A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition

by Bill Bryson

  19 they all use architecture first created in the Cambrian party: US News and World Report, “How Do Genes Switch On?,” 18–25 Aug. 1997, p.74.

  20 at least fifteen and perhaps as many as twenty: Gould, Wonderful Life, p.25.

  21 “Wind back the tape of life”: Gould, Wonderful Life, p.14.

  22 In 1946 Sprigg, a young assistant government geologist: Corfield, Architects of Eternity, p.287.

  23 but it failed to find favour with the association’s head: Corfield, Architects of Eternity, p.287.

  24 Nine years later, in 1957: Fortey, Life, p.85.

  25 “There is nothing closely similar alive today”: Fortey, Life, p.88.

  26 “They are difficult to interpret”: Fortey, Trilobite!, p 125.

  27 “If only Stephen Gould could think as clearly as he writes!”: Dawkins, Sunday Telegraph, 25 Feb. 1990.

  28 One, writing in the New York Times Book Review: New York Times Book Review, “Survival of the Luckiest,” 22 Oct. 1989.

  29 Dawkins attacked Gould’s assertions: review of Full House in Evolution, June 1997.

  30 who startled many in the palaeontological community by rounding abruptly on Gould in a book of his own, The Crucible of Creation: New York Times Book Review, “Rock of Ages,” 10 May 1998, p.15.

  31 “I have never encountered such spleen in a book by a professional”: Fortey, Trilobite!, p.138.

  32 Fortey gives as an example the idea of comparing a shrew and an elephant: Fortey, Trilobite!, p.132.

  33 “None was as strange as a present day barnacle”: Fortey, Life, p.111.

  34 “no less interesting, or odd, just more explicable”: Fortey, “Shock Lobsters,” London Review of Books, 1 Oct. 1998.

  35 It is one thing to have one well-formed creature like a trilobite burst forth in isolation: Fortey, Trilobite!, p.137.

  Chapter 22: Goodbye to All That

  1 In areas of Antarctica where virtually nothing else will grow: Attenborough, The Living Planet, p.48.

  2 “Spontaneously, inorganic stone becomes living plant!”: Marshall, Mosses and Lichens, p.22.

  3 The world has more than twenty thousand species of lichens: Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants, p.214.

  4 Those the size of dinner plates … are therefore “likely to be hundreds if not thousands of years old”: Attenborough, The Living Planet, p.42.

  5 If you imagine the 4,500 million or so years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day: adapted from Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.13.

  6 stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth: McPhee, Basin and Range, p.126.

  7 Oxygen levels … were as high as 35 per cent: Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, p.123.

  8 the isotopes accumulate at different rates depending on how much oxygen or carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere: Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, p.118.

  9 “The U.S. Air Force … has put them in wind tunnels to see how they do it, and despaired”: Conniff, Spineless Wonders, p.84.

  10 In Carboniferous forests dragonflies grew as big as ravens: Fortey, Life, p.201.

  11 Luckily the team found just such a creature: BBC Horizon, “The Missing Link,” first broadcast 1 Feb. 2001.

  12 The names simply refer to the number and location of small holes found in the sides of their owners’ skulls: Tudge, The Variety of Life, p.411.

  13 but the number has been put as high as 4,000 billion: Tudge, The Variety of Life, p.9.

  14 “To a first approximation … all species are extinct”: quoted by Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p.46.

  15 the average lifespan of a species is only about four million years: Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p.38.

  16 “The alternative to extinction is stagnation”: interview with Ian Tattersall, American Museum of Natural History, New York, 6 May 2002.

  17 Crises in the Earth’s history are invariably associated with dramatic leaps afterwards: Stanley, Extinction, p.95; Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.12.

  18 In the Permian, at least 95 per cent of animals known from the fossil record checked out, never to return: Harper’s, “Planet of Weeds,” Oct. 1998, p.58.

  19 Even about a third of insect species went—the only occasion on which they were lost en masse: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.12.

  20 “It was, truly, a mass extinction”: Fortey, Life, p.235.

  21 Estimates for the number of animal species alive at the end of the Permian range from as low as 45,000 to as high as 240,000: Gould, Hens Teeth and Horse’s Toes, p.340.

  22 For individuals the death toll could be much higher—in many cases, practically total: Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p.143.

  23 Grazing animals, including horses, were nearly wiped out in the Hemphillian event: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.100.

  24 At least two dozen potential culprits have been identified as causes or prime contributors: Earth, “The Mystery of Selective Extinctions,” Oct. 1996, p.12.

  25 “tons of conjecture and very little evidence”: New Scientist, “Meltdown,” 7 Aug. 1999.

  26 Such an outburst is not easily imagined: Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p.19.

  27 The KT meteor had the additional advantage—advantage if you are a mammal, that is: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.17.

