Humans bodies require a ridiculous and—for most of Earth’s history—improbable amount of energy to stay alive.
Consider a human dropped into primordial soup 3.8 billions years ago, when life first began…[H]ow did we get sources of concentrated energy (i.e. food) growing on trees and lumbering through grass?
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In “The Energy Expansions of Evolution,” an extraordinary new essay in Nature Ecology and Evolution, Olivia Judson sets out a theory of successive energy revolutions that purports to explain how our planet came to have such a diversity of environments that support such a rich array of life…geochemical energy, sunlight, oxygen, flesh, and fire. Each epoch represents the unlocking of a new source of energy, coinciding with new organisms able to exploit that source and alter their planet.
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Judson divides the history of the life on Earth into five energetic epochs: geochemical energy, sunlight, oxygen, flesh, and fire. Each epoch represents the unlocking of a new source of energy, coinciding with new organisms able to exploit that source and alter their planet.
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[For members of the genus Homo, the epoch of fire represents their ascent since] fire lets us cook, which may have allowed us to get more nutrition out of the same food. [Read the original source here]The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: A Grand New Theory of Life’s Evolution on Earth