A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition
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43 “We’re still in the Dark Ages. We just drop a net down and see what comes up”: Economist, “Pollock Overboard,” 6 Jan. 1996, p.22.
44 Perhaps as much as 22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses: Economist survey, “The Sea,” 23 May 1998, p.12.
45 Large areas of the North Sea floor are dragged clean by beam trawlers as many as seven times a year: Outside, Dec. 1997, p.62.
46 sailors scooped them up in baskets: National Geographic, Oct. 1993, p.18.
47 By 1990 this had sunk to 22,000 tonnes: Economist survey, “The Sea,” 23 May 1998, p.8.
48 “Fishermen … had caught them all”: Kurlansky, Cod, p.186.
49 stocks had still not staged a comeback: Nature, “How Many More Fish in the Sea?,” 17 Oct. 2002, p.662.
50 These days, he notes drily, “fish” is “whatever is left”: Kurlansky, Cod, p.138.
51 “Biologists … estimate that 90 per cent of lobsters are caught within a year after they reach the legal minimum size”: New York Times magazine, “A Tale of Two Fisheries,” 27 Aug. 2000, p.40.
52 As many as 15 million of them may live on the pack ice around Antarctica: BBC Horizon transcript, “Antarctica: The Ice Melts,” p.16.
Chapter 19: The Rise of Life
1 After a few days, the water in the flasks had turned green and yellow in a hearty broth of amino acids: Earth, “Life’s Crucible,” Feb. 1998, p.34.
2 Repeating Miller’s experiments with these more challenging inputs has so far produced only one fairly primitive amino acid: Ball, H2O, p.209.
3 there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body: Discover, “The Power of Proteins,” Jan. 2002, p.38.
4 the odds against all 200 coming up in a prescribed sequence are 1 in 10260: Crick, Life Itself, p.51.
5 Haemoglobin is only 146 amino acids long, a runt by protein standards: Sulston and Ferry, The Common Thread, p.14.
6 DNA is a whiz at replicating—it can make a copy of itself in seconds: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.63.
7 “If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?”: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, p.71.
8 there must have been some kind of cumulative selection process that allowed amino acids to assemble: Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p.45.
9 Lots of molecules in nature get together to form long chains called polymers: Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p.115.
10 “an obligatory manifestation of matter”: quoted in Nuland, How We Live, p.121.
11 If you wished to create another living object … you would need really only four principal elements: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.107.
12 “There is nothing special about the substances from which living things are made”: Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p.112.
13 As one leading biology text puts it, with perhaps just a tiny hint of discomfort: Wallace et al., Biology, p.428.
14 Well into the 1950s, it was thought that life was less than six hundred million years old: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.71.
15 “We can only infer from this rapidity that it is not ‘difficult’ for life of bacterial grade to evolve”: New York Times, “Life on Mars? So What?,” 11 Aug. 1996.
16 “life, arising as soon as it could, was chemically destined to be”: Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p.328.
17 when tens of thousands of Australians were startled by a series of sonic booms and the sight of a fireball streaking from east to west across the sky: Sydney Morning Herald, “Aerial Blast Rocks Towns,” 29 Sept. 1969, and “Farmer Finds ‘Meteor Soot’,” 30 Sept. 1969.
18 it was studded with amino acids—seventy-four types in all: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, pp.209–10.
19 A few other carbonaceous chondrites have strayed into the Earth’s path since: Nature, “Life’s Sweet Beginnings?,” 20–27 Dec. 2001, p.857; Earth, “Life’s Crucible,” Feb.1998, p.37.
20 “at the very fringe of scientific respectability”: Gribbin, In the Beginning, p.78.
21 “Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug or blob you look at”: Ridley, Genome, p.21.
22 “We can’t be certain that what you are holding once contained living organisms”: interview with Victoria Bennett, Australia National University, Canberra, 21 Aug. 2001.
23 full of noxious vapours from hydrochloric and sulphuric acids powerful enough to eat through clothing and blister skin: Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p.200.
24 “undoubtedly the most important single metabolic innovation in the history of life on the planet”: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.78.
25 Our white blood cells actually use oxygen to kill invading bacteria: note provided by Dr Laurence Smaje.
26 But about 3.5 billion years ago something more emphatic became apparent: Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.186.
27 “This is truly time travelling”: Fortey, Life, p.66.
28 the cyanobacteria at Shark Bay are perhaps the most slowly evolving organisms on Earth: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.212.
29 “Animals could not summon up the energy to work”: Fortey, Life, p.89.
30 would be nothing more than a sludge of simple microbes: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.128.
31 you could pack a billion into the space occupied by a grain of sand: Brown, The Energy of Life, p.101.
