Garys Books: January 2021

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

Book: Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
Basic Information : Synopsis : Characters : Expectations : Thoughts : Evaluation : Book Group : New Words : Book References : Good Quotes : Table of Contents : References

Basic Information:

Author: Zora Neal Hurston

Edition: ePub on Libby from the Fresno County Library

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

ISBN: 0060921706 (ISBN13: 9780060921705)

Start Date: January 12, 2021

Read Date: January 20, 2021

193 pages

Genre: History, Biography, Interracial Understanding

Language Warning: None

Rated Overall: 3½ out of 5

Updated January 3, 2022 from APNews articles on the ship Clotilda

History: 4 out of 5

Synopsis:

The main part of the book consists of what is considered the last slave cargo to reach America. The person is Cudjo Lewis, or as he preferred to be called, Kossula. He tells his story from the time he lived in Bante, Benin through the massacre his village endured. During this massacre, he was captured and sold to be a slave. He spends 70 days traveling across the Atlantic before coming to close to Mobile Alabama. There he is a slave for over five years until being freed by Union soldiers.

But he continues to be part of his master’s plantation until him and several other people who came directly from Africa purchase land called AfricaTown. Here he lives, marries, and has children. His children die before him and then his wife. This is where the story ends.

But surrounding the story is background. Deborah Platt has put together notes on the story which are helpful, also a glossary of terms. The Zora Neal Hurston society as well as Alice Walker also have information in the book. Finally Alice Walker’s essay on finding Hurtons’s grave is included.

Cast of Characters:

Oluale Kossula-Cudjo Lewis-Storytelling, part of the cargo of the last slave ship from Africa. Teller of story of his life. Wikipedia article
Zora Neale Hurston-author, person who Kossula told his story to. Wikipedia article
Captain William Foster-Skipper of the Colitilda, the ship which brought Kossula to America
Jim Meaher-plantation owner, Kossula’s master
Abila-Sleely, Kossula’s wife

Expectations:

Date Became Aware of Book: June 2020
How come do I want to read this book: Our book group read Their Eyes Were Watching God by the same author
What do I think I will get out of it? An idea of what it meant to be a slave taken from Africa.

Thoughts:

Foreword: Those Who Love Us Never Leave Us Alone with Our Grief: Reading Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" Alice Walker

Alice Walker provides a good overview of what you are about to read. She captures what Hurston tries to present:

how lonely we are too in this still foreign land:

lonely for our true culture, our people,

our singular connection to a specific understanding of the Universe

And yet I think Walker misses one important point in this: There is not a unified African people, but that they are peoples. I think Walker is looking at this from the aspect of a Black American looking back at something which is not.

At the end of his life, Kossula is asked by his neighbors to speak in parables, to bring his wisdom and “medicine to them. Here is the medicine: That though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. Good thoughts.

Introduction xv

This is Deborah Platt’s Introduction.

Clotilda - the ship which brought the last cargo of slaves to America. The Smithsonian has a May 22, 2019 article on finding the ship.

In this Introduction, there is a good summary of Kossula’s life: Oluale Kossola had survived capture at the hands of Dahomian warriors, the barracoons at Whydah (Ouidah), and the Middle Passage. He had been enslaved, he had lived through the Civil War and the largely un-Reconstructed South, and he had endured the rule of Jim Crow. He had experienced the dawn of a new millennium that included World War I and the Great Depression. Within the magnitude of world events swirled the momentous events of Kossola’s own personal world.

This introduction talks about Kossula’s life being a sequence of separations. In some ways, that is true of all of us. But in his case, they seemed to be much more dramatic. I think it was the circumstances, but maybe also enhanced with the storytelling.

The author goes through a summary of Kossula’s life. I will say reading Hurston’s story it is not as clear as this introduction. So it is a good thing to read this to get the arc of what Kossula is saying.

A couple of things the Introduction brought up which I found enlightening:

Africans opposed to ending the traffic persisted in the enterprise. These were the tribes which were capturing other African tribes to sell them to the slave traders. I think overall, Africans cannot be looked at as a homogenous group, but as individual units.
From 1801 to 1866, an estimated 3,873,600 Africans were exchanged for gold, guns, and other European and American merchandise.

Barracoon

Preface

From Hurston.

Interesting take. Hurston says that she is trying for the truth rather than detail fact. What does she mean by that? The thought back of the act was to set down essential truth rather than fact of detail, which is so often misleading. I think she is saying that sometimes details can lead you astray.

Introduction

This is Hurston’s introduction. The African slave trade is the most dramatic chapter in the story of human existence. She says that those who ran the slave ships have had their say, she wants to give voice to the slaves who were brought over.

Interesting take on the road to slavery: it is the first leg of their journey from humanity to cattle.

She introduces us to Cudjo Lewis and is living at present at Plateau, Alabama.

She also talks about Captain William Foster, who was the skipper for the Clotilda. How he went to West Africa and procured this batch of slaves. It is said that “ I]t had long been a part of the traders’ policy to instigate the tribes against each other,” He bargained with the Dahomey tribe to give him their captives, which they wanted to sell as slaves.

The questions she wants to find out from Kossula were: How does one sleep with such memories beneath the pillow? How does a pagan live with a Christian God? How has the Nigerian “heathen” borne up under the process of civilization?

Talks about Hurston first meeting Kossula. He was happy to meet her, to tell his story, but at his own pace and at his own price. He talked about his family and got in Africa. His grandfather was something like a chief of staff for the King, with several wives. American name is Cudjo Lewis. She outlines what she wants to do, which he is grateful for. They talk about religion in America and Africa. Talks about how a wife is taken. He gets tired of talking and tells Hurston to leave.

Kossula’s reaction when Hurston approached him about telling his story: I want you everywhere you go to tell everybody whut Cudjo say, and how come I in Americky soil since de 1859 and never see my people no mo’.

You callee me Cudjo. Dat do.’ But in Afficky soil my mama she name me Kossula. I use the name Kossula since that is what he wanted to be called.

Some men in de Affica soil don’t gittee no wife ’cause dey cain buy none. Dey ain’ got nothing to give so a wife kin come to dem. “Some men in the Affrican soil don’t get no wife because they cannot buy none. They ain’t got nothing to give so a wife can come to them” Two things. When you read Hurston, know that you will be reading Black Southern English. Just sound out the words and you will understand it. Second, interesting that the dowry system is active there. It does explain somewhat how Black women are viewed.

