A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
One of my absolute favorite books of all time – definitely in my top 5 of non-fiction books. I think this book should be required reading for everyone. This is my third time to read it and it is continuously entertaining and eye-opening. (Though, it does take a pretty fair commitment to get through it.) Here are a couple of quotes I like…
On humans:
…all of these evolutionary jostlings over five million years, from distant, puzzled australopithecine to fully modern human, produced a creature that is still 98.4 percent genetically indistinguishable from the modern chimpanzee. There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.
On why we should dial down our egos a notch:
Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5-billion-year-old picture is to stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth. On this scale … the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand and in a single stroke with a medium grained nail file you could eradicate all of human history.
And my absolute favorite passage of the entire book on the subject of mitochondria:
We couldn’t live for two minutes without them, yet even after a billion years mitochondria behave as if they think things might not work out between us. They maintain their own DNA. They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do. In short, they keep their bags packed. They don’t even speak the same genetic language as the cell in which they live. It’s like having a stranger in your house, but one who has been there for a billion years.
I wish the textbooks in schools were like this. I would’ve enjoyed it a lot more the first time around.
