# A Short History of Nearly Everything ![rw-book-cover](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41CHniZzf0L._SL200_.jpg) ## Metadata - Author:: [[Bill Bryson]] - Full Title:: A Short History of Nearly Everything - Category: #books ## Highlights > Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on October 23, 4004 B.C., an assertion that has amused historians and textbook writers ever since. ([Location 1220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=1220)) > Of course, we can counter these frailties to a large extent by employing clothing and shelter, but even so the portions of Earth on which we are prepared or able to live are modest indeed: just 12 percent of the total land area, and only 4 percent of the whole surface if you include the seas. ([Location 3884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=3884)) > Some scientists now think that there could be as much as 100 trillion tons of bacteria living beneath our feet in what are known as subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems—SLiME for short. Thomas Gold of Cornell has estimated that if you took all the bacteria out of the Earth’s interior and dumped it on the surface, it would cover the planet to a depth of five feet. If the estimates are correct, there could be more life under the Earth than on top of it. ([Location 4841](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=4841)) > In 1997 scientists successfully activated some anthrax spores that had lain dormant for eighty years in a museum display in Trondheim, Norway. Other microorganisms have leapt back to life after being released from a 118-year-old can of meat and a 166-year-old bottle of beer. ([Location 4848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=4848)) > It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance toward largeness and complexity—in a word, toward us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes—an interesting side branch. Of the twenty-three main divisions of life, only three—plants, animals, and fungi—are large enough to be seen by the human eye, and even they contain species that are microscopic. Indeed, according to Woese, if you totaled up all the biomass of the planet—every living thing, plants included—microbes would account for at least 80 percent of all there is, perhaps more. The world belongs to the very small—and it has for a very long time. ([Location 4945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=4945)) > History, Jared Diamond notes, is full of diseases that “once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come.” He cites the robust but mercifully transient English sweating sickness, which raged from 1485 to 1552, killing tens of thousands as it went, before burning itself out. Too much efficiency is not a good thing for any infectious organism. ([Location 4969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=4969)) > A virus is a strange and unlovely entity—“a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news” in the memorable phrase of the Nobel laureate Peter Medawar. ([Location 5023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=5023)) > World War I killed twenty-one million people in four years; swine flu did the same in its first four months. ([Location 5043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=5043)) > have ([Location 5885](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=5885)) > The belief was surprising in as radical a spirit as Huxley because it closely recalled a very conservative religious notion first put forward by the English theologian William Paley in 1802 and known as argument from design. Paley contended that if you found a pocket watch on the ground, even if you had never seen such a thing before, you would instantly perceive that it had been made by an intelligent entity. So it was, he believed, with nature: its complexity was proof of its design. ([Location 6241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=6241)) > Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. ([Location 6710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=6710)) > We are very lucky, it appears, to get any good weather at all. Even less well understood are the cycles of comparative balminess within ice ages, known as interglacials. It is mildly unnerving to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history—the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest—has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather. Previous interglacials have lasted as little as eight thousand years. Our own has already passed its ten thousandth anniversary. ([Location 6794](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=6794)) > Finally, but perhaps above all, human nature is a factor in all this. Scientists have a natural tendency to interpret finds in the way that most flatters their stature. It is a rare paleontologist indeed who announces that he has found a cache of bones but that they are nothing to get excited about. Or as John Reader understatedly observes in the book Missing Links, “It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer.” ([Location 7035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7035)) > “One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,” he says, “is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us. Even anthropologists tended to think this way right up until the 1970s.” ([Location 7151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7151)) - Note: tatersall > Soon afterward, Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Genome Research, announced that modern Europeans, and perhaps people farther afield, are descended from “no more than a few hundred Africans who left their homeland as recently as 25,000 years ago.” As we have noted elsewhere in the book, modern human beings show remarkably little genetic variability—“there’s more diversity in one social group of fifty-five chimps than in the entire human population,” as one authority has put it—and this would explain why. Because we are recently descended from a small founding population, there hasn’t been time enough or people enough to provide a source of great variability. ([Location 7394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7394)) > From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years. That is a breathtakingly scanty period—though it must be said that by this point in our history we did have thousands of years of practice behind us in the matter of irreversible eliminations. Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, in often astonishingly large numbers. ([Location 7516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7516)) > The question that arises is whether the disappearances of the Stone Age and disappearances of more recent times are in effect part of a single extinction event—whether, in short, humans are inherently bad news for other living things. The sad likelihood is that we may well be. According to the University of Chicago paleontologist David Raup, the background rate of extinction on Earth throughout biological history has been one species lost every four years on average. According to one recent calculation, human-caused extinction now may be running as much as 120,000 times that level. ([Location 7534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7534)) > I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job. ([Location 7618](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7618)) > But here’s an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. ([Location 7619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7619)) > Edward O. Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life: “One planet, one experiment.” ([Location 7632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7632)) > Behaviorally modern human beings—that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities—have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth’s history. ([Location 7637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7637)) # A Short History of Nearly Everything ![rw-book-cover](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41CHniZzf0L._SL200_.jpg) ## Metadata - Author:: [[Bill Bryson]] - Full Title:: A Short History of Nearly Everything - Category: #books ## Highlights > Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on October 23, 4004 B.C., an assertion that has amused historians and textbook writers ever since. ([Location 1220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=1220)) > Of course, we can counter these frailties to a large extent by employing clothing and shelter, but even so the portions of Earth on which we are prepared or able to live are modest indeed: just 12 percent of the total land area, and only 4 percent of the whole surface if you include the seas. ([Location 3884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=3884)) > Some scientists now think that there could be as much as 100 trillion tons of bacteria living beneath our feet in what are known as subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems—SLiME for short. Thomas Gold of Cornell has estimated that if you took all the bacteria out of the Earth’s interior and dumped it on the surface, it would cover the planet to a depth of five feet. If the estimates are correct, there could be more life under the Earth than on top of it. ([Location 4841](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=4841)) > In 1997 scientists successfully activated some anthrax spores that had lain dormant for eighty years in a museum display in Trondheim, Norway. Other microorganisms have leapt back to life after being released from a 118-year-old can of meat and a 166-year-old bottle of beer. ([Location 4848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=4848)) > It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance toward largeness and complexity—in a word, toward us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes—an interesting side branch. Of the twenty-three main divisions of life, only three—plants, animals, and fungi—are large enough to be seen by the human eye, and even they contain species that are microscopic. Indeed, according to Woese, if you totaled up all the biomass of the planet—every living thing, plants included—microbes would account for at least 80 percent of all there is, perhaps more. The world belongs to the very small—and it has for a very long time. ([Location 4945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=4945)) > History, Jared Diamond notes, is full of diseases that “once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come.” He cites the robust but mercifully transient English sweating sickness, which raged from 1485 to 1552, killing tens of thousands as it went, before burning itself out. Too much efficiency is not a good thing for any infectious organism. ([Location 4969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=4969)) > A virus is a strange and unlovely entity—“a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news” in the memorable phrase of the Nobel laureate Peter Medawar. ([Location 5023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=5023)) > World War I killed twenty-one million people in four years; swine flu did the same in its first four months. ([Location 5043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=5043)) > have ([Location 5885](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=5885)) > The belief was surprising in as radical a spirit as Huxley because it closely recalled a very conservative religious notion first put forward by the English theologian William Paley in 1802 and known as argument from design. Paley contended that if you found a pocket watch on the ground, even if you had never seen such a thing before, you would instantly perceive that it had been made by an intelligent entity. So it was, he believed, with nature: its complexity was proof of its design. ([Location 6241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=6241)) > Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. ([Location 6710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=6710)) > We are very lucky, it appears, to get any good weather at all. Even less well understood are the cycles of comparative balminess within ice ages, known as interglacials. It is mildly unnerving to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history—the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest—has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather. Previous interglacials have lasted as little as eight thousand years. Our own has already passed its ten thousandth anniversary. ([Location 6794](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=6794)) > Finally, but perhaps above all, human nature is a factor in all this. Scientists have a natural tendency to interpret finds in the way that most flatters their stature. It is a rare paleontologist indeed who announces that he has found a cache of bones but that they are nothing to get excited about. Or as John Reader understatedly observes in the book Missing Links, “It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer.” ([Location 7035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7035)) > “One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,” he says, “is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us. Even anthropologists tended to think this way right up until the 1970s.” ([Location 7151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7151)) - Note: tatersall > Soon afterward, Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Genome Research, announced that modern Europeans, and perhaps people farther afield, are descended from “no more than a few hundred Africans who left their homeland as recently as 25,000 years ago.” As we have noted elsewhere in the book, modern human beings show remarkably little genetic variability—“there’s more diversity in one social group of fifty-five chimps than in the entire human population,” as one authority has put it—and this would explain why. Because we are recently descended from a small founding population, there hasn’t been time enough or people enough to provide a source of great variability. ([Location 7394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7394)) > From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years. That is a breathtakingly scanty period—though it must be said that by this point in our history we did have thousands of years of practice behind us in the matter of irreversible eliminations. Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, in often astonishingly large numbers. ([Location 7516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7516)) > The question that arises is whether the disappearances of the Stone Age and disappearances of more recent times are in effect part of a single extinction event—whether, in short, humans are inherently bad news for other living things. The sad likelihood is that we may well be. According to the University of Chicago paleontologist David Raup, the background rate of extinction on Earth throughout biological history has been one species lost every four years on average. According to one recent calculation, human-caused extinction now may be running as much as 120,000 times that level. ([Location 7534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7534)) > I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job. ([Location 7618](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7618)) > But here’s an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. ([Location 7619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7619)) > Edward O. Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life: “One planet, one experiment.” ([Location 7632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7632)) > Behaviorally modern human beings—that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities—have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth’s history. ([Location 7637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FBFNII&location=7637))