II The King Arrives

There are strict rules of order within the tribe Kossula is part of. One of them is that the leopard is the Kings, including its whiskers. When a man killed a leopard, which is not bad in itself, he was to give the leopard to the king, which this man did. But he had plucked one of the whiskers and kept it for himself. Kollusa tells of the trial, verdict and how the death sentence is carried out.

III

Kossula’s grandfather dies. He talks about how he is mourned, particularly by his wives.

This is the refrain which the village said about Kossula’s grandfather: Only yesterday he was worried about his wives and chillun and here he lies today in need of nothing!

Kossula turns 14 and starts his initiations into becoming a man. He is taught the ways of the village and forest. Initiation does not come once, but is a many event process. When I come away from Afficky I only a boy 19 year old. I have one initiation. A boy must go through many initiations before he become a man. I jus’ initiate one time.

Hurston knew that Kossula could be soften up with food. So she brought him a watermelon. Her comment is that Watermelon, like too many other gorgeous things in life, is much too fleeting. She wanted to savor it.

He starts to be interested in females. Also three emissaries from the king of Dahomey came to his village. They demanded half of the food grown. He [the king of Dahomey] keep his army all de time making raids to grabee people to sell so de people of Dahomey doan have no time to raise gardens an’ make food for deyselves. Kossula’s king said no-meet us like two kingdoms do. But Dahomey bribes a traitor and attacks at night when the village is sleeping. All gates are blocked and most of the village is killed. Kossula is tied up and forced to walk to a sea port.

VI Barracoon

Kossula gets marched to the Dahomey capital for three days. Then marched to the ocean. There he is bought and put on a ship. For 70 days they sailed across the ocean to American.

VII Slavery

Kossula describes his life as a slave, being whipped. But the African men would not let their women be whipped: One man try whippee one my country women and dey all jump on him and takee de whip ’way from him and lashee him wid it. He doan never try whip Affican women no mo’. Working very hard, but never fast or hard enough. He was a slave for five years and six months until freed by the Union soldiers. April 12, 1865. De Yankee soldiers dey come down to de boat and eatee de mulberries off de trees close to de boat, you unnerstand me.

VIII Freedom

But now free, what does that mean? No home to go to, no job, except to his former master. He works in a saw mill. Kossula tries to talk to his former master to give him and his former slaves land. The former master just laughs. The Africans band together to buy a plot of land, setting up their own town, including judge, mayor and laws. This is AfricaTown. A settlement for people who came directly from Africa.

Dat mean he buy de whiskey. It belong to him and he oughter rule it, but it done got control of him

IX Marriage

Kossula finds a woman he wants. They marry by agreeing to marry. Then they join a church. But the church requires a license. Den in de church dey tell us dat ain’ right. We got to marry by license. Kossula has an interesting take on this: So den we gittee married by de license, but I doan love my wife no mo’ wid de license than I love her befo’ de license.

They have six children-five boys, one girl. Because they are Africans, they get picked on (by blacks with more roots in America) and learn to fight. Reputation as wild boys. The girl dies at 15 years old. One of the boys is shot dead by the black sheriff.

we give our chillun two names. One name because we not furgit our home; den another name for de Americky soil so it won’t be too crooked to call. Stands to reason. A name which they could use around the rest of society. But a name to connect them to the place where the family came from. I wonder how much of that is done today?

There is a take charge spirit. In AfricaTown, they do not wait for things to happen. When there is a need for a school building, they build it. We Afficky men doan wait lak de other colored people till de white folks gittee ready to build us a school. We build one for ourself den astee de county to send us de teacher’

He talks about singing in church during the service for his daughter. He knows the English words, but his heart sings it in his native tongue. I know de words of de song wid my mouth, but my heart it doan know dat. I think this shows the depth of sorrow can only be expressed without translation.

The sheriff which killed his son gets religion. Kossula tries to forgive him, but also wants to see sorrow by the sheriff. I try forgive him. But Cudjo think that now he got religion, he ought to come and let me know his heart done change and beg Cudjo pardon for killin’ my son

X Kossula Learns About Law

Kossula is hit by a train. He has three broken ribs and no longer will be able to work. It is advocated that he sue the railroad company. He engages a lawyer who sues for $5,000. The court decides that Kossula should receive $650. The lawyer leaves the state with the money.

He talks about his children. Also about how all of his remaining children died. Very sad looking and remembering your own children’s deaths. His thinking is that once his house, the house he was sitting in as well as his family house was full, De house was full, but now it empty. This is the saddest line in the whole book.

Kossula is talking about his son when Kossula says: He say de deputy kill his baby brother. Den de train kill David. He want to do something. But I ain’ hold no malice. This sounds like an old man speaking, a man who is tired of the things of this life rather than a saintly person. It is still much better than what I think I would be like.

XII Alone

His wife is concerned about her dead children. Then she dies. People come to him now to have him tell stories.

De wife she de eyes to de man’s soul. And when one's wife dies, Kossula feels blinded to life. There is no more to give.

The present was too urgent to let the past intrude. Kossula did not want to dwell in the past, so he rather lives now. Still he gave time to Hurston, so that what he knew and felt could be shared.

I am sure that he does not fear death. In spite of his long Christian fellowship, he is too deeply a pagan to fear death. I found this was a strange sentence by Hurston. Being Christian should say that you do not fear death. Do African’s not fear death? I need to see what she saw to make further comments.

Appendix

Takkoi or Attako-Children's Game

A couple of games Kossula remembered from his childhood. I wonder if they still play these games in the villages they came from.

Stories Kossula Told Me

Hurston convinced Kossula to tell her some of the stories or parables he remembered from Africa. So that Kossula could smoke his pipe in the garden, he made lids for it. The pipe lids are just another of the evidences of the primitive, the self-reliance of the people who live outside the influence of machinery. I am having issues on reconciling what Hurston’s commentary on machinery with the simplicity of what she saw in Kossula. I know several inventive people who are able to create something to fit a need.

He talks about what is important on a person’s body: legs, arms, eyes. He then says: My boys is my feet. My daughter is my hands. My wife she my eye. She left, Cudjo finish. Without his eyes, he cannot see anything more.

The Monkey and the Camel

Story about a red-buttbaboon and a greedy camel.

Story of de Jonah

A little different telling of the story of JOnah, but similar ending.

