David’s Reviews > A Short History of Nearly Everything > Status Update

Done with Darwin, Mendel's been mentioned, now on to talk about DNA. More astounding stats to come, I'm sure, but one so far is that the number of genetic combinations possible within DNA is a number with so many digits it would take about 5000 average size books to write it down.

Starting on Darwin now, and the processes leading to evolution. So many random connections and twists to the story, as in many others.

Here's a project for someone (not me!) that I hadn't really imagined till reading this chapter on life on earth: try to catalog all the different species of life. You might limit it, say, just to bacteria, to narrow it down.
The estimated number of such creatures is astounding! In one example, 2 researchers got a gram of sand from a forest area (essentially a pinch) and there were 4 or 5k species, same in a 2nd case.

So are we more likely to suffer catastrophe from a meteor smashing into us or from a volcano erupting under us? It seems either might happen at any time, and either could be essentially cataclysmic.
Maybe the interesting aspect is how much people have deduced (rightly or not, we don't know) about how such things work, whether from observations in space or by experiments confirming hunches.

Plate tectonics is more recent than I realized: basically in my lifetime. Scientist were tough to persuade, and some insightful amateurs were not able to publish their ideas that turned out to be right because the publishers couldn't be convinced!!

Physics of the small is TRULY weird.

Yeah for Claire Patterson, who is credited here with giving the earth an age that has basically stood up since then (4.5 billion years, give or take 70 million). One of the roadblocks to a good sample for testing was lead contamination, and that led to him being a crusader against lead that led to the clean water act of 1970 and other lead restricting policies.