by Bill Bryson
7 It wasn’t until the younger Darwin was back in England and read Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population: Gould, Ever since Darwin, p.21.
8 “How stupid of me not to have thought of it!”: quoted in Sunday Telegraph, “The Origin of Darwin’s Genius,” 8 Dec. 2002.
9 It was his friend the ornithologist John Gould: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.209.
10 These he expanded into a 230-page “sketch”: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 5, p.526.
11 “I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before”: quoted in Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p.239.
12 Some wondered if Darwin himself might be the author: Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, p.214.
13 “he could not have made a better short abstract”: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 5, p.528.
14 “This summer will make the 20th year (!) since I opened my first note-book”: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, pp.454–5.
15 “whatever it may amount to, will be smashed”: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.469.
16 “all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old”: quoted by Gribbin and Cherfas, The First Chimpanzee, p.150.
17 Much less amenable to Darwin’s claim of priority was a Scottish gardener named Patrick Matthew: Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile, p.336.
18 He referred to himself as “the Devil’s Chaplain”: Cadbury, Terrible Lizard, p.305.
19 felt “like confessing a murder”: quoted in Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.xvi.
20 “The case at present must remain inexplicable”: quoted by Gould, Wonderful Life, p.57.
21 By way of explanation he speculated: Gould, Ever Since Darwin, p.126.
22 “Darwin goes too far”: quoted by McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.190.
23 Huxley was a saltationist: Schwartz, Sudden Origins, pp.81–2.
24 “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder”: quoted in Keller, The Century of the Gene, p.97.
25 it “seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree” that natural selection could produce such an instrument in gradual steps: Darwin, On the Origin of Species (facsimile ed.), p.217.
26 “Eventually … Darwin lost virtually all the support that still remained”: Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p.89.
27 It had a library of twenty thousand books: Lewontin, It Ain’t Necessarily So, p.91.
28 And Darwin, for his part, is known to have studied Focke’s influential paper: Ridley, Genome, p.44.
29 Huxley had been urged to attend by Robert Chambers: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.79.
30 bravely slogged his way through two hours of introductory remarks: Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin, p.142.
31 One of his experiments was to play the piano to them: Conniff, Spineless Wonders, p.147.
32 Having married his own cousin: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.575.
33 Darwin was often honoured in his lifetime, but never for On the Origin of Species: Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin, p.148.
34 Darwin’s theory didn’t really gain widespread acceptance until the 1930s and 1940s: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.45.
35 seemed set to claim Mendel’s insights as his own: Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p.187.
Chapter 26: The Stuff of Life
1 “roughly one nucleotide base in every thousand”: Sulston and Ferry, The Common Thread, p.198.
2 The exceptions are red blood cells, some immune system cells, and egg and sperm cells: Woolfson, Life without Genes, p.12.
3 “guaranteed to be unique against all conceivable odds”: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 2, p.314.
4 there would be enough of it to stretch from the Earth to the Moon and back, not once or twice but again and again: Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p.151.
5 you may have as much as 20 million kilometres of DNA bundled up inside you: Gribbin and Gribbin, Being Human, p.8.
6 “among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules”: Lewontin, It Ain’t Necessarily So, p.142.
7 It was discovered as far back as 1869: Ridley, Genome, p.48.
8 DNA didn’t do anything at all, as far as anyone could tell: Wallace et al., Biology, p.211.
9 The necessary complexity, it was thought, had to exist in proteins in the nucleus: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 2, p.295.
10 Working out of a small lab (which became known, inevitably, as the Fly Room): Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin, p.259.
11 no consensus “as to what the genes are—whether they are real or purely fictitious”: Keller, The Century of the Gene, p.2.
12 we are in much the same position today in respect of mental processes such as thought and memory: Wallace et al., Biology, p.211.
13 Chargaff … suggested that Avery’s discovery was worth two Nobel Prizes: Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, p.327.
14 including, it has been said, lobbying the authorities … not to give Avery a Nobel Prize: White, Rivals, p.251.
15 a member of a highly popular radio programme called The Quiz Kids: Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation, p.46.
16 “it was my hope that the gene might be solved without my learning any chemistry”: Watson, The Double Helix, p.21.
17 the results of which were obtained “fortuitously”: Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p.356.
18 In a severely unflattering portrait: Watson, The Double Helix, p.17.
19 “gratuitously hurtful”: Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p.354.
