A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bryson opens by talking about the importance of our atmosphere. Without it, “Earth would be a lifeless ball of ice with an average temperature of minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit” (255). Despite the atmosphere’s importance, it’s quite small, extending upwards for only 120 miles (Bryson gives the visual analogy that this is like only a couple coats of varnish). The atmosphere is divided into four unequal layers: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and ionosphere (sometimes called the thermosphere). Essentially, the troposphere is closest to us and contains the warmth and oxygen we need to live; the stratosphere is the tiny layer where storms exist and is cold, well below freezing; the troposphere is warmer due to absorptive effects of ozone.

Bryson then goes on to talk about the dangers of mountain climbing. After rising too many thousands of feet above sea level, even the most experienced mountaineers can experience the dangerous and sometimes-deadly effects of altitude sickness. Bryson states that “the human body reminds its owner that it wasn’t designed to operate so far above sea level” (257). 25,000 feet is known as the Death Zone, but most people become severely debilitated at 15,000 feet. Yet fitness seems to have little to do with a person’s susceptibility to altitude illness. Bryson gives the example that “Grannies sometimes caper about lofty situations while their fitter offspring are reduced to helpless, groaning heaps until conveyed to lower altitudes” (258). It seems that the absolute highest elevation that people can continuously live is 18,000 feet, but these people:

have often spent thousands of years developing disproportionately large chests and lungs, increasing their density of oxygen-bearing red blood cells by almost a third, though there are limits to how much thickening with red blood cells and blood supply can stand(258).

Bryson goes on to state that air is surprisingly bulky: “Altogether there are about 5,200 million million tons of air around us—25 million tons for every square mile of the planet—a not inconsequential volume” (259). When the air starts moving at the violent speeds of a hurricane or tornado, it’s clear to see just how powerful air can be. Bryson also mentions the surprising fact that one thunderstorm can contain the same amount of energy as four days’ use of electricity for the entire United States. 

Convection is the same process that moves air around in the atmosphere and propels the internal engine of the planet. The convection process is usually stable and the weather predictable at the equator, but in temperate zones the patterns are seasonal.

Bryson notes that the atmosphere seeks equilibrium. The heat from the sun is unevenly distributed, causing differences in air pressure to arise on the planet. Air rushes to these spots to attempt to equalize things, resulting in wind. This was first discovered by Edmond Halley, who noted that rising and falling columns of air produced “cells.” Despite this discovery, the father of meteorology was a pharmacist named Luke Howard, who named the cloud types in 1803. 

This chapter is all about water, or dihydrogen oxide. Water is everywhere and comprises nearly every organic thing, and Bryson gives the statistics that“A potato is 80 percent water, a cow 74 percent, a bacterium 75 percent. A tomato, at 95 percent, is little but water. Even humans are 65 percent water, making us more liquid than solid by a margin of almost two to one” (270). Water is unlike any other liquid; it expands when close to freezing, and in its solid state it is a tenth more voluminous than it was before. Water molecules are also deeply attracted to other water molecules, which is what creates surface tension strong enough to support insects and skipping stones.

Water is vital to the human body. Without it, a human will die in three days. However, most of the water on Earthis poisonous to humans. Ocean water contains seventy times more salt than humans can metabolize. There are also 320 million cubic miles of water on Earth, which is all there will ever be. Water on Earth can never be added or subtracted, which means that the water we drink has been on Earth since the beginning of time. Only 3 percent of the Earth’s water is fresh, and most of that exists as ice sheets.

Despite the importance of water, the oceans weren’t really investigated until 1872, when the former warship HMS Challenger sailed the oceans for three and a half years, traversed 70,000 miles, collected over 47,000 new species of marine organisms, and created the new scientific discipline of oceanography. In 1977, oceanographers made one of the most important biological discoveries of the twentieth century: tube worms. These wriggling, spaghetti-like creatures live on deep-sea vents, a place that was previously thought to be so toxic that life couldn’t possibly survive there. However, the tube worms thrived, feeding off bacteria that derived their energy from the hydrogen sulfide in the vents. At these depths, there was no sunlight or oxygen, yet life was thriving froma process called chemosynthesis.

