Life on Earth: The Greatest Story Ever Told

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The first rumbles of an oncoming storm came from the rifting and breakup of a supercontinent, Rodinia. This included every significant landmass at the time.29 One consequence of the breakup was a series of ice ages that covered the entire globe, the like of which had not been seen since the Great Oxidation Event. But life responded once again by rising to the challenge. Don’t miss this delightful, concise, sweeping masterpiece! Gee brilliantly condenses the entire, improbable, astonishing history of life on earth—all 5 billion years—into a charming, zippy and scientifically accurate yarn. I honestly couldn’t put this book down, and you won’t either." There is much more detail in the book than on our screens. For odd, historical reasons, the BBC keeps natural history and science in separate silos, as if displaying the scientific fact of evolution can only be represented in the glory of nature. But make no mistake, this is a science book. Life on Earth: A Natural History by David Attenborough is a British television natural history series made by the BBC in association with Warner Bros. Television and Reiner Moritz Productions. It was transmitted in the UK from 16 January 1979. Attenborough recounts the history of the natural world, „from the emergence of tiny one-celled organisms in the primeval slime more than 3,000 million years ago to apelike but upright man, equally well adapted to life in the rain forest of New Guinea and the glass canyons of a modern metropolis.“

Daniel E. Lieberman, Edwin M. Lerner II professor of Biological Sciences, Harvard University and author of Exercised It was nominated for four BAFTA TV awards and won the Broadcasting Press Guild Award for Best Documentary Series. [8] In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, Life on Earth was placed 32nd. Readers should be chastened at his conclusion, shared by most scientists, that Homo sapiens is making its habitat—the Earth—progressively less habitable and will become extinct in a few thousand years. Gee writes lucid, accessible prose." The best remembered sequence occurs in the twelfth episode, when Attenborough encounters a group of mountain gorillas in Dian Fossey's sanctuary in Rwanda. The primates had become used to humans through years of being studied by researchers. Attenborough originally intended merely to get close enough to narrate a piece about the apes' use of the opposable thumb, but as he advanced on all fours toward the area where they were feeding, he suddenly found himself face to face with an adult female. Discarding his scripted speech, he turned to camera and delivered a whispered ad lib:David Attenborough, всъщност се е постарал да не е много пълна с термини и пак ми дойде по нагорнище. The Infinite Variety" gives an overview of the huge variety of life on Earth. After a brief introduction to Evolution by Natural Selection, the reader is then shown the geologic time scale of the Earth compressed into a year, and where along it the various forms of life (from single celled organisms to humans) arose. A look at the possible earliest forms of life is then shown, followed by the evolution of single-celled organisms and the rise of the earliest multi-celled organisms like the sponges, jellyfish and corals. Palaeontology, geology and DNA studies are used to show how much we know (and don't know) about such early forms of life. The story of the building of the Himalayas and their subsequent colonization by animals and plants is only one example of the many changes that are proceeding continuously all over our planet… Each of these physical changes demands a response from the community of plants and animals undergoing it. Some organisms will adapt and survive. Others will fail to do so and disappear.

The book composes of ten more chapters like these two, which we sampled, and the clarity and great detail with which they are drafted makes this a worthy volume to pursue.

Comets may also have offered a ride to Earth-bound hitchhiking molecules, according to experimental results published in 2001 by a team of researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. By showing that amino acids could survive a fiery comet collision with Earth, the team bolstered the idea that life’s raw materials came from space. Forty years after Attenborough released his landmark BBC documentary, Life on Earth, he has released an updated version—this time, as an audiobook. When he put the finishing touches on that first effort, he was a young and spry 44 year-old, traipsing through jungles and diving with jellyfish. Now he is 94, his traipsing days most likely behind him.

