Evolution and The History of Life in Deep Time

Life on Earth carries a story written in molecules, bones, sediments, and branching lineages. This course guides you through that story—from the origins of life and the rise of complex cells to multicellularity, animals, life on land, mass extinctions, and modern conservation. You’ll learn the mechanisms that power evolution (variation, heredity, selection), how molecular changes become anatomical diversity through development, and how scientists reconstruct the tree of life using evidence from DNA, fossils, and comparative morphology.

We’ll explore species concepts and speciation, phylogenetic methods (cladistics, parsimony, Bayesian inference), macroevolutionary dynamics (rates, clocks, adaptive radiations), and evo‑devo insights that reveal how new functions emerge from old parts. You’ll trace milestones such as abiogenesis, oxygenation, eukaryogenesis via endosymbiosis, multicellularity, and the Cambrian explosion, then follow plants, arthropods, and vertebrates as they adapt to life on land—solving challenges like water loss, UV exposure, gravity, and air‑breathing.

You’ll examine extinction from background processes to the Big Five mass extinctions and the unfolding human‑driven sixth, learning to separate ultimate drivers from proximal kill mechanisms and to recognize how recovery and resilience work over millions of years. In palaeoecology, you’ll infer niches, gradients, communities, and depositional environments with care for taphonomic and sampling biases. In palaeobiogeography, you’ll see how barriers and provinces shape distributions, how mixing events spur diversification, and how continents and oceans evolve through time (e.g., the Iapetus ocean). Finally, conservation palaeobiology connects deep‑time knowledge to present decisions—revealing lag effects, thresholds, and multi‑stressor interactions that short‑term studies can miss, and underscoring the importance of protecting geoheritage.

By the end, evolution will be more than a topic—it will be your lens for understanding how life becomes, diversifies, collapses, and recovers, and how deep‑time context sharpens today’s biodiversity and conservation challenges.

Course Features

• Structured, short lectures with clear summaries for each topic.

FAQs

• Is this course suitable for beginners? Yes. It begins with fundamentals and builds to advanced concepts in an accessible way.

Curriculum at a Glance

• Section 1: Introduction — Foundations of evolution: variation, heredity, selection; genotype–phenotype via development.

If you’re ready to understand how life evolves, diversifies, collapses, and recovers—and to use deep‑time insights to see today’s biodiversity and conservation challenges more clearly—enroll now and start reading Earth’s grand story with scientific confidence and curiosity.

Materials and videos provided under this course are on a Creative Commons (CC) License. Original work by Russel Gardwood has been used across the course.