Bryson ends by stating many disheartening facts about the devastating effects of overfishing, and the fact that despite how much we know about the oceans, we are also “remarkably ignorant of the dynamics that rule life in the sea” (285). 

Bryson opens by saying “Despite half a century of further study, we are no nearer to synthesizing life today than we were in 1953 and much further away from thinking we can” (287). The problem, says Bryson, lies in protein. Proteins are the result of amino acids strung together, and the human body is comprised of a million different types of protein. However, as Bryson points out, according to probability, proteins shouldn’t exist. Amino acids must be strung together in a particular order, much like the way letters spell words. But unlike spelling an eight-letter word, “to make collagen, you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right sequence. But—and here’s an obvious but crucial point—you don’t make it. It makes itself, spontaneously, without direction, and this is where the unlikelihoods come in” (288). The odds of this happening are “larger than the number of all the atoms in the universe,” (288), and yet still occurred.

Proteins can’t exist without DNA, and DNA has no purpose without proteins. This is because protein can’t reproduce itself, but DNA can. Furthermore, protein and DNA can only exist in the nurturing environment of a cell, and the cell’s only purpose is to house DNA and proteins. While Bryson admits this is the miracle of life, he goes on to suggest various explanations for how proteins, DNA, cells, and, ultimately, life came into existence. One theory is evolution, or the idea that proteins didn’t spontaneously form all at once, but rather amino acids assembled in chunks over time “and in so doing ‘discovered’ some additional improvement” (290).

Bryson goes on to say that if one wanted to create another living object, whether it be animal, plant, or human, one would only need carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. In fact, “Put these together in three dozen or so combinations to form some sugars, acids, and other basic compounds and you can build anything that lives” (291). While it’s not understood how this happens, scientists think they know one thing for certain, that life started 3.85 billion years ago. Considering the Earth didn’t become solid until 3.9 billion years ago, this means that life started close to when the Earth was created.

After the 4.5 billion-year-old Murchinson meteorite crashed into Australia, and was discovered to be comprised of seventy-four different types of amino acids, it was hypothesized, in a theory known as panspermia, that the building blocks of life came from space. The idea is that if one gets enough of these meteorites crashing into Earth, one would have the basic elements needed for life. However, this theory doesn’t answer the question of how life arose, and only moves the responsibility elsewhere.

Bryson points out that the most extraordinary fact in biology is that “Whatever prompted life to begin, it happened just once” (295). Every living thing on this Earth is the result of one moment of creation. 

This chapter is all about bacteria. Bryson points out that they are “on and around you always, in numbers you can’t conceive” (302). To put it in perspective, Bryson states that “Every human body consists of 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells” (303). Not only do we need bacteria inside of us to live, without bacteria in the world, nothing would rot. Bacteria also make the air breathable by making nitrogen. They are prolific, and can produce a whole new generation in only ten minutes. Further, once in every million divisions, bacteria produce a mutant. This ability to mutate is responsible for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Bacteria are basically like a super organism because they share genetic information, and can seemingly bloom from anything with only a little moisture.

In 1969, ecologist R.H. Whittaker proposed that life be divided into five main branches—Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, and Monera. This was a big deal because before this classification, microorganisms like bacteria weren’t recognized as individual organisms; rather, they were lumped into the same category as plants and algae. However, not much was known about the Protista category, mostly because bacteria don’t thrive in petri dishes. Despite this, while looking at bacteria, Carl Woese discovered archaebacteria, or archaea for short. Archaea are unlike bacteria, and thus Woese had discovered an entirely new division of life.

Most microbes are beneficial or neutral to humans. In fact, only one in a thousand are pathogenic to humans. Yeteven though most are benign, microbes are still the number-three killer in the Western world. As Bryson points out, “making a host unwell has certain benefits for the microbe” (312). Symptoms of illness, such as sneezing, vomiting, or coughing, help spread the microbe into another host. However, if microbes make a person too sick too quickly, this isn’t beneficial,as both the person and the microbe will die.

