A Short History of Nearly Everything
Page 56
Darwin's theory didn't really gain widespread acceptance . . ." Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans , p. 45.
"seemed set to claim Mendel's insights as his own . . ." Schwartz, p. 187.
CHAPTER 26 THE STUFF OF LIFE
"roughly one nucleotide base in every thousand . . ." Sulston and Ferry, p. 198.
"The exceptions are red blood cells . . ." Woolfson, Life Without Genes , p. 12.
"guaranteed to be unique against all conceivable odds . . ." De Duve, vol. 2, p. 314.
"to stretch from the Earth to the Moon . . ." Dennett, p. 151.
"twenty million kilometers of DNA . . ." Gribbin and Gribbin, Being Human , p. 8.
"among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules . . ." Lewontin, p. 142.
"It was discovered as far back as 1869 . . ." Ridley, Genome , p. 48.
"DNA didn't do anything at all . . ." Wallace et al., Biology: The Science of Life, p. 211.
"The necessary complexity, it was thought . . ." De Duve, vol. 2, p. 295.
"Working out of a small lab . . ." Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin , p. 259.
"no consensus 'as to what the genes are' . . ." Keller, p. 2.
"we are in much the same position today . . ." Wallace et al., p. 211.
"worth two Nobel Prizes . . ." Maddox, Rosalind Franklin , p. 327.
"not to give Avery a Nobel Prize." White, Rivals , p. 251.
"a member of a highly popular radio program called The Quiz Kids . . ." Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation , p. 46.
"without my learning any chemistry . . ." Watson, The Double Helix , p. 28.
"the results of which were obtained 'fortuitously' . . ." Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits , p. 356.
"In a severely unflattering portrait . . ." Watson, The Double Helix , p. 26.
"in the summer of 1952 she posted a mock notice . . ." White, Rivals , p. 257; and Maddox, p. 185.
"apparently without her knowledge or consent." PBS website, "A Science Odyssey," undated.
"Years later Watson conceded. . ." Quoted in Maddox, p. 317.
"a 900-word article by Watson and Crick titled 'A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.' " De Duve, vol. 2, p. 290.
"It received a small mention in the News Chronicle . . ." Ridley, Genome , p. 50.
"Franklin rarely wore a lead apron . . ." Maddox, p. 144.
"It took over twenty-five years . . ." Crick, What Mad Pursuit , p. 74.
"That Was the Molecular Biology That Was." Keller, p. 25.
"rather like the keys of a piano . . ." National Geographic , "Secrets of the Gene," October 1995, p. 55.
"Guanine, for instance, is the same stuff . . ." Pollack, p. 23.
"you could say all humans share nothing . . ." Discover , "Bad Genes, Good Drugs," April 2002, p. 54.
"they are good at getting themselves duplicated." Ridley, Genome , p. 127.
"Altogether, almost half of human genes . . ." Woolfson, p. 18.
"Empires fall, ids explode . . ." Nuland, p. 158.
"Here were two creatures . . ." BBC Horizon , "Hopeful Monsters," first transmitted 1998.
"At least 90 percent correlate at some level . . ." Nature , "Sorry, Dogs--Man's Got a New Best Friend," December 19-26, 2002, p. 734.
"We even have the same genes for making a tail . . ." Los Angeles Times (reprinted in Valley News ), December 9, 2002.
"dubbed homeotic (from a Greek word meaning "similar") . . ." BBC Horizon , "Hopeful Monsters," first transmitted 1998.
"We have forty-six chromosomes . . ." Gribbin and Cherfas, p. 53.
"The lungfish, one of the least evolved . . ." Schopf, p. 240.
"Perhaps the apogee (or nadir) . . ." Lewontin, p. 215.
"How fast a man's beard grows . . ." Wall Street Journal, "What Distinguishes Us from the Chimps? Actually, Not Much," April 12, 2002, p. 1.
"the proteome is much more complicated than the genome." Scientific American , "Move Over, Human Genome," April 2002, pp. 44-45.