Now Disa Abraham Fadda de Faitful

Abraham and Lot with Sodom and Gommorrah

The Lion Woman

Lion losing her cubs; man comes close to losing his life to her.

Afterword and Additional Materials Edited Deborah G. Plant

Afterword

Written by Deborah G. Platt. She says that Hurston describes Kossula as a poetical old gentleman . . . who could tell a good story.

And then it is interesting that Hurston says that He was “left to tell” the story of a massacre that befell the town of Bantè. It is a common enough phrase, but last year read of another massacre, this time in Rwanda which is titled Left to Tell. There is a feeling of destiny in this phrase, something controlling that this is a story which needed to be told. I wonder how much of that mysticalness Hurston meant to say.

But as an ethnographer, Hurston’s motivations were different: “The quotations from the works of travelers in Dahomey are set down, not to make this appear a thoroughly documented biography, but to emphasize his remarkable memory. This is not meant to be a history text, but something more personal, it is a story of a people.

Fort Mosé-Hurston had gone there to collect information on this settlement outside of St Augustine, Florida. Talking with Kussola was a side trip, imposed on her. Hurston was not the first to have talked with Kossula: Other anthropologists, folklorists, historians, journalists, and artists alike had sought him out.

The white people had held my people in slavery in America. They had bought us, it is true and exploited us. But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. This may have been the central piece to the whole story, the reason why Kossula never went back to Africa, besides the cost.

Their African Dream was inextricably bound up with Timothy Meaher’s American Dream, and their dream of return would be forever deferred. Interesting that the American Dream comes up. In both Coates’ book, Between the World and Me and Perkin’s book, Dream with Me, this comes up. But Platt ties it to the African Dream which neither talk about. To Kossula, it was to be rejoined with his people, even though I suspect, this dream was more to be with those who were dead.

Africatown is more than a historic site. It is a place expressive of African ingenuity and a prime model of the processes of African acculturation in the American South.

“Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes (Between the World and Me). I did not pick up on this line when I read the book.

Though nearly a century has passed between the completion of the final draft of her manuscript and the publication of Barracoon, the questions it raises about slavery and freedom, greed and glory, personal sovereignty and our common humanity are as important today as they were during Kossola’s lifetime.

"In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" Alice Walker

This is the article which started the revival of Hurston’s work.

There is some fiction in how she lived her life. Such as at one place Walker is told that she died of malnutrition. Hurston’s doctor contradicts this and said she was well fed, and very heavy towards the end of her life. She dies of a stroke in a welfare home. When Walker hears malnutrition, she talks about Phillis Wheatley-first African-American author, who died at age 31 in poverty.

She quotes Robert Hemenway, Hurston’s biographer: Bitter over the rejection of her folklore’s value, especially in the black community, frustrated by what she felt was her failure to convert the Afro-American world view into the forms of prose fiction, Hurston finally gave up

Walker was not well known when she wrote this article. To get information she told people she was Hurston’s illegitimate niece who had not ever seen her. And I hate myself for lying to him. Still I ask myself, would I have gotten this far toward getting the headstone and finding out about Zora Hurston’s last days without telling my lie. So do the ends justify the means?

She[Hurston] was always studying. Her mind—before the stroke—just worked all the time. Sounds like Hurston was smart until almost the end.

Evaluation:

One of the things which you get impressed with being a white guy is how much I have benefited from America’s time of slavery and the succeeding years of oppression. This is true. What is not talked about is how Africans were also involved in the slave trade and how they benefited. Also how there was slavery in Africa before America was discovered.

If that was all there was to Barracoon, then it would be an interesting book and worth reading. But there is more. Hurston traces the life of Kossula, Curdo Lewis, through his time in Africa, his capture and shipping across the Atlantic to America. This is his years in slavery and finally to the early 1900’s. Hurston let's Kossula tell his story in his own words, including the phonetic sounding of it. If it was not for reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, I am not sure I would have continued reading it because of the formation of familiar words with unfamiliar spellings.

This is a short book. So each sentence could tell a whole story of Kossula’s life. Read it with care and attention. Not so much for great truths, but for the life of one simple man whose story told sheds some light on both his world and ours.

Notes from my book group:

When you read of Kossula’s life, what are your thoughts of the man? How would you graph his life? Some of the great national and world events such as the Civil War, World War I, and the Great Depression happened in his lifetime. How was he touched by them? What touched his life? Deborah Platt describes his life as a sequence of separations. Is that how you would describe his life? What are the separations of his life?

What do you think Hurston saw in Kossula’s story which made it worthwhile telling?

When Hurston says she is trying to get to truth rather than detail fact, what does she mean? Does she mean that facts do not lead to truth? Can you give other examples where this is true?

Hurston starts off the story by saying that The African slave trade is the most dramatic chapter in the story of human existence. Does she support this in any way? What other chapters in human history would she consider as being dramatic? What made the African slavery so dramatic?

Hurston uses the phrase that slavery is the first leg of their journey from humanity to cattle. React to this statement. What about slavery leads Hurston to make this statement?

The questions Hurston wants to answer are:

How does one sleep with such memories beneath the pillow?
How does a pagan live with a Christian God?
How has the Nigerian “heathen” borne up under the process of civilization?

How does Kossula’s story answer these questions?

It was a great victory for humans and slaves like Kossula when the Union soldiers freed them. How was freedom a trap for the ex-slaves? How did Kossula and his fellow ex-slaves react to their freedom, but also the trap of being without possessions? Place yourself in the liberating army. Is there anything you could have done for Kossula and his friends after liberation?

How does the people of AfricaTown organize? What was important to the people of AfricaTown? How did they come to achieve their goals? Is there a model which can be used today? How is it faring now? Platt says that Africatown is more than a historic site. It is a place expressive of African ingenuity and a prime model of the processes of African acculturation in the American South. Explain how Kossula’s story shows this.

Why did the people of AfricaTown have two names?

When you read of Kossula’s capture and sale to be a slave, what thoughts do you have? Does this give American slavery a new perspective to you? If so, what is it? Does it justify slavery? Why do you think African tribes enslaved each other?

Kossula tells Hurston several parables or stories. Which ones spoke to you? Why? Are they stories which travel well across cultures and time?

Deborah Platt says that Their African Dream was inextricably bound up with Timothy Meaher’s American Dream, and their dream of return would be forever deferred. How are they bound together. What is the American Dream Platt talks about? What is the African Dream? Are thay at war with each other or can they coexist? Ta-Neshi Coates says that The Dream. He uses this as a placeholder for the American perfect life. He says the Dream is built on the backs of blacks. He says that it rests on the known world of slaves and now repression of blacks. Is this the Dream Platt is talking about?

