Evolution in Action

Abstract

I can safely say that evolution is a familiar thing to me. After growing up with many visits to the museum and after gathering a small personal collection of fossil fish and insects trapped in amber, I can easily imagine a world very different from ours, with dinosaurs roaming through a forest of giant ferns and giant dragonflies. With the help of ancient pot shards and stone knives, I can imagine hairier versions of myself discovering fire and hunting mammoths. I can even imagine tiny cells, newly minted, colonizing the early Earth and gradually, over millennia, flooding it with oxygen to create the world we live in today.

The original version of this chapter was revised. An erratum to this chapter can be found at DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32510-1_24

An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32510-1_24