A Short History of Nearly Everything, page 55
"Hundreds, even thousands of people . . ." Forbes , "Do Germs Cause Cancer?" November 15, 1999, p. 195.
"a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders ..." Science , "Do Chronic Diseases Have an Infectious Root?" September 14, 2001, pp. 1974-76.
"a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news . . ." Quoted in Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues and History , p. 8.
"About five thousand types of virus are known . . ." Biddle, pp. 153-54.
"Smallpox in the twentieth century alone . . . " Oldstone, p. 1.
"In ten years the disease killed some five million people . . . " Kolata, Flu , p. 292.
"World War I killed twenty-one million people in four years . . . " American Heritage , "The Great Swine Flu Epidemic of 1918," June 1976, p. 82.
"In an attempt to devise a vaccine . . ." American Heritage , "The Great Swine Flu Epidemic of 1918," June 1976, p. 82.
"Researchers at the Manchester Royal Infirmary . . . " National Geographic , "The Disease Detectives," January 1991, p. 132.
"In 1969, a doctor at a Yale University lab . . ." Oldstone, p. 126.
"In 1990, a Nigerian living in Chicago . . ." Oldstone, p. 128.
CHAPTER 21 LIFE GOES ON
"The fate of nearly all living organisms . . ." Schopf, p. 72.
"Only about 15 percent of rocks can preserve fossils . . ." Lewis, The Dating Game , p. 24.
"less than one species in ten thousand . . ." Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either , p. 280.
"there are 250,000 species of creature in the fossil record . . ." Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction , p. 45.
"About 95 percent of all the fossils we possess . . ." Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction , p. 45.
"It seems like a big number . . ." Richard Fortey, interview by author, Natural History Museum, London, February 19, 2001.
"one-half of 1 percent as long." Fortey, Trilobite ! p. 24.
"a whole Profallotaspis or Elenellus as big as a crab . . ." Fortey, Trilobite! p. 121.
"built up a collection of sufficient distinction . . ." "From Farmer-Laborer to Famous Leader: Charles D. Walcott (1850-1927)," GSA Today , January 1996.
"In 1879 he took a job as a field researcher . . ." Gould, Wonderful Life , pp. 242-43.
"His books fill a library shelf . . ." Fortey, Trilobite! p. 53.
"our sole vista upon the inception of modern life . . ." Gould, Wonderful Life , p. 56.
"Gould, ever scrupulous, discovered . . ." Gould, Wonderful Life , p. 71.
"140 species in all, by one count." Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction , p. 27.
"a range of disparity . . . never again equaled . . ." Gould, Wonderful Life , p. 208.
"Under such an interpretation,' Gould sighed . . ." Gould, Eight Little Piggies , p. 225.
"Then in 1973 a graduate student from Cambridge . . ." National Geographic , "Explosion of Life," October 1993, p. 126.
"There was so much unrecognized novelty . . ." Fortey, Trilobite! p. 123.
"they all use architecture first created . . . " U.S. News and World Report , "How Do Genes Switch On?" August 18/25, 1997, p. 74.
"at least fifteen and perhaps as many as twenty . . ." Gould, Wonderful Life , p. 25.
"Wind back the tape of life . . ." Gould, Wonderful Life , p. 14.
"In 1946 Sprigg was a young assistant government geologist . . ." Corfield, Architects of Eternity , p. 287.
"it failed to find favor with the association's head . . ." Corfield, p. 287.
"Nine years later, in 1957 . . ." Fortey, Life , p. 85.
"There is nothing closely similar alive today . . ." Fortey, Life , p. 88.
"They are difficult to interpret . . ." Fortey, Trilobite ! p. 125.
"If only Stephen Gould could think as clearly as he writes!" Dawkins review, Sunday Telegraph , February 25, 1990.
"One, writing in the New York Times Book Review . . ." New York Times Book Review , "Survival of the Luckiest," October 22, 1989.
"Dawkins attacked Gould's assertions . . ." Review of Full House in Evolution , June 1997.
"startled many in the paleontological community . . . " New York Times Book Review , "Rock of Ages," May 10, 1998, p. 15.
"I have never encountered such spleen in a book by a professional . . ." Fortey, Trilobite ! p. 138.
"the idea of comparing a shrew and an elephant." Fortey, Trilobite ! p. 132.
"None was as strange as a present day barnacle . . ." Fortey, Life , p. 111.