Many of these questions are either from or adapted from LitLovers.

Why the title of Barracoon?

Does this story work as a piece of history or anthropology?

Did the ending seem fitting?

Every story has a world view. Were you able to identify this story’s world view? What was it? How did it affect the story?

In what context was religion talked about in this book?

Was there anybody you would consider religious?

How did they show it?

Was the book overtly religious?

How did it affect the book's story?

Why do you think the author wrote this book?

What would you ask the author if you had a chance?

What “takeaways” did you have from this book?

What central ideas does the author present?

Are they personal, sociological, global, political, economic, spiritual, …?

What evidence does the author use to support the book's ideas?

Is the evidence convincing...definitive or...speculative?

Does the author depend on personal opinion, observation, and assessment? Or is the evidence factual—based on science, statistics, historical documents, or quotations from (credible) experts?

What implications for you, our nation or the world do these ideas have?

Are these idea’s controversial?

To whom and why?

Are there solutions which the author presents?

Do they seem workable? Practicable?

How would you implement them?

Describe the culture talked about in the book.

How is the culture described in this book different than where we live?

What economic or political situations are described?

Does the author examine economics and politics, family traditions, the arts, religious beliefs, language or food?

How did this book affect your view of the world?

Of how God is viewed?

What questions did you ask yourself after reading this book?

Talk about specific passages that struck you as significant—or interesting, profound, amusing, illuminating, disturbing, sad...?

What was memorable?

New Words:

Barracoon (Introduction): a type of barracks used historically for the internment of slaves or criminals.
Juju (II: The King Arrives): a spiritual belief system incorporating objects, such as amulets, and spells used in religious practice in West Africa
Dashiki (In Search of …): a colorful garment worn mostly in West Africa. It is called Kitenge in East Africa and has been a dominant wear in Tanzania and later Kenya and Somalia. It is also known as Java since it is worn in Indonesia.

Book References:

The Big Sea by Langston Hughes,
Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston
Historic Sketches of the South by Emma Langdon Roche
Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver by Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography by John Swed
Voyage of Clotilde
The New Negro by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston by Lynda Marion Hill
Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston
Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans From the Era of the Slave Trade by Philip Curtin
Prince among Slaves: The True Story of an African Prince Sold into Slavery in the American South by Terry Alford
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The American Slave by George P. Rawick

Good Quotes:

First Line: The African slave trade is the most dramatic chapter in the story of human existence
Last Line: But he is full of trembling awe before the altar of the past.
Watermelon, like too many other gorgeous things in life, is much too fleeting. Chp IV
De wife she de eyes to de man’s soul. Chp XII Alone
The present was too urgent to let the past intrude. Chp XII Alone

Table of Contents:

Foreword: Those Who Love Us Never Leave Us Alone with Our Grief: Reading Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" Alice Walker xi
Introduction xv
Editor's Note xxix
Barracoon

Preface 3
Introduction 5
I 17
II The King Arrives 25
III 33
IV 37
V 43
VI Barracoon 51
VII Slavery 59
VIII Freedom 65
IX Marriage 71

X Kossula Learns About Law 77
XI 83
XII Alone 91

Appendix 95

Takkoi or Attako-Children's Game 95
Stories Kossula Told Me 96
The Monkey and the Camel 101
Story of de Jonah 103
Now Disa Abraham Fadda de Faitful 106
The Lion Woman 107

Afterword and Additional Materials Edited Deborah G. Plant

Afterword 117
Acknowledgments 139
Founders and Original Residents of Africatown 145
Glossary 147
Notes 155
Bibliography 171
"In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" Alice Walker 175

Readers' Guide 203
More Zora Neale Hurston 207

References:

Publisher's Web Site for Book
Author's Web Site
Wikipedia-Book
Wikipedia-Author
Amazon-Book
Amazon-Author
Barnes and Noble
GoodReads-Book
GoodReads-Author
NPR Review
Smithsonian review of Barraccon
Smithsonian May 22, 2019 article on the Clotilda
Atlantic review May 2018
Vox review
University of Alabama at Birmingham Human Rights blog
Updated Jan 3, 2021 form AP News

Sunday, January 10, 2021

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Book: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Basic Information : Synopsis : Expectations : Thoughts : Evaluation : Book Group : New Words : Book References : Good Quotes : Table of Contents : References

Basic Information:

Author: Bill Bryson

Edition: ePub on Libby from the Mountain View Public Library

Publisher: Broadway Books

ISBN: 076790818X (ISBN13: 9780767908184)

Start Date: December 19, 2020

Read Date: January 10,2021

544 pages

Genre: History, Science,

Language Warning: None

Rated Overall: 3 out of 5

Synopsis:

Bryson walks us through the history of discovery in two parts. The first is how the universe is thought to have been created, from the Big Bang to how the continents have come together.

He then takes us through the beginnings of life to the current day.

He also walks us through the various fits and starts of how science has developed this picture of our universe.

Expectations:

Recommendation: Osher
When: December 7, 2020
Date Became Aware of Book: A while back
How come do I want to read this book: Osher book club book

Thoughts:

INTRODUCTION

Bryson starts off by noting how random chance brought us to where we are today. Bryson had a grade school science book where he became curious about” how did scientists know” what was being said in the book. To Bryson, the greatest of all amazements—how scientists work things out. Bryson decided to dedicate part of his life to reading books and journals and finding saintly, patient experts prepared to answer a lot of outstandingly dumb questions.

PART I LOST IN THE COSMOS

1 How to Build a Universe

He gets into how large and small, short and long everything physically is and how it starts.

This is where he starts to be cute. He tries to describe in a sentence or two the status of the universe-inflationary or static? But he is a bit loose in his terms such as the edge of creation. He seems to be taking a very artistic use of terms, rather than terms to describe. Sort of confusing From this term, I was wondering how far into the Creation vs Evolution argument he was going to get.

Once again, he almost gets religious on me: from nothing, our universe begins You almost think he has read Genesis. But upon reflection, maybe that is how his book will be presented.

He talks about the beginnings of the universe taking three minutes. I wonder what time really means in that context? Definitely not in relationship with our day. With things exploding (expanding) at the speed of light, time is different. But we humans need to have some sort of time context.

