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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TO TELL A STORY of this scope, we had to draw upon the help and encouragement of countless individuals who provided us with knowledge, insight, and encouragement along the way. Although we have inevitably overlooked some, we’d like to mention a few. Jack Szostak graciously shared his time and opened up his lab at Harvard to prying eyes. George Fox made us laugh with his personal recollections of Carl Woese, too few of which we were able to use. Armen Mulkidjanian of the University Osnabrück helped with research on Alexander Oparin, some of which would have been unavailable to non-Russian speakers. Ron Fox shared personal details about his father, Sidney. Elisa Biondi at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution deserves special praise. By translating for us original source material from Francesco Redi, she went far beyond what we could have reasonably expected.
Merri Wolf and Shawn Hardy of the Geophysical Library of the Carnegie Institution of Washington provided us with access to many hard to find research materials, as only skilled librarians can. We’d also like to thank the Institute for Advanced Studies, without which we would not have been able to access the breadth of Princeton University’s library resources.
Gail Ross and Howard Yoon lived up to their reputations as excellent agents. And at Norton, we were lucky enough to cross paths with two wonderful editors—Angela von der Lippe, who believed in this story, and Alane Salierno Mason, whose skill and perserverance made it a reality. Others whose assistance was invaluable include Faye Torresyap, Stephanie Hiebert, and Remy Cawley. And we can’t fail to thank our wives, Antje Teegler and Tracy Wahl, without whom this book would have been impossible. Antje was a diligent and invaluable proofreader, while Tracy provided creative guidance that harnessed years of experience at National Public Radio. Thank you both for putting up with us.
We should point out the obvious fact that neither of us is a historian. The lion’s share of the credit for this book is owed to the often underappreciated women and men who have tirelessly preserved the stories of science for posterity. We hope that this book encourages interest in the work of those who have striven to understand not only what we as a society believe, but how and why we came to believe it.
Finally, we’d like to thank those scientists who have devoted and those who continue to devote their lives to humanity’s greatest question: How did we get here?
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Page xv The Lost City. Courtesy Deborah Kelley (University of Washington), Institute for Exploration, URI-IAO, and NOAA.
Page 2 Ancient Egyptians confront the plague of frogs. CC PD-US.
Page 22 The life cycle of the fly, from Experiments on the Generation of Insects. Wellcome Library, London.
Page 32 Hooke’s drawing of a flea in Micrographia. CC PD-US
Page 34 One of van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes. © Jeroen Rouwkema.
Page 55 Trembley’s hydra as depicted in his 1744 book, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce. Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology.
Page 57 Needham and Buffon examining a dog’s testes. Wellcome Library, London.
Page 80 Galvani’s frog leg regeneration. Wellcome Library, London.
Page 87 Crosse’s diagram of what would be called Acarus crossii. © Chronicle / Alamy.
Page 111 An 1882 cartoon showing the implications of Darwinism. Wellcome Library, London.
Page 129 Pasteur’s experiment on spontaneous generation. Library of Congress, LC—USZ62-95258.
Page 136 Burning barrels of tar to ward off miasmas during the Manchester cholera outbreak of 1832. Wellcome Library, London.
Page 140 Drawing of Bathybius haekelii as seen under a microscope. NOAA Central Library Historical Collections.
Page 150 J. B. S. Haldane in 1941. Hans Wild/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.
Page 162 Charles Doolittle Walcott at the Grand Canyon. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image # 83-14116.
Page 177 Stanley Miller and his “classical apparatus.” © Bettmann / Corbis.
Page 181 Editorial cartoon appearing in the Washington Post, December 31, 1956. © A 1956 Herblock Cartoon, © The Herb Block Foundation.
Page 190 Buzz Aldrin drives a core tube sampler into the lunar soil. Photographed by Neil Armstrong. NASA.
Page 205 An iconic 1953 image of Watson and Crick with a DNA double helix model. A. Barrington Brown / Science Source.
Page 215 Possible Martian fossils on ALH84001. NASA / JSC / Stanford University.
Page 225 Stromatolites in Australia’s Yalgorup National Park. C. Eeckhout, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported.
Page 232 Woese holds a model of RNA in 1
961. Associated Press.
Page 233 The Tree of Life according to Chambers (top left). CC PD-US.
Page 233 The Tree of Life according to Woese (top right). NASA.