"no less interesting, or odd, just more explicable." Fortey, "Shock Lobsters," London Review of Books , October 1, 1998.
"to have one well-formed creature like a trilobite . . ." Fortey, Trilobite ! p. 137.
CHAPTER 22 GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT
"In areas of Antarctica where virtually nothing else will grow . . ." Attenborough, The Living Planet , p. 48.
"Spontaneously, inorganic stone becomes living plant!" Marshall, Mosses and Lichens , p. 22.
"more than twenty thousand species of lichens." Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants , p. 214.
"Those the size of dinner plates . . . " Attenborough, The Living Planet , p. 42.
"compressed into a normal earthly day . . ." Adapted from Schopf, p. 13.
"stretch your arms to their fullest extent . . ." McPhee, Basin and Range, p. 126.
"Oxygen levels . . . were as high as 35 percent . . ." Officer and Page, p. 123.
"the isotopes accumulate at different rates . . ." Officer and Page, p. 118.
"put them in wind tunnels to see how they do it . . . " Conniff, Spineless Wonders , p. 84.
"dragonflies grew as big as ravens." Fortey, Life , p. 201.
"Luckily the team found just such a creature . . ." BBC Horizon , "The Missing Link," first aired February 1, 2001.
"The names simply refer to the number and location of holes . . . " Tudge, The Variety of Life , p. 411.
"as high as 4,000 billion." Tudge, The Variety of Life , p. 9.
"To a first approximation . . . all species are extinct." Quoted by Gould, Eight Little Piggies , p. 46.
"the average lifespan of a species . . ." Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction , p. 38.
"The alternative to extinction is stagnation . . ." Ian Tattersall, interviewed at American Museum of Natural History, New York, May 6, 2002.
"invariably associated with dramatic leaps afterward . . ." Stanley, p. 95; and Stevens, p. 12.
"In the Permian, at least 95 percent of animals . . . " Harper's , "Planet of Weeds," October 1998, p. 58.
"Even about a third of insect species . . . " Stevens, p. 12.
"It was, truly, a mass extinction . . ." Fortey, Life , p. 235.
"Estimates for the number of animal species alive . . . " Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes , p. 340.
"For individuals the death toll could be much higher . . . " Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous , p. 143.
"Grazing animals, including horses, were nearly wiped out . . ." Flannery, The Eternal Frontier , p. 100.
"At least two dozen potential culprits . . ." Earth , "The Mystery of Selective Extinctions," October 1996, p. 12.
"tons of conjecture and very little evidence. . . ." New Scientist , "Meltdown," August 7, 1999.
"Such an outburst is not easily imagined . . ." Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous , p. 19.
"The KT meteor had the additional advantage . . ." Flannery, The Eternal Frontier , p. 17.
"Why should these delicate creatures . . . " Flannery, The Eternal Frontier , p. 43.
"In the seas it was much the same story." Gould, Eight Little Piggies , p. 304.
"Somehow it does not seem satisfying . . . " Fortey, Life , p. 292.
"could well be known as the Age of Turtles." Flannery, The Eternal Frontier , p. 39.
"Evolution may abhor a vacuum . . ." Stanley, p. 92.
"For perhaps as many as ten million years . . . " Novacek, Time Traveler , p. 112.
"guinea pigs the size of rhinos . . . " Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker , p. 102.
"a gigantic, flightless, carnivorous bird . . . " Flannery, The Eternal Frontier , p. 138.
"built in 1903 in Pittsburgh . . ." Colbert, p. 164.
"came from only about three hundred specimens . . ." Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous , pp. 168-69.
"There is no reason to believe . . ." BBC Horizon , "Crater of Death," first broadcast May 6, 2001.
"Humans are here today because . . ." Gould, Eight Little Piggies , p. 229.
CHAPTER 23 THE RICHNESS OF BEING
"The spirit room alone holds fifteen miles of shelving . . ." Thackray and Press, The Natural History Museum , p. 90.
"forty-four years after the expedition had concluded." Thackray and Press, p. 74.
"still to be found on many library shelves . . ." Conard, How to Know the Mosses and Liverworts , p. 5.
"The tropics are where you find the variety . . ." Len Ellis interview, Natural History Museum, London, April 18, 2002.
"he sifted through a bale of fodder . . ." Barber, p. 17.
"To the parts of one species of clam . . ." Gould, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms , p. 79.