He talks about how AT&T scientists realized that the hiss they were hearing on space radio was the leftover sound of the beginnings of the universe.

… disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang.

He quotes a Stanford scientist, Dr Andrei Linde: These are very close to religious questions when asked about how things went from nothing to everything. See my comment above. Maybe all things dealing with beginnings have to have a religious context.

10⁴³ seconds At least in the ebook version, it seems like the minus sign always gets dropped. I think what he really meant was 10^-43 The seconds he quotes is just under 685 million years. Later on he writes it out as a decimal place. Things like this makes me suspicious of other things Bryson writes, or at least how it is presented in this book. By the way, it is the same thing a couple more paragraphs later.

Byrson talks about that gravity formed quickly, but not initially after the beginning explosion. He notes that if the gravitational pull had been stronger or weaker, what we know would not have been. Is this because of changes in mass and density? Or that the actual forces which the gravitational equations use changed?

And then Bryson sets science back 500 years by saying We are all at the center of it all. And then he hedges his statement by saying scientists assume we are not the center.

2 Welcome to the Solar System

Our telescopes usually are pointed to only a small portion of the sky at any one time. Consequently if we see something, it may be that we are looking at something just at the right time. Also the skies are not as crisp as the artist renderings make it.

Bryson talks a lot about Pluto as a planet. But most astronomers have now degraded it. So I do not know what that does to the moon Bryson starts the chapter with.

He goes on and talks about the Kuipler belt where many of the comments come from.

He also talks about the relative distances the planets are from each other. He takes us on a hypothetical trip to the limits of the solar system. And we are still finding more. The point to remember, of course, is that when considering the universe at large we don’t actually know what is in our own solar system

3 The Reverend Evans's Universe

Reverend Robert Evans-amateur astronomer from Australia, finder of supernovae

Talks about neutron stars and how they are formed. Also talked about dark mass.

Evans makes a statement the absence of evidence is evidence. Which on the surface seems a bit like if I keep my eyes closed, that is evidence of some kind. But what he is talking about is if you find x number of phenomena in a y amount of time. That can tell you how much is out there. Also if you do not find that phenomena in a location, then you may start wondering about the distribution-both time and location-wise.

New technology is downgrading the need for night-time observers like Evans. Now even amateurs are finding supernovae with charge-coupled devices. “With CCDs you can aim a telescope at the sky and go watch television,” Evans said with a touch of dismay. “It took all the romance out of it.” There is a bit of sadness to it. Somehow sending a drone into space which detects a great deal of phenomena will never have the impact which a Neil Armstrong planting a flag on the moon.

Talking about if Alpha Centauri went supernova-being 4,3 light years away. What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones. The answer is we would never know about it. The moment light hit us, so would destruction. It would blow away our protection atmosphere, leaving us defenseless to the sun’s rays, let along from the supernova’s. None of our neighbors are candidates for this phenomena.

He then goes on and talks a bit about formation from supernova.

PART II THE SIZE OF THE EARTH

4 The Measure of Things

Talks about a 1735 expedition to Peru to figure out distances in the Andes and possibly the world. This expedition was one which fell apart from the beginnings. Bryson puts in, I hope tongue in cheek, that the fact that eighteenth-century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

Why do the planets go into elliptical orbits? Hooke, Halley, Wren and eventually Newton would be involved. From this, Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy was written. Speaking of this, Bryson says Once in a great while, a few times in history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected that people can’t quite decide which is the more amazing—the fact or the thinking of it. In it is stated the three laws of motion. The Royal Society backed out of publishing it as they had a recent flop. Halley published by himself.

Richard Norwood worked out a pretty close number for the distance of a degree.

Talks about the measurements of Mason and Dixon.

Interesting information, since I love topo maps. Charles Hutton had invented contour lines

Henry Cavendish-resided at Clapham. Being a recluse, I do not suppose he had any connection with the Clapham people who eventually abolished slavery in Great Britan. He got much of Thermodynamics right before the laws were formulated. He discovered hydrogen. He also figured out the weight of the earth to within 1%.

5 The Stone-Breaker

Talks about the beginning of geology. How did things like seashells end up high up in the mountains. Geology in its infancy in the early 1800’s generated a lot of non-scientist interest. Sort of an early crowd-sourcing. Title “stone-breaker” comes from how those who were trying to do geological work called themselves. Talks about Charles Lyell. Byrson talks a little bit about how wrong Bishop Ussher’s dating was. Which leads into dating of the earth.

6 Science Red in Tooth and Claw

In 1787 the first dinosaur bone was found in America near Woodbury, New Jersey. More bones are found in various places and they are put together in a rather haphazard way. Once it was figured out that fossils could help date the layers of rock, then they started to figure out where the relative layers of earth were.

Bryson goes into another attack on how and why things in the Bible could not be correct.

Also he talks about rivalries and jealousies between paleontologists such as Huxley, Owens, and Matrell. These were English. But Americans had their own wars. Seldom—perhaps never—has science been driven forward more swiftly and successfully by animosity

7 Elemental Matters

Time to talk chemistry.

I am hoping that in trying to be cute, Bryson is just confusing. He talks about the difference between organic and inorganic chemistry. In there he talks about a mystery substance, an elan vital. His confusing statement concerning elan vital is: ... it existed in some substances but not others, which is why we ended up with two branches of chemistry: organic (for those substances that were thought to have it) and inorganic (for those that did not). As far as I can tell, during the next page, he says nothing about carbon, which is the difference. And according to the ACS (I think the American Chemical [or Chemistry] Society), it is not just life giving properties, but also things like paint, petrochemicals, and explosives.

He talks about the atom. He gives a brief, very brief comment on Avagado’s Principle without mentioning the number 6.023x10²³. This is the number of atoms in a standard unit weight of a chemical. Bryson talks about the width of an atom, which he says is very small-yes it is.

Bryson talks about how the names of elements were standardized. And then about the Periodic Table. Byrson says that what is certain is that anything that is found will fit neatly into Mendeleyev’s great scheme.

He talks about discovering radiation-Henri Becquerel and Marie Curie with assistance from Pierre Curie.

