in a given environment, bu that life has to adapt and cope with wildly changing circumstances, some of which it caused itself.

I do wish he didn’t refer to every single creature as ‘he’. However, this provides a good bio-complement to Hazen’s course, which focusses more on the geology in this co-evolutionary tale of our planet.