GEOL 199 Emergence of Life (Online)

CRN 37410

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign – Summer Session 2013

Course Overview: How did Life emerge on Earth? How have Life and Earth co-evolved through geological time? Is Life elsewhere in the universe? This fully-online, 8-week course reevaluates these questions and the 4 billion-year history of Life on Earth through the new lens of Professor Carl Woese’s “Tree of Life”. The course fundamentally reconsiders what early Life and evolution looked like before the root of the Tree, the role of Darwinian evolution within the Tree, and the search for Life in the cosmos.

Faculty Instructor: Professor Bruce W. Fouke, Departments of Geology, Microbiology and The Institute for Genomic Biology. Prof. Fouke has taught the acclaimed course History of Life for the last 16 years at Illinois, which has laid the groundwork for this first integrative look at the co-evolution of Life and Earth within the greater Tree of Life and NASA’s latest missions.