A Brief History of Creation

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A Brief History of Creation Page 33

by Bill Mesler


  “Science: Semi-Creation.” Time, May 25, 1953.

  Secord, J. A. “The Curious Case of the Acarus crossii.” Nature 345 (1990): 471–72.

  Secord, J. A. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

  Seymour, M. Mary Shelley. London: John Murray, 2000.

  Shapiro, R. Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth. New York: Summit, 1986.

  Shea, W. R., and M. Artigas. Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troubled Genius. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

  Shelley, M. Frankenstein. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

  “Sidney W. Fox; Analyzed First Moon Rocks.” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 1998.

  Soloviev, Y. Y. “240th Anniversary of the Birth of Georges Cuvier (1769–1832).” Paeleontological Journal 44, no. 6 (2010): 107–12.

  Stott, R. Darwin’s Ghosts. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2012.

  Strick, J. “Creating a Cosmic Discipline: The Crystallization and Consolidation of Exobiology, 1957–1973.” Journal of the History of Biology 37 (2004): 131–80.

  Strick, J. Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Debates over Spontaneous Generation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

  Thomas, S. Men of Space: Profiles of Scientists Who Probe for Life in Space. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1963.

  Tresch, J. The Romantic Machine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

  Vallery-Radot, R. Louis Pasteur—His Life and Labours. London: Longmans, Green, 1885.

  Venter, J. C. Life at the Speed of Light. New York: Viking, 2013.

  Voltaire. Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 10. Edited by L. Moland. Paris: Garnier, 1877.

  Voltaire. The Works of Voltaire. Akron, OH: Werner, 1904.

  Voltaire. The Works of Voltaire, vol. 33. Paris: A. Firmin Didot, 1829. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30123/30123-h/30123-h.htm#chap04.

  Walcott, C. “Pre-Cambrian Rocks of North America.” Bulletin of the United States Geological Survey, no. 81 (1891): 594.

  Wald, G. “The Origin of Life.” Scientific American 191, no. 2 (1954): 44–53.

  Ward, P. Life as We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life. New York: Penguin, 2005.

  Watson, J. D. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968.

  Watson J. D., and F. H. Crick. “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.” Nature 171 (1953): 737–38.

  Wedgwood, C. V. The Thirty Years War. New York: New York Review of Books, 2005.

  Whitfield, J. “Origin of Life: Nascence Man.” Nature 459 (2009): 316–19.

  Whittaker, E. T. A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity from the Age of Descartes to the Close of the Nineteenth Century. London: Longman, Green, 1910.

  Wilson, E. O. From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

  Woese, C. “Evolving Biological Organization.” In Microbial Phylogeny and Evolution, edited by Jan Sapp, 99–118. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

  Woese, C. R. The Genetic Code: The Molecular Basis for Genetic Expression. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

  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

 

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