Saturday, April 5, 2014

Chapters Seven and Eight

Chapter Seven: The seventh chapter starts off with the topic of the origin of life on Earth. Scientists today are attempting to re-create the conditions in which living organisms arose and how they evolved into modern life. The first creatures had to have been small microorganisms that lived in a very hydrogen rich environment. There was not much oxygen back then because plants had not yet arisen. These organisms then started to evolve through Charles Darwin's process of natural selection. For these organisms to survive, the basic organic building blocks of life had to be present: amino acids and nucleotide bases.
Chapter Eight: Chapter eights begins with talking about the immense sky and of the stars. The night sky is like an enormous clock, everything moving on its scale. Our ancient ancestors observed this, totally amazed by it. they named the planets after their gods and used the sky as a clock for everyday. An interesting fact, the names of every day of the week derive from ancient civilizations beliefs in their gods. For example, Saturday is named after the Greek God Saturn. Around that time there were six planets that were known. But in 1781, another planet was discovered. A musician named William Herschel had discovered Uranus, which was named after the father of Saturn.





Uranus







1 comment:

  1. I wonder what life would have been like if the universe already had oxygen… if plants weren't needed for it how different the world would be and how natural selection would have played a role. I didn't know that was why week days were named and why Saturn was named. This post was very interesting.

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