  28 “Why should these delicate creatures have emerged unscathed from such an unparalleled disaster?”: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.43.

  29 In the seas it was much the same story: Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p.304.

  30 “Somehow it does not seem satisfying just to call them ‘lucky ones’ and leave it at that”: Fortey, Life, p.292.

  31 the period immediately after the dinosaur extinction could well be known as the Age of Turtles: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.39.

  32 “Evolution may abhor a vacuum … but it often takes a long time to fill it”: Stanley, Extinction, p.92.

  33 For perhaps as many as ten million years mammals remained cautiously small: Novacek, Time Traveler, p.112

  34 For a time, there were guinea pigs the size of rhinos and rhinos the size of a two-storey house: Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p.102.

  35 For millions of years, a gigantic, flightless, carnivorous bird called Titanis was possibly the most ferocious creature in North America: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.138.

  36 built in 1903 in Pittsburgh and presented to the museum by Andrew Carnegie: Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and their Discoveries, p.164.

  37 Until very recently, everything we know about the dinosaurs of this period came from only about three hundred specimens: Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, pp.168–9.

  38 “There is no reason to believe that the dinosaurs were dying out gradually”: BBC Horizon, “Crater of Death,” first broadcast 6 May 2001.

  39 “Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured”: Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p.229.

  Chapter 23: The Richness of Being

  1 The spirit room alone holds 15 miles of shelving: Thackray and Press, The Natural History Museum, p.90.

  2 forty-four years after the expedition had concluded: Thackray and Press, The Natural History Museum, p.74.

  3 published in 1956 and still to be found on many library shelves as almost the only attempt: Conard, How to Know the Mosses and Liverworts, p.5.

  4 “The tropics are where you find the variety”: interview with Len Ellis, Natural History Museum, London, 18 April 2002.

  5 he sifted through a bale of fodder sent for the ship’s livestock and made new discoveries: Barber, The Heyday of Natural History: 1820–1870, p.17.

  6 To the parts of one species of clam he gave the names: Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, p.79.

  7 “Love comes even to the plants. Males and females … hold their nuptials”: quoted by Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p.237, and at University of California/UCMP Berkeley website.

  8
Linnaeus lopped it back to Physalis angulata: Kastner, A Species of Eternity, p.31.

  9 The first edition of his great Systema Naturae: Gjertsen, The Classics of Science, p.223.

  10 John Ray’s three-volume Historia Generalis Plantarum in England: Durant, The Age of Louis XIV, p.519.

  11 just in time to make Linnaeus a kind of father figure to British naturalists: Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p.65.

  12 gullibly accepted from seamen and other imaginative travellers, Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p.59.

  13 he saw that whales belonged with cows, mice and other common terrestrial animals in the order quadrupedia (later changed to mammalia): Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p.59.

  14 other names in everyday use included mare’s fart, naked ladies, twitch-ballock, hound’s piss, open arse, and bum-towel: Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp.82–5.

  15 while Edward O. Wilson in The Diversity of Life puts the number at a surprisingly robust eighty-nine: Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.157.

  16 were transferred, amid howls, to the genus Pelargonium: Elliott, The Potting-Shed Papers, p.18.

  17 Estimates range from three million to two hundred million: Audubon, “Earth’s Catalogue,” Jan.-Feb. 2002; Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.132.

  18 as much as 97 per cent of the world’s plant and animal species may still await discovery: Economist, “A Golden Age of Discovery,” 23 Dec. 1996, p.56.

  19 he estimated the number of known species of all types—plants, insects, microbes, algae, everything—at 1.4 million: Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.133.

  20 Other authorities have put the number of known species slightly higher, at around 1.5 million to 1.8 million: US News and World Report, 18 Aug. 1997, p.78.

  21 It took Groves four decades to untangle everything: New Scientist, “Monkey Puzzle,” 6 Oct. 2001, p.54.

  22 only about fifteen thousand new species of all types are logged per year: Wall Street Journal, “Taxonomists Unite to Catalog Every Species, Big and Small,” 22 Jan. 2001.

  23 “It’s not a biodiversity crisis, it’s a taxonomist crisis!”: interview with Koen Maes, National Museum, Nairobi, 2 Oct. 2002.

  24 “many species are being described poorly in isolated publications”: Nature, “Challenges for Taxonomy,” 2 May 2002, p.17.

  25 launched an enterprise called the All Species Foundation: The Times, “The List of Life on Earth,” 30 July 2001.

  26 your mattress is home to perhaps two million microscopic mites: Bodanis, The Secret House, p.16.

  27 to quote the man who did the measuring, Dr. John Maunder of the British Medical Entomology Centre: New Scientist, “Bugs Bite Back,” 17 Feb. 2001, p.48.

