Dance of Rock and Life: Energy, Evolution, and the Transformation of the Earth

Throughout its long history, life has been a force of planetary transformation, remaking the air, the rocks, the landscapes, even painting the color of the sky and increasing the variety of Earth’s minerals.  But are the histories of life and Earth just one thing after another, or is there an underlying pattern that we can make sense of?  I will argue that there is a pattern, and that life-Earth history can be understood as a sequence of five epochs, each of which corresponds to the evolution of lifeforms that can access a new source of energy.  With each new epoch, the diversity of life has become greater, ecosystems have become richer, and life has increased its impact on the planet.  This framework of energy expansions provides a way to think about current human impacts upon the Earth—and about the probable trajectories of life-planet systems elsewhere.

Biography

Olivia Judson is an evolutionary biologist and award-winning writer.  She received her doctorate in biological sciences from the University of Oxford before joining the staff of The Economist, where she covered biology and medicine.  She left the magazine to write her first book, Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex, which has been translated into more than 15 languages, and was also made into a (very eccentric) TV show.  Since then she has written for a variety of other publications, including The Atlantic and National Geographic; for two years, she was the author of a popular weekly column for The New York Times online.  Affiliated with both Imperial College London and the Freie Universität Berlin, she is now writing a history of life and Earth.