"they will allow themselves to be phosphorylated, glycosylated, acetylated, ubiquitinated . . ." The Bulletin , "The Human Enigma Code," August 21, 2001, p. 32.
"Drink a glass of wine . . ." Scientific American , "Move Over, Human Genome," April 2002, pp. 44-45.
"Anything that is true of E. coli . . ." Nature , "From E. coli to Elephants," May 2, 2002, p. 22.
CHAPTER 27 ICE TIME
" The Times ran a small story . . ." Williams and Montaigne, p. 198.
"Spring never came and summer never warmed." Officer and Page, pp. 3-6.
"One French naturalist named de Luc . . ." Hallam, p. 89.
"and the other abundant clues . . ." Hallam, p. 90.
"The naturalist Jean de Charpentier told the story . . ." Hallam, p. 90.
"He lent Agassiz his notes . . ." Hallam, pp. 92-93.
"there are three stages in scientific discovery . . ." Ferris, The Whole Shebang , p. 173.
"In his quest to understand the dynamics of glaciation . . ." McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , p. 182.
"William Hopkins, a Cambridge professor . . ." Hallam, p. 98.
"He began to find evidence for glaciers . . ." Hallam, p. 99.
"ice had once covered the whole Earth . . ." Gould, Time's Arrow , p. 115.
"When he died in 1873 Harvard felt it necessary . . ." McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , p. 197.
"Less than a decade after his death . . ." McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , p. 197.
"For the next twenty years . . ." Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age , p. 51.
"The cause of ice ages . . ." Chorlton, Ice Ages , p. 101.
"It is not necessarily the amount of snow . . ." Schultz, p. 72.
"The process is self-enlarging . . ." McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , p. 205.
"you would have been hard pressed to find a geologist . . ." Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age , p. 60.
"we are still very much in an ice age . . ." Schultz, Ice Age Lost , p. 5.
"a situation that may be unique in Earth's history." Gribbin and Gribbin, Fire on Earth , p. 147.
"at least seventeen severe glacial episodes . . ." Flannery, The Eternal Frontier , p. 148.
"about fifty more glacial episodes . . ." McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , p. 4.
"Earth had no regular ice ages . . ." Stevens, p. 10.
"the Cryogenian, or super ice age." McGuire, p. 69.
"The entire surface of the planet . . ." Valley News (from Washington Post ), "The Snowball Theory," June 19, 2000, p. C1.
"the wildest weather it has ever experienced . . ." BBC Horizon transcript, "Snowball Earth," February 22, 2001, p. 7.
"known to science as the Younger Dryas," Stevens, p. 34.
"a vast unsupervised experiment . . ." New Yorker , "Ice Memory," January 7, 2002, p. 36.
"a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates . . ." Schultz, p. 72.
"No less intriguing are the known ranges . . ." Drury, p. 268.
"a retreat to warmer climes wasn't possible." Thomas H. Rich, Patricia Vickers-Rich, and Roland Gangloff, "Polar Dinosaurs," unpublished manuscript.
"there is a lot more water for them to draw on . . ." Schultz, p. 159.
"If so, sea levels globally would rise . . ." Ball, p. 75.
"'Did you have a good ice age?' " Flannery, The Eternal Frontier , p. 267.
CHAPTER 28 THE MYSTERIOUS BIPED
"Just before Christmas 1887 . . ." National Geographic , May 1997, p. 87.
"found by railway workers in a cave . . ." Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 149.
"The first formal description . . ." Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 173.
"the name and credit for the discovery . . ." Trinkaus and Shipman, pp. 3-6.
"T. H. Huxley in England drily observed . . ." Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 59.
"He did no digging himself . . ." Gould, Eight Little Piggies , pp. 126-27.
"In fact, many anthropologists think it is modern . . ." Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones , p. 47.
"If it is a
n erectus bone . . ." Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 144.
"with nothing but a scrap of cranium and one tooth . . ." Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 154.
"Schwalbe thereupon produced a monograph . . ." Walker and Shipman, p. 50.
"Dart could see at once . . ." Walker and Shipman, p. 90.
