Biospheres (C4)

5. Biospheres (C4)#

Understanding the biology of life in the Universe is very different to the other modules you have covered because currently astrobiology doesn’t exist – that is we do not currently have life outside this planet, i.e. no astrobiology. This means that studying astrobiology is fundamentally different because you can’t actually learn about the biology outside the earth, so instead we have to focus on life on earth and the inferences we can make from that. Note that lots of the questions we would like to know for astrobiology are the really big questions in evolutionary biology and ecology, which we need to be aware of when we start to consider what life would look like elsewhere. This course will cover the chemical basis for life, the evolution from protocells to LUCA to animals, and finish with considering how we can go about understanding extra-terrestrial life.

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Fig. 5.1 The 565 million year old animal fossils of Mistaken Point. The advent of animals represents one of the major evolutionary transitions in Earth history, as animals began to mechanically alter the environment they inhabited. Image credit: Emily Mitchell.#

Learning outcomes

The overarching learning outcomes for this module are below, lecture-specific learning outcomes are included in the notes for each lecture.

  • Understanding the pre-biotic to biotic transition and the building blocks of life

  • Understanding the history of life on Earth

  • Understanding life as a planetary phenomenon

Glossary

There are many new terms/phrases. The below link provides a very good glossary for these. https://evolution.berkeley.edu/glossary/