Peter D. Ward

Medea hypothesis

The Medea hypothesis is a term coined by Ward for a hypothesis that contests the Gaian hypothesis, proposing that multicellular life, understood as a superorganism, is self-destructive or suicidal, allowing a return to simpler life-forms.

Appearances

Peter Ward was featured in the PBS's Evolution series (2001) to discuss the evidence for evolution in the geologic record and has appeared on NOVA scienceNOW. He was also one of the scientists on Animal Planet's Animal Armageddon (2009). Ward is also a guest on Coast to Coast AM, a radio program that mostly specializes on paranormal activity and other unexplained phenomena.

Selected works

Books In Search of Nautilus: Three Centuries of Scientific Adventures in the Deep Pacific to Capture a Prehistoric, Living Fossil (1988) OCLC 17840660 On Methuselah's Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions (1992) The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared (1997) Time Machines: Scientific Exploration of Deep Time (1998) Rivers in Time: the Search for Clues to Earth's Mass Extinctions (2000) Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe with Donald Brownlee (2000) Future Evolution: An Illuminated History of Life to Come (2001) The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World with Donald Brownlee (2003) Gorgon: Obsession, Paleontology, and the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History (2004) Life as We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life (2005) Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere (2006) Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future (2007) The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? (2009) The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps (2010) A New History of Life: The radical new discoveries about the origins and evolution of life on Earth with Joe Kirschvink (2015) Lamarck's Revenge: How Epigenetics Is Revolutionizing Our Evolution's Past and Present (2018)

Journal articles