PART III A NEW AGE DAWNS

8 Einstein's Universe

Michelson and Morley removed the need for space being ether. Also shows that light is always measured at the same speed. Talks about Max Plank figuring out quantum mechanics. This leads to Einstein and relativity. Einstein produced a paper called “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. It had no footnotes or citations, contained almost no mathematics, made no mention of any work that had influenced or preceded it, and acknowledged the help of just one individual, a colleague at the patent office named Michele Besso. The formula E=mc² Would follow in a subsequent paper a few months later.

And then Einstein’s most important ideas came to fruit.”Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity.” This implied a universe which was not static. To correct this problem, Einstein put in a factor-which was not needed. It was discovered that stars are moving away from the center of the universe.

Hubble was set on determining how old the universe is. He computed how quickly stars were moving away and then took some good estimates on how far away a star was. He used several other people’s work to come up with these figures.

9 The Mighty Atom

Distilling a lot of science: Richard Feynman: All things are made of atoms. Bryson goes on and talks about how we are all made out of reused atoms. I am surprised that Bryson did not use this quote from Alan Sandage;s The Creation of the Universe:

Every single atom in your body was once inside a star

John Dalton figured out the basics of atoms, not how they are made up, but they being small particulars each unique in their own weight. Then talks about Rutherford and his contributions to figuring out radioactivity. Bryson then goes into explaining about the makeup of an atom. He does a good job of explaining that a neutron does not affect the identity of an atom, only its weight. He also talks about how most of an atom is empty space. But what is there is very dense.

And here he starts to get into explaining quantums and how electrons are not really little balls which spin around in an orbit but as Bryson says more as fan blades as being everywhere at once.

And then there is one of my more favorite theory’s, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. And then the cat I cannot get my head around-Schrodinger’s cat.

All of this leads to the fact that we will never be able to observe certain things because the moment we observe we have displaced.

The upshot of all of this is you had two laws, and I would say a third one, to govern how the universe operated:

Quantum mechanics for very small items
Relativity for very large
My third is thermodynamics for the middle.

10 Getting the Lead Out

Talked about how lead was in almost any product in the early 1900’s. There was knowledge of it having negative health effects. But it was also easy to use and cheap to add to products to make them perform better. Then CFC’s are talked about.

And then the Carbom-14 test to date when things were done. But To begin with, it was discovered that one of the basic components of Libby’s formula [Libby was the person who figured out about Carbon-14 dating] , known as the decay constant, was off by about 3 percent. By this time, however, thousands of measurements had been taken throughout the world. Rather than restate every one, scientists decided to keep the inaccurate constant. So all dates we read today are about 3% older than recorded. This sort of means that you have a compromise for truth vs expediency’s sake.

And then there are other reasons why Carbon-14 dating can be off. We now know that the volume of atmospheric carbon-14 varies depending on how well or not Earth’s magnetism is deflecting cosmic rays, and that that can vary significantly over time. This means that some carbon-14 dates are more dubious than others. This is particularly so with dates just around the time that people first came to the Americas, which is one of the reasons the matter is so perennially in dispute. Is carbon-14 dating still used? According to Wikipedia, it sounds like it still is. Sounds like the best way to think about Carbon-14 dating is as an approximation.

By using Potassium-40, Arthur Holmes was able to date the earth at 4.55 billion years.

Bryson gets back to testing to see if lead was harmful.

11 Muster Mark's Quarks

Starts off by talking about particle accelerators. These found all sorts of subatomic particles.

And he goes again and talks about 10²⁴ (instead of 10-²⁴ ) seconds. He does write it out as decimals, so it is clear what he is trying to go after.

Going after subatomic particles is expensive. Not sure what we get out of it, except for understanding.

Interesting that he quotes Leon Lederman to say: We don’t really see the creator twiddling twenty parameters to create the universe as we know it. I know that Lederman is not talking about the Christian God as creator, still it is interesting to see that it gets very hard to get away from the creator image.

He talks about the Standard Model, and acknowledges that it is at least incomplete, if without a type of mathematical beauty. He then goes on and talks a bit like string theory. This seems less clarifying for us laymen and sounding more like making up stuff. This seems to be the consensus of physicists. One says it is hard for the layman to differentiate between the weird and crackpot theories.

And on the large scale, scientists still squabble over the age of the universe. Still the squabbling is in terms of 10 or 20 billion, not 4,000 years. And then the fact is, there is a great deal, even at quite a fundamental level, that we don’t know—not least what the universe is made of. To add to the confusion, we also talk about dark matter-stuff we think is there, but cannot sense.

12 The Earth Moves

Talking about Continental Drift-better to be called plate tectonics. There were a lot of explanations to get around finding similar rocks and fossil formations on either side of the Atlantic.

Another problem bearing on this was if the rivers had been carrying silt for all the millions of years, where was it all going? There should be enough silt to cover any formations underwater. But that was not true.

And then there was the problem that a long underwater mountain range going down the Atlantic Ocean, arcing through the Indian and then back up the Pacific Ocean was found. This was determined to be pretty old. But alongside it, there was a long canyon in the Atlantic with young material. Harry Hess realized that this was new ocean crust being formed.

Magnetic changes in the earth also were fitting a pattern of continents being together.

The reason why it is better called plate tectonics is that it is not just continents which are part of this change. Portions of land mass within continents change as well. Example they gave was part of Antarctica may have been part of the Appalachians in America. A fragment of Staten island in New York came from Africa.

This leads to earthquakes.

But do continents move as a whole or is it more like a sand going over a conveyor belt?

PART IV DANGEROUS PLANET

13 Bang!

Manson, IW - large asteroid hit at least 2.5 million years ago. Gigantic blast. But now it is worn down so not much is left.

Talks about Shoemaker and Levy’s work of looking for space debris which may impact the earth.

Near misses happen several times a week without us knowing about them.

And then there is the iridium layer of dust throughout the world which the Alveraz’s found. This indicated a world wide catsophere. This brings us back to Manson. It was shown that this was not the cause of the iridium. But another crater was found around the Yucatan. Then coming back to Shoemaker and Levy, a comet hit Jupiter, showing what kind of effect an impact of a comet or an asteroid would have.

If an asteroid was headed towards earth today, how much warning would we have? Probably none, or nothing which would help us any. Bryson goes into a possible scenario of being hit by an asteroid-pretty devastating.

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

14 The Fire Below

Talks about finding the fossil bed at Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park. You usually find fossils in dry, hot places with exposed rock, not in the middle of a prairie. The ash which killed all of the animals found here was from a volcanic explosion in Yellowstone.

