"How did life begin" Are we alone in the Universe? We are the first generation in history to ask those as scientific rather than philosophical questions says Andrew Knoll, professor of natural history at Harvard. The question: How did life begin on Earth is one of the big unsolved questions humanity has always asked. Biology has been very good at describing how living organisms work, but not very good at answering what life is or how it could emerge from a non-organic, non-living world.

Packing the Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history into a two-foot-by-three poster—roughly three-quarters of a billion years per square foot—is no easy task. Yet scientists from Harvard and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Chevy Chase, Maryland, have teamed up to do just that with “Earth Evolution: The Intersection of Geology and Biology”—a graphic display (opposite) of how geological and biological processes have dynamically shaped and molded the world we inhabit.

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