"Love comes even to the plants." Quoted by Gjertsen, p. 237; and at University of California/UCMP Berkeley website.
"Linnaeus lopped it back to Physalis angulata . . ." Kastner, p. 31.
"The first edition of his great Systema Naturae . . ." Gjertsen, p. 223.
"John Ray's three-volume Historia Generalis Plantarum . . ." Durant and Durant, p. 519.
"a kind of father figure to British naturalists." Thomas, Man and the Natural World , p. 65.
"gullibly accepted from seamen and other imaginative travelers." Schwartz, Sudden Origins , p. 59.
"he saw that whales belonged with cows . . ." Schwartz, p. 59.
"mare's fart, naked ladies, twitch-ballock . . ." Thomas, pp. 82-85.
. . . "Edward O. Wilson in The Diversity of Life . . ." Wilson, The Diversity of Life , p. 157.
"transferred, amid howls, to the genus Pelargonium ." Elliott, The Potting-Shed Papers , p. 18
"Estimates range from 3 million to 200 million." Audubon, "Earth's Catalogue," January-February 2002, and Wilson, The Diversity of Life , p. 132.
"as much as 97 percent . . ." Economist , "A Golden Age of Discovery," December 23, 1996, p. 56.
"he estimated the number of known species of all types . . ." Wilson, The Diversity of Life , p. 133.
"Other authorities have put the number . . ." U.S. News and World Report , August 18, 1997, p. 78.
"It took Groves four decades to untangle everything . . ." New Scientist , "Monkey Puzzle," October 6, 2001, p. 54.
"about fifteen thousand new species of all types . . ." Wall Street Journal , "Taxonomists Unite to Catalog Every Species, Big and Small," January 22, 2001.
"It's not a biodiversity crisis, it's a taxonomist crisis!" Ken Maes, interview with author, National Museum, Nairobi, October 2, 2002.
"many species are being described poorly . . ." Nature , "Challenges for Taxonomy," May 2, 2002, p. 17.
"an enterprise called the All Species Foundation . . ." The Times (London), "The List of Life on Earth," July 30, 2001.
"your mattress is home to perhaps two million microscopic mites . . ." Bodanis, The Secret House , p. 16.
"to quote the man who did the measuring . . ." New Scientist , "Bugs Bite Back," February 17, 2001, p. 48.
"These mites have been with us since time immemorial . . ." Bodanis, The Secret House , p. 15.
"Your sample will also contain perhaps a million plump yeasts . . ." National Geographic , "Bacteria," August 1993, p. 39.
"If over 9,000 microbial types exist . . ." Wilson, The Diversity of Life , p. 144.
"it could be as high as 400 million." Tudge, The Variety of Life , p. 8.
"discovered a thousand new species of flowering plant . . ." Wilson, The Diversity of Life , p. 197.
"tropical rain forests cover only about 6 percent . . ." Wilson, The Diversity of Life , p. 197.
"over three and a half billion years of evolution." Economist , "Biotech's Secret Garden," May 30, 1998, p. 75.
"found on the wall of a country pub . . ." Fortey, Life , p. 75.
"about 500 species have been identified . . ." Ridley, The Red Queen , p. 54.
"all the fungi found in a typical acre of meadow . . ." Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants , p. 176.
"the number could be as high as 1.8 million." National Geographic , "Fungi," August 2000, p. 60; and Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction , p. 117.
"The large flightless New Zealand bird . . ." Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature , p. 2.
"was considered a rarity in the wider world." New York Times , "A Stone-Age Horse Still Roams a Tibetan Plateau," November 12, 1995.
"a sort of giant ground sloth . . ." Economist , "A World to Explore," December 23, 1995, p. 95.
"A single line of text in a Crampton table . . ." Gould, Eight Little Piggies, pp. 32-34.
"he hiked 2,500 miles to assemble a collection . . ." Gould, The Flamingo's Smile , pp. 159-60.
CHAPTER 24 CELLS
"about the same number of components . . ." New Scientist , title unnoted, December 2, 2000, p. 37.
"no more than about 2 percent . . ." Brown, p. 83.
"scientists began to find it all over the place . . ." Brown, p. 229.
"It is converted into nitric oxide in the bloodstream . . ." Alberts et al., Essential Cell Biology , p. 489.
"'some few hundred' different types of cell . . ." De Duve, vol. 1, p. 21.
"If you are an average-sized adult . . ." Bodanis, The Secret Family , p. 106.