Page 233 The Tree of Life according to Darwin (bottom). Wellcome Library, London.
Page 243 A Tetrahymena as seen by scanning electron micrograph. Aaron J. Bell / Science Source.
INDEX
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
abiogenesis (life from nonlife), xvii, 141, 145, 148, 153, 160, 207
Accademia del Cimento (Academy of Experiment), 16, 17, 18, 24, 256
Accademia della Crusca (Academy of Literature), 24
acidophiles, 236
age of reason, 14
agnosticism, 106, 131
agricultural revolution, 148
alchemy, 20
alcohol, and fermentation, 124–26
Aldini, Giovanni, 80
Aldrin, Buzz, 186–90, 190, 191
Alexander the Great, 9
algae, 271n
ALH84001, 211–16, 218, 219, 220, 221–22
Altman, Sidney, 241–42, 243–44, 245
amino acids:
as building blocks of proteins, 178, 193, 198, 209, 226, 229
creation of, 173, 197
in early cell prototype, 197–98, 208
in meteorites from space, 220–21
amphiphiles, 249
Anaxagoras, 216
Anaximander, 4–5, 19, 81
apeiron of, 7
cosmology of, 7
elements identified by, 7, 8
On Nature, 6–7, 8
on origin of life, 8, 10
animalcules, 38–41, 58, 59, 70
animal electricity, 79–81
animal magnetism, 84
Antarctic:
and ALH84001 (Mars rock), 211–16
meteorites in, 211
rocks in, 209, 210–19
Transantarctic Mountains, 211
aperiodic crystal, 195
aphasia, 134
Apollo missions:
experiments of, 244
man on the moon, 185, 186–90, 190
moon rocks from, 189–90, 191, 193
archaebacteria “archaea,” 231–33
archaeology, 163
archebiosis, 134–35, 141
Argo (marine explorer), xi–xiii, 238
Aristophanes, 81
Aristotle, 8–11, 14, 19, 41, 114
as founder of biology, 10
History of Animals, 10–11
and Lyceum of Athens, 8–9
Physics, 8
on spontaneous generation, 10–11, 13, 18, 20, 133, 134, 141, 144
tree of life, 10
Armstrong, Neil, 186–90, 191
Arrhenius, Svante, 216
artificial insemination, 70
atheism, 65, 66, 68, 69, 132
and evolution, 106, 155
government repression of, 29, 120
and origin of life, 78–79, 120, 253, 255–56
Athenaeum, 112, 113
Atlantis Massif, xii–xiii
atomic bomb, 271n
atoms:
coining of term, 7n
Needham’s studies of, 58
Atum (Egyptian god), 3
Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 12–14, 81, 254
Literal Commentary on Genesis, 12–13
Australia:
last universal common ancestor in, 224
Murchison meteorite, 220, 222, 250
prehistoric era in, 223–24
Yalgorup National Park, 225
autotrophs, 238
Avery, Oswald, 202
Babbage, Charles, 89
Babylonians, 5–6
bacteria, 27, 228
airborne, 138, 139, 142–43
and antibiotics, 235n
bacterium eater, 166
boiling to kill, 126
dead, genes scavenged from, 236
discovery of, 38, 40
lunar, 190–91
reproduction of, 182
superbugs, 236
bacteriophages, 166, 248
Bakh, Aleksei Nikolaevich, Tsar-Golod (“Tsar of Hunger”), 156
Balzac, Honoré de, 122
Barnard, George, 141–42
Barre, Jean-François de la, 45, 46, 47, 48, 71
Barre, Joseph-Antoine de la, 45
basalts, 237
Bastian, Henry Charlton, 133–35, 139–41, 157, 256, 258
on aphasia, 134
and archebiosis, 134–35, 141
The Beginnings of Life, 135, 141, 143
and consciousness, 133, 200, 245
and miasmatic theory, 138
recipes for microbes, 259
and spontaneous generation, 134–35, 137, 138, 139, 141, 143–44, 148
Bayle, Peter, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 46, 51
Becquerel, Henri, 159
bees:
recipe for creation of, 18–19
studies of, 31, 34, 37
Beilstein’s Handbook of Organic Chemistry, 178
Bergmann, Max, 197
Berkelse Mere, 25–26, 27, 38
Bernard, Claude, 126
Berthelot, Marcellin, 217
Bertrand, Alexandre, 83
Bible:
and creation stories, 102, 107, 147
and literalists, 255
see also religion
Big Bang theory, 148, 206, 218–19