32 Such fossils have been found just once and then no more are known for 500 million years: Ward and Brownlee, Rare Earth, p.10.
33 little more than “bags of chemicals”: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.68.
34 enough, as Carl Sagan noted, to fill eighty books of five hundred pages: Sagan, Cosmos, p.273.
Chapter 20: Small World
1 Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied with his that he took to peering critically at every dish placed before him with a magnifying glass: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, p.16.
2 If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.248; Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p.4.
3 Your digestive system alone is host to more than a hundred trillion microbes, of at least four hundred types: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, p.57.
4 A surprising number … have no detectable function at all: National Geographic, “Bacteria,” Aug. 1993, p.51.
5 Every human body consists of about ten quadrillion cells, but is host to about a hundred quadrillion bacterial cells: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.67.
6 We couldn’t survive a day without them: New York Times, “From Birth, Our Body Houses a Microbe Zoo,” 15 Oct. 1996, p. C-3.
7 Algae and other tiny organisms bubbling away in the sea blow out about 150 billion kilograms of the stuff every year: Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p.11.
8 Clostridium perfringens, the disagreeable little organism that causes gangrene, can reproduce in nine minutes: Outside, July 1999, p.88.
9 At such a rate, a single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring in two days than there are protons in the universe: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.75.
10 “a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day”: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 2, p.320.
11 Essentially … all bacteria swim in a single gene pool: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.16.
12 Scientists in Australia found microbes known as Thiobacillus concretivorans: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, p.145.
13 Some bacteria break down chemical materials from which, as far as we can tell, they gain no benefit at all: National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p.39.
14 “like the scuttling limbs of an undead creature from a horror movie”: Economist, “Human Genome Survey,” 1 July 2000, p.9.
15 Perhaps the most extraordinary survival yet found w
as that of a Streptococcus bacterium that was recovered from the sealed lens of a camera that had stood on the Moon for two years: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, p.146.
16 It has even been suggested that their tireless nibblings created the Earth’s crust: New York Times, “Bugs Shape Landscape, Make Gold,” 15 Oct. 1996, p. C-1.
17 if you took all the bacteria out of the Earth’s interior and dumped them on the surface, they would cover the planet to a depth of 15 metres: Discover, “To Hell and Back,” July 1999, p.82.
18 The liveliest of them may divide no more than once a century: Scientific American, “Microbes Deep Inside the Earth,” Oct. 1996, p.71.
19 “The key to long life, it seems, is not to do too much”: Economist, “Earth’s Hidden Life,” 21 Dec. 1996, p.112.
20 Other micro-organisms have leaped back to life after being released from a 118-year-old can of meat and a 166-year-old bottle of beer: Nature, “A Case of Bacterial Immortality?,” 19 Oct. 2000, p.844.
21 claimed to have revived bacteria frozen in Siberian permafrost for three million years: Economist, “Earth’s hidden life,” 21 Dec. 1996, p.111.
22 But the record claim for durability so far is one made by Russell Vreeland and colleagues at West Chester University: New Scientist, “Sleeping Beauty,” 21 Oct. 2000, p.12.
23 The more doubtful scientists suggested that the sample might have been contaminated: BBC News online, “Row over Ancient Bacteria,” 7 June 2001.
24 Bacteria were usually lumped in with plants, too: Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p.22.
25 In 1969, in an attempt to bring some order to the growing inadequacies of classification: Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p.23.
26 By one calculation it contained as many as two hundred thousand species of organism: Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p.24.
27 At that time, according to Woese, only about five hundred species of bacteria were known: New York Times, “Microbial Life’s Steadfast Champion,” 15 Oct. 1996, p. C-3.
28 Only about 1 per cent will grow in culture: Science, “Microbiologists Explore Life’s Rich, Hidden Kingdoms,” 21 March 1997, p.1740.
29 “like learning about animals from visiting zoos”: New York Times, “Microbial Life’s Steadfast Champion,” 15 Oct. 1996, p. C-7.
30 Woese … “felt bitterly disappointed”: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, pp.274–5.
31 “Biology, like physics before it … has moved to a level where the objects of interest and their interactions often cannot be perceived through direct observation”: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Default Taxonomy: Ernst Mayr’s View of the Microbial World,” 15 Sept. 1998.
32 “Woese was not trained as a biologist and quite naturally does not have an extensive familiarity with the principles of classification”: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Two Empires or Three?,” 18 Aug. 1998.
33 Of the twenty-three main divisions of life only three … are large enough to be seen by the human eye: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.106.
34 if you totalled up all the biomass of the planet … microbes would account for at least 80 per cent of all there is: New York Times, “Microbial Life’s Steadfast Champion,” 15 Oct. 1996, p. C-7.
