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I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Safeguarding Sound Science, Evolution Edition.

Evolution is the unifying principle of biology, yet it still breeds controversy a century

and a half after Charles Darwin.

Join us as we meet the passionate researchers and communicators who are expanding our knowledge

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You'd think that this would be one of the last places you'd look for life.

After a four decades-long slumber, the world's largest active volcano is now spewing molten lava and raining ash near the very top of Hawaii's Big Island.

Spewing lava and belching nonches fumes, volcanoes seem implacably hostile to biology.

But the search for life off Earth includes the hunt for these hotheads on other moons and planets,

and that may seem contradictory.

So why do scientists say that these dramatic fissures in the Earth's crust and the tectonic forces below

produce more than dramatic geology but are essential to our existence?

This is Big Picture Science from the SETI Institute, and I'm Seth Shostak.

I'm Molly Bentley. In this episode, we tour some of the most imposing volcanoes in the solar system,

and many are not on Earth. What does the infernal condition of Venus suggest about the possibility of life there?

Find out why the presence of biology on a planet

or moon is tied to the restless churning of its depths. This crashing, colliding, erupting episode

is Life in the Solar System. In his classic sci-fi story, journey to the center of the earth, Jules Verne made the trip easy for his intrepid explorers.

They simply dropped into a volcano to reach the

bowels of Earth. Once there, they walked through miles of an interior labyrinth and even sailed on a

...