biochemistry, 242
biology:
lines of descent, 60; see also tree of life
molecular, 255
synthetic, 253
biomarkers, 214
biotechnology, 247
Blackburn, Elizabeth, 244–45
black smokers, xiii
Bletchley Park, 206
body fluids (“ferments”), 20
Bohr, Niels, 174
Boltwood, Bertram, 159
Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, 127
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 120–21, 124, 127
Bonnet, Charles, 54n
Bosch, Hieronymus, 27
Boulanger, Nicolas, 67, 68
Boyle, Robert, 32, 35–36
Bragg, William Lawrence, 201
brain, studies of, 133–34
Brenner, Sydney, 242
British Association for the Advancement of Science, 86, 130–31, 148
Brock, Thomas, 237
Brouncker, William, 35
Bryan, William Jennings, 172, 182
Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 56–60, 67
and age of Earth, 147, 158
and Jardin du Roi, 51, 58, 61
and Lamarck, 120
and materialism, 54, 59
Natural History, 51–52, 56, 58, 59–61, 96, 121, 223
and Needham, 56–60, 57, 71–72
and origin of life, 52, 56, 59, 61, 119
on reproduction, 60
and Voltaire, 60–61, 66
Buffon’s needle, 51
Burnet, MacFarlane, 182
Bynoe, Benjamin, 92
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 76–77
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), 192, 197
Calvin, Melvin, 175–76, 184
camera obscura, 33–34
carbon dioxide, isolation of, 20
Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, 201, 203
Cech, Thomas, 241–42, 243–44, 245
cell membrane, lack of, 238
cells:
building from scratch, 245–46, 247, 249, 260
elements of, 196–97
and genetic code, 206
naming of, 196
nature of, 195–97
precursors of, 198–99
cellular metabolism, 166, 178, 195, 197, 242
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 180, 182
 
; Chambers, Robert, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 88–91, 101, 106–7, 109, 112, 255
Charles II, king of England, 35
Charles Island prison colony, 96, 97
Charles X, king of France, 121
Charlotte, Queen (George III’s wife), 80
Châtelet, Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du, 61–63, 71
chemistry:
organic and inorganic, 83
prebiotic, 177
chicken-or-egg paradox, 195, 240
Child, Julia, 153n
chirality, 228
cholera (Vibrio cholerae), 135–37, 136, 166
chromosomes, 195, 198, 244, 247
Chuaria algae, 163
Churchill, Winston, 208
Cicero, 4
cilia, 243
Clairaut, Alexis, 63
Clark, Ronald, JBS: The Life and Work of JBS Haldane, 269n
Clarke, Arthur C., 153
Claus, George, 217
Cleaves, H. James II, 177–78n
Clinton, Bill, 215
clones:
and binary fission, 224
first use of term, 153
coacervates, 165
codon, 206
Cohn, Ferdinand, 144
cold fusion, discovery of, 91n
Cold War, 180–82, 181, 183, 185, 271n
Collins, Michael, 188
common ancestor, 116, 196
Darwin on, 97, 225, 228, 236
LUCA, 224–25, 225, 234, 237, 240
consciousness, 104, 133, 200, 207, 245
Constantine VII, Emperor, 18
Copernicus, 14, 266
Corynebacterium diphtheriae, 234–35
Cosimo III of Tuscany, 23–24
Cosimo II of Tuscany, 17–18
Cowley, Ambrose, 93
creation stories, 1–4, 14
biblical, 102, 107, 147
divine process of creation, 3, 120, 126, 145
frogs of the Nile, 2–3, 2
life from nonlife, 3
naturalistic, 79
nonbiological, 141
science fiction, 77
Crick, Francis, 200–207, 229, 242
and consciousness, 200, 245
and DNA structure, 200–204, 205, 226
funeral of, 254
and genetics, 205, 206, 209, 227, 241
Life Itself, 240
and panspermia, 218
and religion, 208–9
reputation of, 208
and RNA, 206–7
Crick, Michael, 254
Crosse, Andrew, 74–76, 79, 84–91, 140
Acarus crossii, 87, 87, 88, 90, 91n
and crystals, 74, 86, 87, 123
electrical experiments of, 74–75, 83, 84–85, 86, 87