"Liver cells can survive for years . . ." De Duve, vol. 1, p. 68.
"not so much as a stray molecule . . ." Bodanis, The Secret Family , p. 81.
"Hooke calculated that a one-inch square of cork . . ." Nuland, p. 100.
"After he reported finding 'animalcules' . . ." Jardine, p. 93.
"there were 8,280,000 of these tiny beings . . ." Thomas, p. 167.
"He called the little beings 'homunculi' . . ." Schwartz, p. 167.
"In one of his least successful experiments . . ." Carey (ed.), The Faber Book of Science , p. 28.
" all living matter is cellular." Nuland, p. 101.
"The cell has been compared to many things . . ." Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either , p. 133; and Brown, p. 78.
"a jolt of twenty million volts per meter." Brown, p. 87.
"approximate consistency 'of a light grade of machine oil' . . ." Nuland, p. 103.
"up to a billion times a second . . ." Brown, p. 80.
"the molecular world must necessarily remain . . ." De Duve, vol. 2, p. 293.
"100 million protein molecules in each cell . . ." Nuland, p. 157.
"At any given moment, a typical cell . . ." Alberts et al., p. 110.
"Every day you produce and use up . . . " Nature , "Darwin's Motors," May 2, 2002, p. 25.
"On average, humans suffer one fatal malignancy . . . " Ridley, Genome , p. 237.
"the single best idea that anyone has ever had . . . " Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea , p. 21.
CHAPTER 25 DARWIN'S SINGULAR NOTION
"Everyone is interested in pigeons . . ." quoted in Boorstin, Cleopatra's Nose , p. 176.
"You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching . . ." Quoted in Boorstin, The Discoverers , p. 467.
"The experience of witnessing an operation . . ." Desmond and Moore, Darwin , p. 27.
"some 'bordering on insanity' . . ." Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds , p. 199.
"In five years . . . he had not once hinted . . ." Desmond and Moore, p. 197.
"atolls could not form in less than a million years . . ." Moorehead, Darwin and the Beagle, p. 239.
"It wasn't until . . . Darwin was back in England . . ." Gould, Ever Since Darwin , p. 21.
"How stupid of me not to have thought of it!" Sunday Telegraph , "The Origin of Darwin's Genius," December 8, 2002.
"It was his friend the ornithologist John Gould . . ." Desmond and Moore, p. 209.
"These he expanded into a 230-page 'sketch' . . ." Dictionary of National Biography , vol. 5, p. 526.
"I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before." Quoted in Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way , p. 239.
"Some wondered if Darwin himself might be the author." Barber, p. 214.
"he could not have made a better short abstract." Dictionary of National Biography , vol. 5, p. 528.
"This summer will make the 20th year (!) . . ." Desmond and Moore, pp. 454-55.
"whatever it may amount to, will be smashed." Desmond and Moore, p. 469.
"all that was new in them was false . . . " Quoted by Gribbin and Cherfas, p. 150.
"Much less amenable to Darwin's claim of priority . . ." Gould, The Flamingo's Smile, p. 336.
"He referred to himself as "the Devil's Chaplain'. . ." Cadbury, p. 305.
"felt 'like confessing a murder.' " Quoted in Desmond and Moore, p. xvi.
"The case at present must remain inexplicable . . ." Quoted by Gould, Wonderful Life , p. 57.
"By way of explanation he speculated . . ." Gould, Ever Since Darwin , p. 126.
"Darwin goes too far." Quoted by McPhee, In Suspect Terrain , p. 190.
"Huxley . . . was a saltationist . . ." Schwartz, pp. 81-82.
"The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder." Quoted in Keller, The Century of the Gene , p. 97.
"absurd in the highest possible degree . . ." Darwin, On the Origin of Species (facsimile edition), p. 217.
"Darwin lost virtually all the support that still remained . . ." Schwartz, p. 89.
"It had a library of twenty thousand books . . ." Lewontin, It Ain't Necessarily So , p. 91.
"known to have studied Focke's influential paper . . ." Ridley, Genome, p. 44.
"Huxley had been urged to attend by Robert Chambers . . ." Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 79.
"bravely slogged his way through two hours of introductory remarks . . ." Clark, p. 142.
"One of his experiments was to play the piano to them . . ." Conniff, p. 147.
"Having married his own cousin . . ." Desmond and Moore, p. 575.
"Darwin was often honored in his lifetime . . ." Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin , p. 148.
