Peter Ward (paleontologist)

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Peter Douglas Ward (* 1949 ) is an American paleontologist and professor of biology, earth and space sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle . He is also the author of popular science books.

Live and act

Peter Ward mainly conducts research on the mass extinctions of the earth's history with a focus on the KT impact and the ecological crisis at the Perm-Triassic border . He is also an associate professor for zoology and astronomy . He has published books on biodiversity and fossilization . His book On Methuselah's Trail , published in 1992, received a Golden Trilobite Award from the Paleontological Society for the best popular science book of the year.

Ward's academic career includes appointments and teaching assignments at Ohio State University , NASA Astrobiology Institute, University of Calgary, and California Institute of Technology . In 1984 he was elected a member of the California Academy of Sciences.

In addition to the astronomer Donald Brownlee , he is co-author of the best-selling book Rare Earth : Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe , published in 2000 . In this book, the authors argue that the universe is inherently hostile to higher life and thus the likelihood of life forms like those on Earth is extremely low, whereas simple life can be common.

In his book Under a Green Sky from April 2007, he argues that all mass extinctions except for the KT impact were caused by climate change - including the current one as a result of global warming . He further argues that past events could provide important information about the future of our planet. Reviewer Doug Brown summed this up more drastically with the words "this is how the world ends".

He also appeared on television on the PBS "Evolution Series" to discuss the evidence for evolution based on fossils, and on NOVA scienceNOW .

Medea hypothesis

Peter Ward coined the term Medea hypothesis for a counter hypothesis to the Gaia hypothesis and postulated in it that the community of multicellular life perceived as a superorganism is inherently self-destructive and not self-sustaining, as claimed in the Gaia hypothesis. Multicellular life would very likely self-extinguish and life on Earth would revert to a state of microbial life that has been normal for most of Earth's history.

In his view, past attempts at self-destruction of life are the methane crisis 3.7 billion years ago, the Great Oxygen Catastrophe 2.5 billion years ago, two Snowball Earth events 2.3 billion and 790–630 million years ago and at least 5 hydrogen sulfide - induced mass extinctions, such as that on the Permian-Triassic boundary around 252 million years ago.

See also

Works

  • In Search of Nautilus (1988)
  • On Methuselah's Trail (1992) (German: The long breath of the Nautilus: Why living fossils are still alive . Spectrum, Heidelberg, 1993 ISBN 3-86025-087-6 )
  • The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared (1997) (German: Ausgerottet or extinct? Why the Mammoths couldn't survive the Ice Age . Translated from the English by Monika Niehaus-Osterloh and Hans-Peter Krull. Birkhäuser, Basel, 1998 ISBN 3-7643-5915-3 )
  • Time Machines: Scientific Exploration of Deep Time (1998)
  • Rivers in Time (2000)
  • Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe with Donald Brownlee (2000) (German: Our lonely earth: Why complex life in the universe is improbable . Translated from English by Eckard Helmers. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2001 ISBN 3- 540-41365-0 )
  • Future Evolution (2001) ISBN 0-7167-3496-6
  • The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World with Donald Brownlee (2003) ISBN 0-8050-6781-7
  • Gorgon: Obsession, Paleontology, and the Greatest Mass Extinction (2004)
  • Life as We Do Not Know It (2005) ISBN 0-670-03458-4
  • Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere (2006) ISBN 0-309-10061-5
  • Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future (2007) ISBN 978-0-06-113791-4
  • The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? (2009) ISBN 0-691-13075-2
  • The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps (2010) ISBN 0-465-00949-2
  • Peter Ward, Joe Kirschvink : A New Story of Life. How catastrophes determined the course of evolution. Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, Munich 2016. ISBN 978-3-421-04661-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Ward - Short Biography . University of Washington, Earth and Space Sciences. Archived from the original on December 21, 2009. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved December 1, 2009. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / earthweb.ess.washington.edu
  2. ^ Doug Brown, Review-a-Day: This Is How the World Ends . Retrieved January 30, 2011.
  3. ↑ Peter Ward: The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? . Princeton University Press . 2009. ISBN 978-1-4008-2988-0
  4. ^ TED conference : Peter Ward's speaker profile , accessed February 27, 2009
  5. ^ Turn over a new leaf . In: Times Higher Education Magazine . January 1, 2009. Retrieved February 27, 2009.
  6. ↑ Peter Ward: Gaia's wicked sister . In: Spectrum of Science November 2009. pp. 84–88.
personal data
SURNAME Ward, Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ward, Peter Douglas (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleontologist and professor of biology, earth and space sciences
DATE OF BIRTH 1949