The Observer (Kampala)
Martyn Drakard
12 August 2009
book review
Book: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Author: Bill Bryson
Palaeontology, the history of the cosmos, dinosaurs and dodos, genes, atoms, protons and DNA may not be your choice of leisure reading. They were certainly not mine, until someone with good book sense said I must read Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything.
The book, with its stock of stories, data and amusing twists is in fact hard to put down. As Bryson puts it, where have we been brought into existence?
In a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify... And about the earth beneath our feet?
For less than a generation we have known that the continents slide around like lily pads. We, that is, our scientists, know more about the sun's interior than the earth's; but the heat in both is about the same. Japan, incidentally, is the country most prone to tremors, especially Tokyo, standing on a meeting-point of three tectonic plates.
Earthquakes are random like lightning and give scant warning. Yet Planet Earth is the place to be. Five per cent closer or farther away from the Sun and we couldn't survive. We're protected from cosmic radiation and ocean flooding - owing to the steadying influence of the moon.
Water is a continual wonder to us. A tomato is eighty per cent water; a cow, seventy and we humans, sixty-five. We love to be beside it, even though it's shapeless and transparent; it's tasteless too, yet we long to drink it.
Then the proteins, and we have one million types in our body. We can't produce even one, and chances of doing so would be like a whirlwind spinning through a junk-yard and leaving behind a fully-assembled jumbo jet.
Microbes we need to keep the atmosphere stable. According to scientist, Carl Woese, microbes account for at least eighty percent of the planet's biomass. Our world belongs to the small: your mattress is home to two million microscopic mites, and your pillow forty thousand!
These are approximations, because the world is short of taxonomists who classify all the species. Africa had none in 2003 when the book's research was done.
Tropical rain forests cover only about six per cent of the Earth's surface, but they harbor more than half its animal life and two-thirds of its flowering plants. But most of this life remains unknown to us because too few researchers spend time in them.
Every living thing, Bryson reminds us, is a wonder of atomic engineering. To prove the point, we have, according to the experts, 10,000 trillion cells in our body at birth. The book is packed with such staggering information.
Yet, we are left with the conviction that the only thing we know is that we know little about all this, as one after another he demystifies widely taught "truths." For instance, at the well-known Olorgesailie pre-historic site, he could conclude nothing: the man-made axes are there, but not a single human bone.
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