"he would sometimes bury their bodies . . ." Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 233.
"Dart spent five years working up a monograph . . ." Lewin, Bones of Contention , p. 82.
"sat as a paperweight on a colleague's desk." Walker and Shipman, p. 93.
"announced the discovery of Sinanthropus pekinensis . . ." Swisher, et al., Java Man, p. 75.
"enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones . . ." Swisher et al., p. 77.
"Solo People were known . . ." Swisher, et al., p. 211.
"in 1960 F. Clark Howell of the University of Chicago . . ." Trinkaus and Shipman, pp. 267-68.
"our understanding of human prehistory . . ." Washington Post , "Skull Raises Doubts About Our Ancestry." March 22, 2001.
"You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck . . ." Ian Tattersall interview, American Museum of Natural History, New York, May 6, 2002.
"early hand tools were mostly made by antelopes." Walker and Shipman, p. 82.
"males and females evolving at different rates . . ." Walker and Shipman, p. 133.
"dismiss it as a mere 'wastebasket species' . . ." Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 111.
"have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer." Quoted by Gribbin and Cherfas, The First Chimpanzee , p. 60.
"perhaps the largest share of egos . . ." Swisher et al., p. 17.
"unpredictable and high-decibel personal verbal assaults . . ." Swisher et al., p. 140.
"For the first 99.99999 percent of our history . . ." Tattersall, The Human Odyssey , p. 60.
"She is our earliest ancestor . . ." PBS Nova , June 3, 1997, "In Search of Human Origins."
"discounted the 106 bones of the hands and feet . . ." Walker and Shipman, p. 181.
"Lucy and her kind did not locomote . . ." Tattersall, The Monkey in the Mirror , p. 89.
"Only when these hominids had to travel . . ." Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 91.
"Lucy's hips and the muscular arrangement of her pelvis . . ." National Geographic , "Face-to-Face with Lucy's Family," March 1996, p. 114.
"One, discovered by Meave Leakey . . ." New Scientist , March 24, 2001, p. 5.
"the oldest hominid yet found . . ." Nature , "Return to the Planet of the Apes," July 12, 2001, p. 131.
"found a hominid almost seven million years old . . ." Scientific American , "An Ancestor to Call Our Own," January 2003, pp. 54-63.
"Some critics believe that it was not human . . ." Nature , "Face to Face with Our Past," December 19-26, 2002, p. 735.
"when you are a small, vulnerable australopithecine . . ." Stevens, p. 3; and Drury, pp. 335-36.
"but that the forests left them . . ." Gribbin and Gribbin, Being Human , p. 135.
"For over three million years . . ." PBS Nova , "In Search of Human Origins," first broadcast August 1999.
"yet the australopithecines never took advantage . . ." Drury, p. 338.
"'Perhaps,' suggests Matt Ridley, 'we ate them.' " Ridley, Genome , p. 33.
"they make up only 2 percent of the body's mass . . ." Drury, p. 345.
"The body is in constant danger . . ." Brown, p. 216.
"C. Loring Brace stuck doggedly to the linear concept . . ." Gould, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms , p. 204.
" Homo erectus is the dividing line . . ." Swisher et al., p. 131.
"It was of a boy aged between about nine and twelve . . ." National Geographic , May 1997, p. 90.
"the Turkana boy was 'very emphatically one of us.' " Tattersall, The Monkey in the Mirror , p. 105.
"Someone had looked after her." Walker and Shipman, p. 165.
"they were unprecedentedly adventurous . . ." Scientific American, "Food for Thought," December 2002, pp. 108-15.
"couldn't be compared with anything else . . ." Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 132.
"Tattersall and Schwartz don't believe that goes nearly far enough." Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 169.
CHAPTER 29 THE RESTLESS APE
"They made them in the thousands . . ." Ian Tattersall, interview by author, American Museum of Natural History, New York, May 6, 2002.
"people may have first arrived substantially earlier . . ." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , January 16, 2001.
"There's just a whole lot we don't know . . ." Alan Thorne, interview by author, Canberra, August 20, 2001.