The human body is well equipped to destroy invaders. Each body holds over ten million types of white blood cells. White blood cells are like soldiers waiting to attack pathogens. While they are extremely efficient, some microbes can hide themselves to avoid being seen by white cells, as with HIV.

Bryson points out the devastating effects of over-antibiotic use, which mostly occurs due to giving antibiotics to farm animals. By doing so, the developed world is giving bacteria a chance to become resistant to antibiotics. For example, in 1952 penicillin was effective at treating staphylococcus bacteria, but by 1997, penicillin had become useless against it. Bryson also mentions viruses, which are smaller than bacteria and aren’t technically alive. There are five thousand known viruses, causing anything from colds to flus to polio. While bacteria are made of thousands of genes, some viruses are composed of as few as ten genes. However, viruses can be devastating. Bryson provides the example of the Great Spanish Flu epidemic. While World War I killed twenty-one million people in four years, the Spanish flu did so in only four months. A total of 548,452 people died in America alone, and nearly 50 million globally. Yet, despite the devastation, little is known about the Spanish flu; no one knows why it erupted at the same time in different locations, nor why it was so deadly, when most flus aren’t.

Bryson opens by giving the statistic that less than 0.1 percent of all dead organisms become fossils. This is because when most things die they decompose until nothing is left. To become a fossil, Bryson states that “you must die in the right place. Only about 15 percent of rocks can preserve fossils, so it’s no good keeling over on a future site of granite” (321). Basically, a dead organism must be buried in sediment so that it can leave an impression, or decompose without exposure to the elements. In addition, the fossil must be able to maintain its identifiable shape despite being pushed down in the Earth. Only one bone in a billion becomes a fossil, making fossils rare.

Bryson goes to the Natural History Museum in London to meet paleontologist Richard Fortey, author of Life: An Unauthorised Biography. Fortey is an avid collector of trilobites, an extinct marine creature that existed some 540 million years ago. Despite that trilobites are extinct, they are thought to be some of the most successful animals ever to have lived. According to Bryson, “Their reign ran for 300 million years—twice the span of dinosaurs, which were themselves one of history’s great survivors” (323). By comparison, humans have only lived for one-half of 1 percent as long.

For much of the nineteenth century, trilobites were assumed to be the only form of early complex life. But what makes them so interesting is that they seemed to have appeared out of nowhere in history. As Fortey says, it can be startling to go to the right formation of rocks and to work your way upward through the eons finding no visible life at all, and then suddenly “a whole Profallotapsis or Elenellusas big as a crab will pop into your waiting hands” (324).

Even more fascinatingly, these creatures suddenly appeared as many different species and in many different locations. How this could be remained a mystery until a man named Charles Doolittle Walcott came along. During a trip to the Canadian Rockies, he discovered “the holy grail of paleontology,” a shale outcrop full of fossils which dated back to the Cambrian explosion, the supposed time, 500 million years ago, when life first appeared on Earth. Altogether, tens of thousands of specimens were collected, amounting to 140 species. Although Walcott made such an amazing discovery, he failed to see the significance of the fossils because he dated them as modern creatures. It wasn’t until Simon Conway Morris visited these fossils years after Walcott’s death that the fossils revealed that the:

Cambrian [Period] had been a time of unparalleled innovation and experimentation in body designs” (327). The fossils were all uniquely and strangely shaped; some resembled pineapple slices, others had five eyes. From these findings, scientists concluded that “Evolutionary success, it appeared, was a lottery (327). 

However, not everyone viewed these findings as proof of evolution. Stephen Gould believed that “evolution in the Cambrian period was a different kind of process from today,” suggesting that it was an evolutionary period of trial and air, but that “It was a fertile time when all the great ‘fundamental body plans’ were invented. Nowadays, evolution just tinkers with old body plans” (331). 