This leads us to the unstable core of the earth and the mantle we live on. It was deduced when a shockwave from a Guatemalan earthquake sent off waves which seemed to bounce off at an unexpected angle.

Now we come to measure earthquakes and what has been known as the Reitcher (Richter scale) scale. Bryson notes that this is an arbitrary measure of the Earth’s tremblings based on surface measurements. It rises exponentially, so that a 7.3 quake is fifty times more powerful than a 6.3 earthquake and 2,500 times more powerful than a 5.3 earthquake. Is Bryson right that this each order is 50 times more powerful, not 100? According to WIkipedia: This was later revised and renamed the local magnitude scale, denoted as ML or M_L . Because of various shortcomings of the M_L  scale, most seismological authorities now use other scales, such as the moment magnitude scale (M_w ), This was later revised and renamed the local magnitude scale, denoted as ML or M_L . Because of various shortcomings of the M_L  scale, most seismological authorities now use other scales, such as the moment magnitude scale (M_w ),

Tokyo-the city waiting to die (Bill McGuire) due to the pent up demand for an earthquake.

The earth is made up of four layers: rocky outer crust, a mantle of hot viscous rock, a liquid outer core, and solid inner core. There is varying depth of the crust-some places which was unexpected. Recently there was the discovery of convection beneath the earth surface.

15 Dangerous Beauty

Bob Christinsen was wondering, if Yellowstone was created by volcanic activity, where was the volcano? When he saw a satellite photo, he realized the whole park was the caldera.

Talks about different types of volcanoes.

Goes into Yellowstone some more.

When a supervolcano blows, there will be a long volcanic winter world wide, maybe around six years.

When you go to a park like Yellowstone (or Yosemite, or …) you accept the risk that something could happen.

PART V LIFE ITSELF

16 Lonely Planet

We live in a world where much of life exists outside of the boundaries of extremes. We do not live in the high elevations or the depths of the sea. In the extreme cold of the pols and the heat of the deserts. We create artificial environments to stand these extremes. Bryson lists conditions which made this planet just right for us:

Excellent location
The right kind of planet
Twin Planet (the moon)
Timing

17 Into the Troposphere

Bryson starts talking about the atmosphere. He names the various layers of atmosphere: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and ionosphere (or thermosphere). He points out that even at 120 miles thick, it is a pretty thin layer of protection.

Bryson makes a comment to show how protective our atmosphere is. He says that Even raindrops would pound us senseless if it weren’t for the atmosphere’s slowing drag. I think he gets carried away here trying to show an example of how protective it is. But really, if we had no atmosphere, we would not have any raindrops to cut through us.

Interesting: When you see the top of a storm cloud flattening out into the classic anvil shape, you are looking at the boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere.

Bryson goes on and talks about weather. He also talks about the carbon cycle.

18 The Bounding Main

Onward to the discussion of water. He talks about some of the properties of water and how ubiquitous it is. It is vital to us to live. The oceans are not level, so there is not really a set sea level-there is a standard though. Wonder what that standard is?

Talks about early exploration of the depths of the ocean.

Oceans were viewed as dumping places. Especially radioactive waste. But also we have considered the oceans as inexhaustible. They are not.

19 The Rise of Life

How did life begin? A graduate student in the 1950’s was able to simulate the elements which would be building blocks for life. But Repeating Miller’s experiments with these more challenging inputs has so far produced only one fairly primitive amino acid. At all events, creating amino acids is not really the problem. The problem is proteins.

To make a protein is highly complex involving hundreds if not thousands of amino acids in the right way. Here Bryson dances on the edge of saying that life is almost impossible to begin, something like only 1 out of 10²⁶⁰ possibilities if hitting the right combination. Paul Davies noted If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place.

One sort of wonders if some sort of intelligence put them together.

Bryson’s other explanation is from Richard Dawkins saying that there was a trial forming of small groups to see what worked. Then more and more complex.

And then he says that life itself ... demonstrate[s] repeatedly that complexity is a natural, spontaneous, entirely commonplace event. There may or may not be a great deal of life in the universe at large, ... Complexity is not what happens naturally. At least in chemistry, things try for the simplest arrangement. You do not get H₄O₂ when H₂O will work. Even the sugar molecules as complex as they are are not like the ones Bryson is talking about.

When Bryson talks about how powerful the impulse it is to assemble in nature, what does he mean? Where is this impulse? He quotes a Nobel laureate (de Duve) saying there is an obligatory manifestation to do this. What makes it obligatory?

One possibility of where all of this came from is outer space on a meteorite.

How do scientists know about early life? From carbon remains, not fossils or any such items.

Bryson describes the atmosphere of ancient earth as being non-conducive to current life. That oxygen is fundamentally toxic often comes as a surprise to those of us who find it so convivial to our well-being, but that is only because we have evolved to exploit it. Describes the beginning form of life. How did we get oxygen? Tiny little creatures gradually created oxygen until the earth’s atmosphere had about 20% oxygen. Then more complex organisms could start to develop. As time passed, two types of organisms developed: those we gave off oxygen (plants for example) and those which consumed it (animals).

Of course someplace along the lines, we have to ask, what is life?

20 Small World

Onward to microbes.

Bryson opens with this: If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains—about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of skin you shed every day, plus all the tasty oils and fortifying minerals that seep out from every pore and fissure. You are for them the ultimate food court, with the convenience of warmth and constant mobility thrown in. Lovely! Bryson points out we cannot escape microbes. That This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.

It is hard to replicate what they do. They are everywhere and can live in such extremes, we would perish-airlessness, heat, cold, … We tend to categorize life as either animal or botanical. Bryson points out that microbes and the like is ever so much more extensive than both of those combined. Even among bacteria there are distinguishing differences which says that they are not bacteria, but something which mimics it.

Quotes Jared Diamond (read most of his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, but I think he is quoting from Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies)

Bryson talks about our bodies defenses-white blood cells.

Bacteria and viruses also have an unnerving capacity to burst upon the world in some new and startling form and then to vanish again as quickly as they came. Ironic that our OSHER class read this book during the COVID-19 pandemic which came on in just a few months and will last for who knows how long. Sort of line the pandemic of 1918. In the United States, the first deaths were recorded among sailors in Boston in late August 1918, but the epidemic quickly spread to all parts of the country.

21 Life Goes On

We now read about fossils. He talks about how one bone in a billion gets fossilized, let alone found. This raises the question about distribution. Why are there some places where many fossils are found? Also 95% of the fossils we have today were marine animals.