"the most recent major event in human evolution . . ." Tattersall, The Human Odyssey , p. 150.
"whether any or all of them actually represent our species . . ." Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 226.
"odd, difficult-to-classify and poorly known . . ." Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 412.
"No Neandertal remains have ever been found in north Africa . . ." Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 209.
"known to paleoclimatology as the Boutellier interval . . ." Fagan, The Great Journey , p. 105.
"They survived for at least a hundred thousand years . . ." Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 204.
"In 1947, while doing fieldwork in the Sahara . . ." Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 300.
"Neandertals lacked the intelligence or fiber to compete . . ." Nature , "Those Elusive Neanderthals," October 25, 2001, p. 791.
"Modern humans neutralized this advantage . . ." Stevens, p. 30.
"1.8 liters for Neandertals versus 1.4 for modern people . . ." Flannery, The Future Eaters , p. 301.
"Rhodesian man . . . lived as recently as 25,000 years ago . . ." Canby, The Epic of Man , page unnoted.
"the front end looking like a donkey . . ." Science , "What--or Who--Did In the Neandertals?" September 14, 2001, p. 1981.
"all present-day humans are descended from that population . . ." Swisher et al., p. 189.
"people began to look a little more closely . . ." Scientific American , "Is Out of Africa Going Out the Door?" August 1999.
"DNA from the arm bone of the original Neandertal man . . ." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , "Ancient DNA and the Origin of Modern Humans," January 16, 2001.
"all modern humans emerged from Africa . . ." Nature , "A Start for Population Genomics," December 7, 2000, p. 65, and Natural History, "What's New in Prehistory," May 2000, pp. 90-91.
"more diversity in one social group of fifty-five chimps . . ." Science , "A Glimpse of Humans' First Journey Out of Africa," May 12, 2000, p. 950.
"In early 2001, Thorne and his colleagues . . ." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , "Mitochondrial DNA Sequences in Ancient Australians: Implications for Modern Human Origins," January 16, 2001.
"the genetic record supports the out of Africa hypothesis." Rosalind Harding interview, Institute of Biological Anthropology, February 28, 2002.
"whether he thought an old skull was varnished or not . . ." Nature , September 27, 2001, p. 359.
"had inserted a visit to Olorgesailie. . ." Just for the record, the name is also commonly spelled Olorgasailie, including in some official Kenyan materials. It was this spelling that I used in a small book I wrote for CARE concerning the visit. I am now informed by Ian Tattersall that the correct spelling is with a median e .
CHAPTER 30 GOOD-BYE
"a handful of crude descriptions by 'unscientific voyagers . . .' " Quoted in Gould, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, pp. 237-38.
"Australia . . . lost no less than 95 percent . . ." Flannery and Schouten, p. xv.
"there are only so many mammoth steaks you can eat." New Scientist, "Mammoth Mystery," May 5, 2001, p. 34.
"only four types of really hefty . . . land animals . . ." Flannery, The Eternal Frontier , p. 195.
"human-caused extinction now may be running . . ." Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction , p. 241.
; "He set off at once for the island . . ." Flannery, The Future Eaters, pp. 62-63.
"At each successive discharge . . ." Quoted in Matthiessen, Wildlife in America, pp. 114-115.
"the zoo lost it . . ." Flannery and Schouten, p. 125.
"as many as four hundred at a time . . ." Gould, The Book of Life, p. 79.
"Hugh Cuming, who became so preoccupied . . ." Desmond and Moore, p. 342.
"Millions of years of isolation . . ." National Geographic , "On the Brink: Hawaii's Vanishing Species," September 1995, pp. 2-37.
"if someone imitated its song . . ." Flannery and Schouten, p. 84.
"a bird so sublimely rare . . ." Flannery and Schouten, p. 76.
"By the early 1990s he had raised the figure . . ." Easterbrook, A Moment on the Earth, p. 558.
"A United Nations report of 1995 . . ." Valley News, quoting Washington Post, "Report Finds Growing Biodiversity Threat," November 27, 1995.
"One planet, one experiment." Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 182.
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