Bryson opens by talking about lichens, “the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but among the least ambitious” (335). Lichen will grow just about anywhere, but they prefer to grow in desolate places without much competition. Because they grow on rocks, many scientists throughout the ages were baffled at how the lichen received nourishment, or produced seeds. Lichen are an amalgam of fungi and algae, in that the “fungi excrete acids that dissolve the surface of the rock, freeing minerals that algae convert into food sufficient to sustain both” (336). While the world has more than 20,000 species of lichen, they are slow to grow, taking half a century to reach the size of a shirt button. Bryson concludes by saying that “It would be hard to imagine a less fulfilling existence,” and that lichen life seems to exist just for the sake of existing (336).

Bryson states that “anytime life does something bold it is quite an event, and few occasions were more eventful than when life moved on to the next stage in our narrative and came out of the sea” (337). At the beginning of time, land was a hostile place. Yet life had an incentive to leave the water: predators, especially sharks. Plants had left the water and begun colonizing land 450 million years ago, but larger animals didn’t emerge until 400 million years ago. Because the air was oxygen rich during this time, the animals grew quickly (scientists have made assumptions about the oxygen levels during this because of isotope geometry).

Despite being able to assume a lot about this time, scientists still don’t quite know where humans came from. This is because there has never been a fossil revealing humans’ evolution from something else. Bryson states that since life began, it has consisted of four megadynasties. The first consisted of primitive amphibians and reptiles known as synapsids. The synapsids then divided into four streams, only one of which survived. This stream became therapsids, and this period is known as Megadynasty 2. After 150 million years, there is Megadynasty 3, the Age of Dinosaurs. After the dinosaurs abruptly die, Megadynasty 4 arrives, the Age of Mammals. Yet, what made each of these Megadynasties possible was the process of extinction. In fact, Bryson gives the statistic that “99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us” (342). The Earth has experienced five major extinction episodes—the Ordovican, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous. In the Permian period, more than 95 percent of animals went extinct as didone-third of insects; this is the closest the Earth has come to total extinction. Bryson points out, however, that these numbers are all just estimates based off the available fossils. 

Bryson opens the chapter by talking about the secret rooms inside the Natural History Museum, the behind-the-scenes areas that house “some seventy million objects from every realm of life and every corner of the planet, with another hundred thousand or so added to the collection each year” (350). The back rooms contain rare specimens found by the likes of Joseph Banks, Alexander Von Humboldt, and Charles Darwin.

Bryson then starts talking about bryophytes, or mosses. Moss is different than lichen, although the two are often confused for one another. According to Henry S. Conrad, “Perhaps no great group of plants has so few uses, commercial or economic, as the mosses” (352). They are, however, prolific, and scientists are still unsure about how many species of moss there are because new moss species are still being found (although they know that there are more than ten thousand species to date). Len Ellis, an avid studier of mosses, has a collection of 780,000 moss specimens that are folded into sheets of heavy paper.

Bryson goes on to talk about Sir Joseph Banks, England’s greatest botanist. He and a group of travelers set sail on a three-year adventure around the world; when it was over, he’d brought back thirty thousand plant specimens, fourteen hundred of which hadn’t been documented. While Banks’s journey was unique, plant collecting in the eighteenth century was not. In fact, it became a mania of sorts, and innumerous new species were discovered during this time by botanists and amateurs alike. It wasn’t until Carolus Linnaeus came along that each newly discovered plant and animal species was catalogued, and a system brought order to all the new information. 

Yet, for all that we know, Bryson says that there is a lot we don’t know about plants and animals. One of the main reasons for our lack of knowledge is that “Most living things are small and easily overlooked” (365). For example, bed mites, a prolific organism that has been with humans for quite some time, was only discovered during the age of color television. Given this fact, it’s no wonder that “the rest of the small-scale world is barely known to us” (365). The final reasons are that “We don’t look in the right places” (366), “There aren’t enough specialists” (367), and “The world is a really big place” (368). 

Bryson opens with the fact that we are all made of cells. While we start as just one cell, that cell splits, becoming two, and “after just forty-seven doublings, you have ten thousand trillion cells in your body and are ready to spring forth as a human being” (371). Each human cell carries a copy of the complete genetic code, which is basically the instruction manual for the body. Even the simplest cells are:

far beyond the limits of human ingenuity. To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in the Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns across; then somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce (372).

