The class covers all the basics, but with a distinctly plant-forward flair. When he gets to the Great Oxygenation Event—the long period in which the earth’s atmosphere transitioned away from being a suffocating cage of carbon dioxide to an oxygen-dominated haven—he makes sure one crucial detail sinks in: plants did that. They made the terrestrial world a habitable place for other forms of life to arise, and eventually to be able to breathe. Without them, animal life as we know it would not even have had the faintest shot at clambering onto the evolutionary treadmill. Our cells would never have
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