Age of the Earth research. Most geological samples from Earth are unable to give a direct date of the formation of Earth from the solar nebula because Earth has undergone differentiation into the core, mantle, and crust, and this has then undergone a long history of mixing and unmixing of these sample reservoirs by plate tectonics, weathering and hydrothermal circulation. All of these processes may adversely affect isotopic dating mechanisms because the sample cannot always be assumed to have remained as a closed system, by which it is meant that either the parent or daughter nuclide (a species of atom characterised by the number
The Social Conquest of Earth The Social Conquest of Earth The Social Conquest of Earth is a 2012 non-fiction book by biologist Edward O. Wilson. Wilson adapted the title of Paul Gauguin's famous mural as a theme -- "What are we?", "Where did we come from?", "Where are we going?"—for discussing his topic of eusocial behavior in several arthropod taxa and a few mammalian species, and its role in making humans as a species unique. Wilson argues, building on the paper "The evolution of eusociality" (2010) by Wilson, Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita in "Nature", for more importance of group selection and against the idea