Andy Knoll: The First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
Lawrence M. Krauss
4.4 • 592 Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2022
⏱️ 174 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Andy Knoll is a Renaissance Scientist. He is a geologist, paleobiologist, and geochemist and has applied key ideas from chemistry, biology, physiology and more to understanding the key developments associated with life on Earth—both how geology and chemistry have impacted on life, and vice versa. He has made ground breaking contributions to the understanding of almost every phase of life, from early Pre-Cambrian single cell life, to the emergence of more complex lifeforms, to mass extinctions. His group was the first to demonstrate that the rapid rise of CO2 was probably responsible for the last great extinction on Earth, a subject of some relevance today. For his work he most recently won the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Crafoord Prize in Geosciences… the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in that field.
But more than all of this, Andy is a wonderful teacher and human being, and a great communicator . He has written numerous books on the history of life on Earth, and we discussed his most recent book, “A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters” in this podcast, along with his own origins and evolution as a scientist. The discussion was so fascinating that we went overtime during our first session and had to continue the next day.
Our discussion will forever change your perspective on our planet, and our place within it. Enjoy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Lawrence Krause and welcome to the Origins Podcast. |
| 0:12.0 | This has been an exciting week in science as the James Webb Space Telescope released its first images of the universe. |
| 0:18.0 | One of those images was of a distant exoplanet surrounding a star and it looked at |
| 0:23.8 | the atmosphere was a spectrum of radiation coming from through that star and you were able to see |
| 0:28.3 | the absorption of water, which is clearly water vapor in the atmosphere. That's one of the main |
| 0:32.3 | missions of JWST, which is to look at the atmospheres of extrasolar planets to look for biomarkers and potentially evidence for life elsewhere in the universe. |
| 0:42.3 | But of course if we're going to understand life elsewhere in the universe, we should first try and understand life here on Earth and the evolution of life on Earth. |
| 0:49.3 | In particular, those things that may be relevant to the way life affected geology and vice versa. |
| 0:58.3 | And in that regard, there's no better person in the world to discuss this topic with than Andy Noel of Harvard University. |
| 1:06.2 | Andy is a, it's hard to define him. |
| 1:09.5 | He's a geopalientologist, a geobiologist, chemist, physiologists. He |
| 1:15.9 | merges all those different fields to try and apply that expertise to novel ways of looking |
| 1:21.2 | at the development of life and earth. And he has made major contributions to almost every |
| 1:26.0 | single area from the pre-Cambrian life and single-cell life and the development of complex life on Earth to in fact major extinctions. |
| 1:33.3 | And his group was the first to be able to suggest that the rise of, sudden rise of carbon dioxide was perhaps responsible for the last major extinction on Earth. |
| 1:43.3 | A very topical subject for looking at for today. |
| 1:47.0 | Andy, for his work, Andy has been awarded basically every major prize in the world. |
| 1:53.0 | He's a member of National Academy of Sciences as well as many other national academies. |
| 1:58.0 | But two in particular stand out for me. |
| 2:00.0 | One, he was given the International Prize in biology in the presence of the Emperor and Empress of Japan in 2018, and just this year was awarded the Crawford Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Geosciences. That's essentially the Nobel Prize for work done in areas for which there's no Nobel Prize, |
| 2:18.3 | because his work has been so remarkable and innovative. |
| 2:23.3 | And I have learned a tremendous amount from Andy over the years. |
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