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In Our Time
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PROGRAMME INFO |
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The big ideas which form the intellectual agenda of our age are illuminated by some of the best minds. Melvyn Bragg and three guests investigate the history of ideas and debate their application in modern life. |
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LISTEN AGAIN |
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PRESENTER |
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BIOGRAPHY
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| "I'm fascinated by the fact that we live in a time when so many people are doing fantastic work, and thinking in areas which it's not remotely possible for me to keep up with & and these people are prepared to talk about it. They're prepared to come on In Our Time and other programmes on Radio 4 and try and talk to the rest of us ..." |
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PROGRAMME DETAILS |
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THE ORIGINS OF LIFE
Click here to view Richard Corfield's Origins of Life clock spanning over 4 billion years. It puts different forms of life into context.
Click here to read audience reactions to this edition of In Our Time.
Scientists have named 1.5 million species of living organism on the land, in the skies and in the oceans of planet Earth and a new one is classified every day. Estimates of how many species remain to be discovered vary wildly, but science accepts one categorical point – all living matter on our planet, from the nematode to the elephant, from the bacterium to the blue whale, is derived from a single common ancestor.
What was that ancestor? Did it really emerge from a ‘primordial soup’? And what, in the explanation of evolutionary science, provided the catalyst to start turning the cycle of life?
Contributors
Richard Dawkins, Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University
Richard Corfield, Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research at the Open University
Linda Partridge, Biology and Biotechnology Research Council Professor at University College London
Further Reading
The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life by Richard Dawkins (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
The Silent Landscape by Richard Corfield (John Murray)
Architects of Eternity by Richard Corfield (Hodder Headline)
Life on a Young Planet by Andrew Knoll (Princeton University Press) |
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RELATED LINKS
Richard Corfield's website on the Isua/Akilia and Apex Chert controversies.
Open University's CEPSAR website
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