35 the most rampantly infectious organism on Earth, a bacterium called Wolbachia: Nature, “Wolbachia: a tale of sex and survival,” 11 May 2001, p.109.
36 only about one microbe in a thousand is a pathogen for humans: National Geographic, “Bacteria,” Aug. 1993, p.39.
37 microbes are still the number three killer in the Western world: Outside, July 1999, p.88.
38 History … is full of diseases that “once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come”: Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, p.208.
39 a disease called necrotizing fasciitis in which bacteria essentially eat the victim from the inside out: Gawande, Complications, p.234.
40 “The time has come to close the book on infectious diseases”: New Yorker, “No Profit, No Cure,” 5 Nov. 2001, p.46.
41 Even as he spoke, however, some 90 per cent of those strains were in the process of developing immunity to penicillin: Economist, “Disease Fights Back,” 20 May 1995, p.15.
42 in 1997 a hospital in Tokyo reported the appearance of a strain that could resist even that: Boston Globe, “Microbe Is Feared to Be Winning Battle Against Antibiotics,” 30 May 1997, p. A-7.
43 As James Surowiecki noted: New Yorker, “No Profit, No Cure,” 5 Nov. 2001, p.46.
44 America’s National Institutes of Health … didn’t officially endorse the idea until 1994: Economist, “Bugged by Disease,” 21 March 1998, p.93.
45 “Hundreds, even thousands of people must have died from ulcers who wouldn’t have”: Forbes, “Do Germs Cause Cancer?,” 15 Nov. 1999, p.195.
46 Since then, further research has shown that there is or may well be a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders: Science, “Do Chronic Diseases Have an Infectious Root?,” 14 Sept. 2001, pp.1974–6.
47 “a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news”: quoted in Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues and History, p.8.
48 About five thousand types of virus are known: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, pp.153–4.
49 Smallpox in the twentieth century alone killed an estimated three hundred million people: Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues and History, p.1.
50 In ten years the disease killed some five million people and then quietly went away: Kolata, Flu, p.292.
51 The First World War killed 21 million people in four years; swine flu did the same in its first four months: American Heritage, “The Great Swine Flu Epidemic of 1918,” June 1976, p.82.
52 In an attempt to devise a vaccine, medical authorities conducted experiments on volunteers at a military prison on Deer Island in Boston Harbor: American Heritage, “The Great Swine Flu Epidemic of 1918,” June 1976, p.82.
53 Researchers at the Manchester Royal Infirmary discovered that a sailor who had died of mysterious, untreatable causes in 1959 in fact had AIDS: National Geographic, “The Disease Detectives,” Jan. 1991, p.132.
54 In 1969, a doctor at a Yale University lab in New Haven, Connecticut, who was studying Lassa fever: Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues and History, p.126.
55 In 1990, a Nigerian living in Chicago was exposed to Lassa fever on a visit to his homeland: Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues and History, p.128.
Chapter 21: Life Goes On
1 The fate of nearly all living organisms: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.72.
2 Only about 15 per cent of rocks can preserve fossils: Lewis, The Dating Game, p.24.
3 less than one species in ten thousand has made it into the fossil record: Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science, p.280.
4 statement … that there are 250,000 species of creature in the fossil record: Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p.45.
5 About 95 per cent of all the fossils we possess are of animals that once lived under water: Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p.45.
6 “It seems like a big number,” he agreed: interview with Richard Fortey, Natural History Museum, London, 19 Feb. 2001.
7 Humans … have survived so far for one-half of 1 per cent as long: Fortey, Trilobite!, p.24.
8 “a whole Profallotaspis or Elenellus as big as a crab”: Fortey, Trilobite!, p.121.
9 and built up a collection of sufficient distinction that it was bought by Louis Agassiz: “From Farmer-Laborer to Famous Leader: Charles D. Walcott (1850–1927),” GSA Today, Jan. 1996.
10 In 1879 Walcott took a job as a field researcher: Gould, Wonderful Life, pp.242–3.
11 “His books fill a library shelf”: Fortey, Trilobite!, p.53.
12 “our sole vista upon the inception of modern life”: Gould, Wonderful Life, p.56.
13 Gould, ever scrupulous, discovered: Gould, Wonderful Life, p.71.
14 140 species, by one count: Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extin
ction, p.27.
15 “a range of disparity … never again equaled”: Gould, Wonderful Life, p.208.
16 “Under such an interpretation,” Gould sighed: Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p.225.
17 Then in 1973 a graduate student from Cambridge: National Geographic, “Explosion of Life,” Oct. 1993, p.126.
18 There was so much unrecognized novelty … that at one point: Fortey, Trilobite!, p.123.