"Do you like history, perhaps investigating where your family came from or learning what challenges your ancestry met and where they called home? This course traces some of the wanderings of our wider family, the biosphere, from its first appearance on Earth around 4 billion years ago through to the present day. This journey has been a fantastic one, whit many interesting twists and turns along the way, many high points and more than a few crises."--page...

Traces the twenty-one-year period between Charles Darwin's original idea about natural selection and the publication of "On the Origin of Species, " in an account that offers insight into his experiences as a cautious naturalist.

"For evolutionary biologists, the concept of chance has always played a significant role in the formation of evolutionary theory. As far back as Greek antiquity, chance and "luck" were understood to be key factors in the evolution of the natural world. Emphasizing chance is an entire way of thinking about nature, and it is also one of the key ideas that separates Charles Darwin from other systematic biologists of his time. Studying the concept of...