Winter World
The Ingenuity of Animal Survival
Excerpt
Chapter OneFire and Ice
Microscopic life evolved some 3.5 billion years ago in the Precambrian period during the first and longest chapter of life that covers about 90 percent of geological time. No one knows exactly what the earth was like when microbial life began but we do know that at some time the earth was a hot and hellish place with an atmosphere that lacked oxygen. Early microbes, probably bluegreen algae or bacterialike organisms, invented photosynthesis to harness sunlight as a source of energy. They took carbon dioxide out of the air as their food, and they generated oxygen as a waste product that further transformed the atmosphere and hence the climate. They developed DNA for storing information, invented sex, which produced variation for natural selection, and evolution took off on its unending and largely unpredictable course.
Molecular fingerprinting suggests that every life-form on earth today originated from the same bacterialike ancestor. That ancestor eventually led to the three main surviving branches of life, the archaea, bacteria, and the eukaryotes (th ... read full excerpt from Winter World ebook