20 To Wilkins’s presumed dismay and embarrassment, in the summer of 1952 she posted a mock notice: White, Rivals, p.257; Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, p.185.
21 “apparently without her knowledge or consent”: PBS website, “A Science Odyssey,” n.d.
22 Years later, Watson conceded that it “was the key event … it mobilized us”: quoted in Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, p.317.
23 a 900-word article by Watson and Crick titled “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid”: de Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 2, p.290.
24 It received a small mention in the News Chronicle and was ignored elsewhere: Ridley, Genome, p.50.
25 Franklin rarely wore a lead apron and often stepped carelessly in front of a beam: Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, p.144.
26 “It took over twenty-five years for our model of DNA to go from being only rather plausible, to being very plausible”: Crick, What Mad Pursuit, p.73–4.
27 by 1968 the journal Science could run an article entitled “That Was the Molecular Biology That Was”: Keller, The Century of the Gene, p.25.
28 In this sense, they are rather like the keys of a piano, each playing a single note and nothing else: National Geographic, “Secrets of the Gene,” Oct. 1995, p.55.
29 Guanine, for instance, is the same stuff that abounds in, and gives its name to, guano: Pollack, Signs of Life, p.22–3.
30 “you could say all humans share nothing, and that would be correct, too”: Discover, “Bad Genes, Good Drugs,” April 2002, p.54.
31 “exist for the pure and simple reason that they are good at getting themselves duplicated”: Ridley, Genome, p.127.
32 Altogether, almost half of human genes … don’t do anything at all, as far as we can tell: Woolfson, Life without Genes, p.18.
33 Junk DNA does have a use: National Geographic, “The New Science of Identity,” May 1992, p.118.
34 “Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction”: Nuland, How We Live, p.158.
35 Here were two creatures that hadn’t shared a common ancestor for five hundred million years: BBC Horizon, “Hopeful Monsters,” first transmitted 1998.
36 At least 90 per cent correlate at some level with those found in mice: Nature, “Sorry, dogs—man’s got a new best friend,” 19–26 Dec. 2002, p.734.
37 We even have the same genes for making a tail, if only they would switch on: Los Angeles Times (reprinted in Valley News), 9
Dec. 2002.
38 dubbed homeotic (from a Greek word meaning “similar”) or hox genes: BBC Horizon, “Hopeful Monsters,” first transmitted 1998.
39 We have forty-six chromosomes, but some ferns have more than six hundred: Gribbin and Cherfas, The First Chimpanzee, p.53.
40 The lungfish, one of the least evolved of all complex animals, has forty times as much DNA as we have: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.240.
41 Perhaps the apogee (or nadir) of this faith in biodeterminism was a study published in the journal Science in 1980: Lewontin, It Ain’t Necessarily So, p.215.
42 How fast a man’s beard grows … is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex: Wall Street Journal, “What Distinguishes Us from the Chimps? Actually, Not Much,” 12 April 2002, p.1.
43 “the proteome is much more complicated than the genome”: Scientific American, “Move Over, Human Genome,” April 2002, pp.44–5.
44 Depending on mood and metabolic circumstance, they will allow themselves to be phosphorylated, glycosylated, acetylated, ubiquitinated: The Bulletin, “The Human Enigma Code,” 21 Aug. 2001, p.32.
45 Drink a glass of wine … and you materially alter the number and types of proteins at large in your system: Scientific American, “Move Over, Human Genome,” April 2002, pp.44–5.
46 “Anything that is true of E. coli must be true of elephants, except more so”: Nature, “From E. coli to Elephants,” 2 May 2002, p.22.
Chapter 27: Ice Time
1 In London, The Times ran a small story: Williams, Surviving Galeras, p.198.
2 Spring never came and summer never warmed: Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, pp.3–6.
3 One French naturalist named de Luc: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.89.
4 and the other abundant clues that point to passing ice sheets: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.90.
5 The naturalist Jean de Charpentier told the story: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.90.
6 He lent Agassiz his notes: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, pp.92–3.
7 Humboldt … observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p.173.
8 In his quest to understand the dynamics of glaciation, he went everywhere: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.182.
9 William Hopkins, a Cambridge professor and leading member of the Geological Society: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.98.
10 He began to find evidence for glaciers practically everywhere: Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, p.99.
11 Eventually he became convinced that ice had once covered the whole Earth: Gould, Time’s Arrow, p.115.
12 When he died in 1873 Harvard felt it necessary to appoint three professors to take his place: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.197.
