From the Sludge to Homo Sapiens
Friday 30th January: The BRLSI's Darwin and Beyond programme delivered another Elwin Room capacity audience, who came to hear Professor Michael Benton of Bristol University (right) describe the wealth of scientific knowledge that has emerged since Darwin's time on how life on Earth developed from the earliest single-cell organisms to the far more complex life forms (including, of course, ourselves) alive today.
Prof Benton took us on a journey through the ten key developmental stages of the lecture's title, revealing that, perhaps surprisingly, the first seven, including the emergence of discrete cells and a reproductive code, had taken place in the primitive ''sludge' of early life forms.
We learned how great extinctions cleared the decks and allowed new species to become dominant, and that while the Dinosaur extinction of 65 million years ago gets all the media attention, the Permian extinction, nearly 200 million years earlier, was the biggest and most significant of all. In that context the emergence of Homo Sapiens, a mere 150,000 years ago, appeared as very recent history.
A long and lively Q&A session rounded off what had been, by any standards, an outstanding lecture by one of the UK's most accomplished scientific speakers. What's more there are still 11 months of Darwin and Beyond to go. •
Prof Benton took us on a journey through the ten key developmental stages of the lecture's title, revealing that, perhaps surprisingly, the first seven, including the emergence of discrete cells and a reproductive code, had taken place in the primitive ''sludge' of early life forms.
We learned how great extinctions cleared the decks and allowed new species to become dominant, and that while the Dinosaur extinction of 65 million years ago gets all the media attention, the Permian extinction, nearly 200 million years earlier, was the biggest and most significant of all. In that context the emergence of Homo Sapiens, a mere 150,000 years ago, appeared as very recent history.
A long and lively Q&A session rounded off what had been, by any standards, an outstanding lecture by one of the UK's most accomplished scientific speakers. What's more there are still 11 months of Darwin and Beyond to go. •
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LECTURE REPORT - KEY STAGES IN THE HISTORY OF LIFE
Professor Benton (left) kept a packed Elwin Room audience enthralled and entertained.