Moreover, he makes sure nobody forgets that any place on Earth is special and that we should look closer at the natural world around us to really appreciate and protect it.In The Living Planet, based on his BBC television series, David Attenbourough's searching eye, unfailing curiousty and infectious enthusiasm, explain and illuminate the intricate lives of these colonies - from the lonely heights of the Himalayas to the wild creatures which have established themselves in the most recent of environments, the city. By the end of this biook it is difficult to say which is the more astonishing - the ingenuity with which individual species contrive a living of the complexity of their interdependence on each other and the habitations provided by our plant. Life on Earth was his first program. Nowadays, David Attenborough is such a household name, and his influence on nature documentaries is so widespread, that it made the experience of seeing the young Attenborough a bit jarring. He looks spry, even sprightly. He snorkels, scuba dives, crawls through a cave, holds animals in his own hands, and tries to cut an antelope carcass with a stone tool. He’s slowed down a lot since then. But in all other respects he was and remains the same. In this context, of course, Sir Attenborough also talks about slightly more special places on this planet such as New Zealand or Galápagos, telling us of how important these places were historically in shaping our modern understanding of the natural world.

But Attenborough needed some way to organize the material, and this one did just fine. In any case, science isn't the focus of these programs. Attenborough does not, for example, give us a good explanation of the mechanism of evolution. He gives us the Attenborough trademark: beautiful images of animals and plants, along with thoughtful narration in his sonorous voice. Some even experimented with multicellular life, such as the 1,200-million-year-old seaweed Bangiomorpha26 and the approximately 900-million-year-old fungus Ourasphaira.27 But there were stranger things. The earliest known signs of multicellular life are 2,100 million years old. Some of these creatures are as large as twelve centimeters across, so hardly microscopic, but they are so strange in form to our modern eyes that their relationship with algae, fungi, or other organisms is obscure.28 They could have been some form of colonial bacteria, but we cannot discount the possibility that there once lived entire categories of living organisms—bacterial, eukaryote, or something entirely other—that died out without leaving any descendants and that we should therefore find hard to comprehend. In said quote alone, it's claimed that dinos are paraphyletic (They're not), that marine reptiles & pterosaurs are dinos (They're not), & that 230 - 160 = 65 (It doesn't). Definitely, a classic story of life on earth, what I really enjoyed was how David Attenborough kept his views based strictly on science, avoiding any references to religious interpretations of life on earth. Life began on earth based on a unique combination of an environment with time. Did someone create this wonderful set of occurrences or was it by chance? DA avoids this question as there can be no scientific explanation but instead leaves the question open to its readers. But one question has been answered, the human being is in no way special or above any other animals or insects. DA attributes the rise of the humanoids to the power of communications, making it the most effective way of controlling the resources and all other animals. But he also points out that in the long history of the earth there were other animals which were far more efficient in controlling the environments till the environment changed. Life is very poorly-written: For 1, it synonymizes "developed" with "evolved" ( www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/04... ); For another, it simplifies things to the point of being meaningless (E.g. See the 2nd Jenkins quote; Notice that it fails to mention either DNA, which causes mutation, or variation, which is caused by mutation).

Written by ‘ David Attenborough’, ‘ The Living Planet: A Portrait of the Earth’, is the companion volume to his incredibly successful BBC nature documentary series from 1984, which portrays the diverse history of life on our planet in staggering detail. This documentary series and the book is a follow up to his own much acclaimed series ‘ Life on Earth’ from 1979 - which investigated the story of evolution - and carries on with his in-depth study in to the intricate and amazing ways in which animal life – and often human beings - adapts to their surroundings. This is a great way to get acquainted with the various habitats and the life that surround them on our planet. The reader will get familiarized with a number of such instances where life thrives in volcanic or extreme hot conditions in this chapter. Huggan, G. (2013). "A is for Attenborough". Nature's Saviours: Celebrity Conservationists in the Television Age. Routledge. p.31. ISBN 9780415519144. As a University of Chicago graduate student in 1952, Stanley Miller performed a famous experiment with Harold Urey, a Nobel laureate in chemistry. Their results explored the idea that life formed in a primordial soup. The book is divided into 12 chapters that tell us about the amazingly different habitats on Earth: volcanos, ice shelves, forests, jungles, grasslands, deserts, the sky, fresh water (like rivers and ponds), oceans etc. We walk down the timeline and thus see dead ends, mass extinctions, catastrophic natural phenomena, but also the emergence of humans.