A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [191]
What is perhaps most remarkable is that it is all just random frantic action, a sequence of endless encounters directed by nothing more than elemental rules of attraction and repulsion. There is clearly no thinking presence behind any of the actions of the cells. It all just happens, smoothly and repeatedly and so reliably that seldom are we even conscious of it, yet somehow all this produces not just order within the cell but a perfect harmony right across the organism. In ways that we have barely begun to understand, trillions upon trillions of reflexive chemical reactions add up to a mobile, thinking, decision-making you—or, come to that, a rather less reflective but still incredibly organized dung beetle. Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering.
Indeed, some organisms that we think of as primitive enjoy a level of cellular organization that makes our own look carelessly pedestrian. Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be.
And that's because of a curious, determined, barely understood molecule that is itself not alive and for the most part doesn't do anything at all. We call it DNA, and to begin to understand its supreme importance to science and to us we need to go back 160 years or so to Victorian England and to the moment when the naturalist Charles Darwin had what has been called “the single best idea that anyone has ever had”—and then, for reasons that take a little explaining, locked it away in a drawer for the next fifteen years.
25 DARWIN'S SINGULAR NOTION
IN THE LATE summer or early autumn of 1859, Whitwell Elwin, editor of the respected British journal the Quarterly Review, was sent an advance copy of a new book by the naturalist Charles Darwin. Elwin read the book with interest and agreed that it had merit, but feared that the subject matter was too narrow to attract a wide audience. He urged Darwin to write a book about pigeons instead. “Everyone is interested in pigeons,” he observed helpfully.
Elwin's sage advice was ignored, and On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published in late November 1859, priced at fifteen shillings. The first edition of 1,250 copies sold out on the first day. It has never been out of print, and scarcely out of controversy, in all the time since—not bad going for a man whose principal other interest was earthworms and who, but for a single impetuous decision to sail around the world, would very probably have passed his life as an anonymous country parson known for, well, for an interest in earthworms.
Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809,*41 in Shrewsbury, a sedate market town in the west Midlands of England. His father was a prosperous and well-regarded physician. His mother, who died when Charles was only eight, was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, of pottery fame.
Darwin enjoyed every advantage of upbringing, but continually pained his widowed father with his lackluster academic performance. “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family,” his father wrote in a line that nearly always appears just about here in any review of Darwin's early life. Although his inclination was to natural history, for his