Bryson continues by saying that human cells are a “country of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some intensively specific way to your overall well-being” (372).

Of the 200,000 different types of proteins working inside of us, scientists understand only about what 2 percent of them do. Surprises happen all the time. Bryson gives the example of how astonished they were to find nitric oxide, a toxin and air pollutant, being produced naturally in human cells. Most living cells don’t last more than a month, except for our brain cells; we receive about a hundred billion at birth, and we don’t get any more ever again. 

Robert Hooke was the first person to describe a cell in 1665—he called them cells because they reminded him of monks’ cells. There is no up or down inside a cell, no gravity, and every bit of space is used. Everything we eat or drink are combined in the cells and converted into electricity (an amount we can’t feel because it’s 0.1 volts of electricity traveling in nanometers). The cell is made up of an outer membrane, a nucleus, and cytoplasm. If the furious activity inside the cell were slowed down, we would see that it’s just millions of objects like “lysosomes, endosomes, ribosomes, ligands, peroxisomes, proteins of every shape and size” bumping into each other and performing ordinary tasks (378).

Bryson opens by introducing Charles Darwin, who published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. At the age of twenty-two, he embarked on a sea voyage with Robert FitzRoy, and brought back enough specimens to keep him busy for years. During this time, he developed a theory for the formation of coral atolls, but, interestingly, not a theory of evolution. In fact, a theory of evolution had been around for quite some time. Darwin was responsible for the idea that “all organisms competed for resources, and those that had some innate advantage would prosper and pass on that advantage to their offspring” (384). This became the theory of natural selection. Later in life, he also devised the theory that humans evolved from primates, but he didn’t immediately share it with the world as he was afraid of the uproar it might cause.

Bryson also mentions Gregor Mendel, who repeatedly bred and crossbred thirty thousand pea plants, noting “every slight variation in the growth and appearance of seeds, pods, leaves, stems, and flowers” (392). Although Mendel never used the word gene, he invented the terms dominant and recessive to explain how each flower has two factors, and when combined they produce “predictable patterns of inheritance” (392). 

Bryson opens the chapter by saying “If your two parents hadn’t bonded just when they did—possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond—you wouldn’t be here” (397). In fact, looking back twenty generations, 1,048,576 people had to come together at precisely the exact correct moment for us to be here today. He gives these statistics to point out that somewhere down the line of our history, we are most likely geneticallyrelated to the people around us, including even our spouses. We are 99.99 percent similar to those around us, and it is the 0.1 percent difference that makes us individuals.

Everyone has his or her own genome, which is comprised of chromosomes and DNA. DNA is so good at replicating, and we have so much of it, that each cell contains over six feet of DNA, which amounts to 3.2 billion letters of coding, ensuring that each person is unique. Yet, despite all this activity, DNA isn’t alive, which is why it can be extracted from dried blood at a crime scene or taken from ancient bones.

DNA was first discovered in 1869, by Johann Friedrich Miescher. However, its importance wasn’t immediately recognized. This is because scientists couldn’t figure out the link between DNA and protein; Bryson states that despite being intimately intertwined, the two don’t speak the same language. They need RNA to be the interpreter; that is, RNA “translates information from a cell’s DNA into terms proteins can understand and act upon” (401).

It wasn’t until Thomas Hunt Morgan came along that the link between inheritance and chromosomes became better understood. By methodically breeding and crossbreeding fruit flies, Morgan could isolate certain mutations, such as differences in eye color. However, it wasn’t until a man named Oswald Avery infected an innocuous strain of bacteria with foreign DNA, thus making the bacteria infectious, that there was a visible link between heredity and DNA.

Many different scientists are responsible for our current understanding of DNA. However, it was Francis Crick and James Watson that received the most credit for solving the mysteries of DNA—they discovered DNA’s helix shape and the four chemical components of DNA: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine.

These were the building blocks to understand that the human genome is basically “a kind of instruction manual for the body” (408). The genome lists the parts of human, but doesn’t tell us how we work, which is why so little is still understood about the genome.