  28 These mites have been with us since time immemorial: Bodanis, The Secret House, p.15.

  29 Your sample will also contain perhaps a million plump yeasts: National Geographic, “Bacteria,” Aug. 1993, p.39.

  30 “If over 9,000 microbial types exist in two pinches of substrate from two localities in Norway”: Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.144.

  31 according to one estimate, it could be as many as 400 million: Tudge, The Variety of Life, p.8.

  32 and discovered a thousand new species of flowering plant: Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.197.

  33 Overall, tropical rainforests cover only about 6 per cent of Earth’s surface: Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p.197.

  34 “over three and a half billion years of evolution”: Economist, “Biotech’s Secret Garden,” 30 May 1998, p.75.

  35 one ancient bacterium was found on the wall of a country pub: Fortey, Life, p.75.

  36 about 500 species have been identified (though other sources say 360): Ridley, The Red Queen, p.54.

  37 Gather together all the fungi found in a typical hectare of meadowland: Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants, p.177.

  38 it is thought the total number could be as high as 1.8 million: National Geographic, “Fungi,” Aug. 2000, p.60; Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p.117.

  39 The large, flightless New Zealand bird called the takahe: Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p.2.

  40 the horse was considered a rarity in the wider world: New York Times, “A Stone-Age Horse Still Roams a Tibetan Plateau,” 12 Nov. 1995.

  41 “a megatherium, a sort of giant ground sloth which may stand as high as a giraffe”: Economist, “A World to Explore,” 23 Dec. 1995, p.95.

  42 A single line of text in a Crampton table: Gould, Eight Little Piggies, pp.32–4.

  43 he hiked 4,000 kilometres to assemble a collection of three hundred thousand wasps: Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile, pp.159–60.

  Chapter 24: Cells

  1 you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner: New Scientist, 2 Dec. 2000, p.37.

  2 we understand what no more than about 2 per cent of them do: Brown, The Energy of Life, p.83.

  3 Its purpose was at first a mystery, but then scientists began to find it all over the place: Brown, The Energy of Life, p.229.

  4 It is converted into nitric oxide in the bloodstream, relaxing the muscle linings of vessels, allowing blood to flow more freely: Alberts, et al., Essential Cell Biology, p.489.

  5 You possess “some few hundred” different types of cell: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 1, p.21.

  6 If you are an average-sized adult you are lugging around over 2 kilograms of dead skin: Bodanis, The Secret Family, p.106.

  7 Liver cells can survive for years: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 1, p.68.

  8 not so much as a stray molecule: Bodanis, The Secret Family, p.81.

  9 Hooke calculated that a one-inch square of cork would contain 1,259,712,000 of these tiny chambers: Nuland, How We Live, p.100.

  10 After he reported finding “animalcules” in a sample of pepper-water in 1676: Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p.93.

  11 He calculated that there were 8,280,000 of these tiny beings in a single drop of water: Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p.167.

  12 He called the little beings “homunculi”: Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p.167.

  13 In one of his least successful experiments: Carey (ed.), The Faber Book of Science, p.28.

  14 Only in 1839, however, did anyone realize that all living matter is cellular: Nuland, How We Live, p.101.

  15 The cell has been compared to many things: Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p.33; Brown, The Energy of Life, p.78.

  16 However, scale that up and it would translate as a jolt of 20 million volts per metre: Brown, The Energy of Life, p.87.

  17 has the approximate consistency “of a light grade of machine oil”: Nuland, How We Live, p.103.

  18 and flying into each other up to a billion times a second: Brown, The Energy of Life, p.80.

  19 “the molecular world must necessarily remain entirely beyond the powers of our imagination”: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 2, p.293.

  20 “the total is still a very minimum of 100 million protein molecules in each cell”: Nuland, How We Live, p.157.

  21 At any given moment, a typical cell in your body will have about one billion ATP molecules in it: Alberts et al., Essential Cell Biology, p.110.

  22 Every day you produce and use up a volume of ATP equivalent to about half your body weight: Nature, “Darwin’s Motors,” 2 May 2002, p.25.

  23 On average, humans suffer one fatal malignancy for each 100 million billion cell divisions: Ridley, Genome, p.237.

  24 what has been called “the single best idea that anyone has ever had”: Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p.21.

  Chapter 25: Darwin’s Singular Notion

  1 “Everyone is interested in pigeons”: quoted in Boorstin, Cleopatra’s Nose, p.176.

  2 “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching”: quoted in Boorstin, The Discoverers, p.467.

  3 The experience of witnessing an operation on an understandably distressed child:
Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.27.

  4 some “bordering on insanity”: Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, p.199.

  5 In five years … he had not once hinted at an attachment: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.197.

  6 which suggested, not incidentally, that atolls could not form in less than a million years: Moorehead, Darwin and the Beagle, p.191.