A Follow-Up Book Report

The other book I'm just finishing is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, a book reviewed almost a year ago here in the Journal by Jeffy, and one recommended to me by another friend as well.

I have little to add to Jeffy's review except to agree with his conclusions (I also chased Susan around to read every other page to her until she told me to stop--but now she's hoarding the book as a bathroom reader). The book is a fantastic summary of everything you maybe ought to know, like Cliff's Notes for Life. I think Bryson has a distinct talent for talking about scientific concepts in a way that lets them sink into a non-science brain, and the scope of the book, of what he had to review, indeed of what is known about the Earth's history, is really impressive. It makes me feel as though I let all of school pass me by.

Two things stand out to me. First, while we know that human presence on this planet is but a tiny tick of the clock at the very end of a vast and lengthy history, the scope of the book gives one a fresh understanding of exactly how little time we're talking about (or, more accurately, of how much time elapsed before we get to the stuff we all care about). And most astounding of all is how very, very recently we've come upon so much of the knowledge that now represents the bedrock of everything human and civilized. Engineering and medicine and communications and transportation and so many things have flowered in just the last 50 or 100 years, which is so brief as to not even be measurable if we were not in the midst of it. Literally, on a timeline of Earth's history, the rise of human civilization would be nil for 99.999% of it and then a 90° line straight up. What we accept as a fixed baseline is nothing of the sort.

The other thing is the fascinating world depicted in Earth's fossil record. I remember Carl Sagan writing in Cosmos or The Demon-Haunted World that our Star Trek vision of alien life really reflects a great poverty of imagination. Just on our own planet (to say nothing of all the potential places in the universe for life to be) the upright bipedal bioform with binaural hearing and binocular vision is just one particular branch of life that has flowered for our recent past with us along its lineage (along with many animals which show evidence of a similar bone structure--whales and dogs and zebras, and on and on). But a hell of a lot of other life--even that using virtually the same genes as us--looks nothing like us. And the species living today (even though Bryson argues that we know only a fraction of those in existence on our planet right now) represent but a tiny fraction of a percent of all the species that ever lived.

The range of creatures who have lived and flown and slithered and swam is truly astonishing, and those are just the ones who have been privileged to get recorded as fossils--there were countless others we'll never know about. If you could transport yourself back in a time machine, say, 100 million or a billion or three billion years, you would emerge into a world utterly alien and terrifying. And that's our own planet. The idea that we'd travel the galaxy and keep meeting--or ever meet--aliens who are just humans with bad skin (which is, of course, all their special effects departments could do with the human actors who had to play the aliens) is just not a very well-informed stab.

It's so easy to forget that everything bedrock and familiar in our world--after, say, air and water and gravity--is totally impermanent and circumstantial (and even air and water are lucky happenstances and not especially stable even at that). The fact that they're necessary things for us is of no great moment, except to us at the end of this evolutionary line at this time. A billion years ago there were no humans, no artifacts of civilization whatsoever, no animals friendly to us, almost nothing that would even seem familiar to us. Specialists in virtually every field would emerge from our time machine to see an alien planet (well, except the geologist whose present-day four billion year-old rocks would then appear three billion years old).

It just puts a spin on everything when you look out your window today. Trees and lakeflies and catfish suddenly seem unfamiliar and slightly monstrous (well, OK, not everything; the puppies still seem fluffy and friendly and fabulous). An attractive woman from the nearby college jogs past on the sidewalk; but she is not really attractive, she's a collection of genes which have built her body and mine and constructed the motivational brains inside them to have a peculiar urge to help these genes move on and on and on. We have lots of energy wrapped up in our particular packages, but that's all just a stab in the dark from the point of view of the genes who are running the show. And our genes are not materially different from those in fruit flies and geraniums and head lice and elephants. It's all quite closely connected.

It's a common religious sentiment that a world devoid of gods and spirits is an empty world and one not worth living in. This book soundly puts that bit of reasoning on the shelf. The real world, even that part we know and understand (which is small and finite but ever-expanding) proves to be unsettling and thrilling and much richer and more thought-provoking than our collective societal creation myths. This one's a must-read.