Starts 25th July, 2 Fridays, 10-12noon,
25 July 2025 - 1 August 2025
2 weeks, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
CWEA, Christchurch
Join Paul Broady for these two perspectives on life on earth. The first lecture will focus on diversity, the second on the abundance of life here on earth. Week 1: The diversity of life on Earth – new perspectives The scientific recognition that all organisms are related has developed only within the last couple of centuries. As new technologies have been applied to the description and classification of this diversity a vast previously hidden world has come into view. This is mostly a microbial world in which numerous major lines of evolution overwhelm the few with which most people are familiar in their daily lives. Week 2: The abundance of life on Earth – do we really know how much? Most people now live in crowded cities and might easily think that humans are the most abundant organism on Earth. How wrong they would be. So, what are the most abundant organisms? Where do they live? Are they on the land surface or in the oceans? Or maybe somewhere else? How do we even measure “abundance”? After all, there are as many bacteria in a handful of soil as there are humans. It might be easy to estimate the weight of humans on Earth but is it so easy to estimate the weight of bacteria? So how accurate are our measurements of this very fundamental biological characteristic of our planet?
