Now I feel special

[Axxon]

So thank goodness for atoms. But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most-99.99 percent-are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only
brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself-shape, size, color, species affiliation, everything-and to do so repeatedly. That's much easier said than done, because the process of change is random. To get from "protoplasmal primordial atomic globule" (as the Gilbert and Sullivan song put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.


Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely-make that miraculously-fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result-eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you.

This is from the introduction to the book "A short history about nearly everything." It's part of a bigger point but the point it makes really is pretty amazing once you think about it. Kinda makes you realize that stupid can't be genetic. Maybe for a few centuries but not this long.

[JetsIn06]

Love it.

[molson]

That kind of makes me feel bad about spending so much time on a message board....

Oh well.

[Sun Tzu]

I heart Bill Bryson.

[Axxon]

Originally Posted by Sun Tzu

I heart Bill Bryson.

This is the first book of his that I'm reading but I'm quickly coming to that same opinion.

[QuikSand]

He has a great gift.

[sterlingice]

I wish people applied this to other aspects of their life as well. Yes, you're successful but there was a lot of luck along the way- it wasn't all your doing.

SI

[path12]

Bryson is just great. That is one of my favorite books.

[3ric]

Bryson is great when writing about science, history or languages... but in his books about travels he's made, he comes across as a whiny, grumpy bastard... I'm trying to ignore that perception as I enjoy his other writing.