13 Less than a decade after his death: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.197.
14 For the next twenty years, even while on holiday: Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age, p.51.
15 The cause of ice ages, Köppen decided, is to be found in cool summers, not brutal winters: Chorlton, Ice Ages, p.101.
16 “It is not necessarily the amount of snow that causes ice sheets but the fact that snow, however little, lasts”: Schultz, Ice Age Lost, p.72.
17 “The process is self-enlarging”: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.205.
18 “you would have been hard pressed to find a geologist or meteorologist who regarded the model as being anything more than an historical curiosity”: Gribbin and Gribbin, Ice Age, p.60.
19 The fact is, we are still very much in an ice age: Schultz, Ice Age Lost, p.5.
20 a situation that may be unique in the Earth’s history: Gribbin and Gribbin, Fire on Earth, p.147.
21 it appears that we have had at least seventeen severe glacial episodes in the last 2.5 million years: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.148.
22 about fifty more glacial episodes can be expected: McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p.4.
23 Before fifty million years ago the Earth had no regular ice ages: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.10.
24 the Cryogenian, or super ice age: McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World, p.69.
25 The entire surface of the planet may have frozen solid: Valley News(from Washington Post), “The Snowball Theory,” 19 June 2000, p. C1.
26 the wildest weather it has ever experienced: BBC Horizon transcript, “Snowball Earth,” broadcast 22 Feb. 2001, p.7.
27 in an event known to science as the Younger Dryas: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.34.
28 “the last thing you’d want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it”: New Yorker, “Ice Memory,” 7 Jan. 2002, p.36.
29 The idea is that a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates: Schultz, Ice Age Lost, p.72.
30 No less intriguing are the known ranges of some late dinosaurs: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.268.
31 In Australia—which at that time was more polar in its orientation—a retreat to warmer climes wasn’t possible: Thomas H. Rich, Patricia Vickers-Rich and Roland Gangloff, “Polar Dinosaurs,” manuscript, n.d.
32 there is a lot more water for them to draw on this time: Schultz, Ice Age Lost, p.159.
33 If so, sea levels globally would rise—and pretty quickly—by between 4.5 and 6 metres on average: Ball, H2O, p.75.
34 “Did you have a good ice age?”: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.267.
Chapter 28: The Mysterious Biped
1 Just before Christmas 1887: National Geographic, May 1997, p.87.
2 found by railway workers in a cave at a cliff called Cro-Magnon: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.149.
3 The first formal description: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.173.
4 So instead the name and credit for the discovery of the first early humans went to the Neander valley in Germany: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, pp.3–6.
5 Hearing of this, T. H. Huxley in England drily observed: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.59.
6 He did no digging himself, but instead used fifty convicts lent by the Dutch authorities: Gould, Eight Little Piggies, pp.126–7.
7 In fact, many anthropologists think it is modern, and has nothing to do with Java man: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.39.
8 If it is an erectus bone, it is unlike any other found since: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.144.
9 He also produced, with nothing but a scrap of cranium and one tooth, a model of the complete skull, which also proved uncannily accurate: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.154.
10 To Dubois’ dismay, Schwalbe thereupon produced a monograph: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.42.
11 Dart could see at once that the Taung skull was not of a Homo erectus: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.74.
12 he would sometimes bury their bodies in his back garden to dig up for study later: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.233.
13 Dart spent five years working up a monograph, but could find no-one to publish it: Lewin, Bones of Contention, p.82.
14 For years, the skull … sat as a paperweight on a colleague’s desk: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.93.
15 found a single fossilized molar and on the basis of that alone quite brilliantly announced the discovery of Sinanthropus pekinensis: Swisher et al., Java Man, p.75.
16 then discovered to his horror that they had been enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones: Swisher et al., Java Man, p.77.
17 The Solo People were known variously as Homo soloensis, Homo primigenius asiaticus: Swisher et al., Java Man, p.211.
18 in 1960 F. Clark Howell of the University of Chicago, following the suggestions of Ernst Mayr and others the previous decade: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, pp.267–8.
19 the whole of our understanding of human prehistory is based on the remains, often exceedingly fragmentary, of perhaps five thousand individuals: Washington Post, “Skull Raises Doubts about
our Ancestry,” 22 March 2001.
20 “You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck if you didn’t mind how much you jumbled everything up”: interview with Ian Tattersall, American Museum of Natural History, New York, 6 May 2002.