As a note, Bryson seems to think that all religious thinking is against science. More from a couple of comments he makes.

Also interesting is the argument among those who are evolutionists about various interpretations. Almost sounds like a religious war from Bryson’s descriptions.

22 Good-bye to All That

Another item which few of us consider: lichen. In Antartica, here are four hundred types of them. The world has more than twenty thousand species of lichens. Lichens are slow growing. A lichen about the size of a quarter may be 50 years old.

Bryson gets a little philosophical about lichen. They do not seem to have a lot of ambition to take over. This is perhaps a little odd because life has had plenty of time to develop ambitions. Or are humans the odd ones? Also what gives it this ambition? Is it just a chemical reaction?

He has an interesting clock showing how little time land creatures have been around. He notes that the fact is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Sort of depressing that if you follow a mechanical universe all which you are left with is just a record of your existence, maybe, if it can be found. The alternative to extinction is stagnation,” says Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History, “and stagnation is seldom a good thing in any realm.”

For the most part, we do not know why extinctions happen-massive solar flare, asteroids, … We also do not know why certain species survived while others were obliterated. Stephen Jay Gould expressed it succinctly in a well-known line: “Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured—never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history

He takes a flying leap bring us from the oceans to land masses with plant life.

Four points Bryson makes about life:

Life wants to be
Life does not always want much
Life goes extinct from time to time
Life goes on

Sounds a bit like religious thought than scientific. What drives this Life which Bryson talks about? What gives it this drive?

23 The Richness of Being

Talks about the London Museum of Natural History-how it has samples of almost everything discovered.

And then he goes on to mosses.

Talking about Carl vonLinne who thought he was the greatest. Bryson gives an interesting line: It was never wise to question his generous self-assessments. Those who did so were apt to find they had weeds named after them. vonLinne is the one who gave us plant classifications. Even now, there are oftentimes the same species has been named twice. We do not know how many species there are currently on earth-on estimate is 1.5 to 1.8 million. We have no universal systematized knowledge base of this. I wonder if there is one now, 20 years later?

Most living things on earth are small and can be easily overlooked. if your pillow is six years old—which is apparently about the average age for a pillow—it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of “sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung,” to quote the man who did the measuring. If a pillow has this, what about the rest of the earth.

We are still finding large quantities of new species.

We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way

24 Cells

Talking about cells. From Bryson’s comments, he edges on the thought that each cell is interchangeable in your body and each cell can perform the function of any other cell. I think what he is trying to cell is that each cell has a function which allows it to work with other cells to form your body.

He talks about nitrous oxide as being something your body cannot live without-there is not a disclaimer that it is used in a special way in the body and is not compatible to be administered other ways.

Most cells are good for a day or two before they die and are discarded. Brain cells last a lifetime. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all youngsters. Meaning that most of our cells are very new.

He goes through how cells were observed.

He describes cancer as a cell division gone wrong.

Is this true? 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

25 Darwin's Singular Notion

Talked about Charles Darwin. Turns out that his father-in-law was Josiah Wedgwood. Wedgewood was not only a pottery maker as Bryson notes, but was an abolitionist and followed WIlbur Wilberforce. Also Wedgewood was a devout Christian. Just interesting the connections. Darwin tried law instead, but found that insupportably dull. He had also tried medicine, but could not stand the blood or the surgery. Darwin got invited along on the Beagle to be the Captain’s dining and conversation partner. FitzRoy’s formal assignment was to chart coastal waters, but his hobby—passion really—was to seek out evidence for a literal, biblical interpretation of creation.

Bryson goes through how Darwin’s ideas had a cool reception among the scientific folks of his time. Sort of interesting that as much flack as the religious got, the scientists also had a hard time accepting his theories.

William Paley in 1802 and known as argument from design.

Bryson notes that even though the title of his book is On the Origin of Species, Darwin does not explain how species originates, rather how they evolve. Even then it took Mendel to explain how traits continued in a species instead of being diluted. Neither of them initiallyproposed that we are descended from apes. Darwin eventually did, but much later.

26 The Stuff of Life

Bryson talks about inbreeding, but uses the term incest. He says that You couldn’t be here without a little incest—actually quite a lot of incest—albeit at a genetically discreet remove. He shows that someplace along the lines we are all related in some fashion, from a statistical view. But is that really incest? According to Wikipedia, it definitely is in the case of first degree. But beyond a third-degree, it is not seen as incest. So what does Bryson mean?

Much has been made in recent years of the unraveling of the human genome. Bryson says that all humans have a different genome. Isn’t what being said by the human genome is more the components and what makes each part of us function? Not that we are all the same.

Bryson goes on and talks about what is a genome. But is it like a sentence with letters so the combinations have length? He talks like it does”: every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, He says there are only four components, but the length of the message makes it unique. He then talks about RNA or ribonucleic acid, which acts as an interpreter between the two (DNA and proteins).

Both peas and fruit flies have been used to determine how mutations work.

Once again rival scientists dish each other’s work.

As the understanding of the structure of DNA grew, it looked like there was a lot of the sequence of DNA which was not used. Sometimes when the DNA is broken apart and reconnected, they do not connect right. This can cause a susceptibility to a disease or illness, or it can mean a benefit. Also as scientists experimented with DNA, they concluded that it seemed like much of a species is to generate DNA, not just their own, but anything they could match with. Life, it appeared, was drawn up from a single set of blueprints. Why do the same genres turn into different part of the body? It is the hox genes that instruct them, and they do it for all organisms in much the same way.

PART Vl THE ROAD TO US

27 Ice Time

1816-year without a summer because of a volcanic eruption in Indonesian, Sumbawa.

There was the beginning of understanding how powerful glaciers are. Agassiz was the first evangelist of this idea. Gwen Schultz has noted that It is not necessarily the amount of snow that causes ice sheets but the fact that snow, however little, lasts. Bryson traces the cycle of ice ages including the world freezing over.

In the cycles of ice age and calm, they come in about 8,000 year cycles. We have passed its ten thousandth anniversary. The fact is, we are still very much in an ice age.

At the end of this thousand-year onslaught average temperatures leapt again, by as much as seven degrees in twenty years, which doesn’t sound terribly dramatic but is equivalent to exchanging the climate of Scandinavia for that of the Mediterranean in just two decades.

A self-induced global warming may not have the consequences we would hope for. It may just provide for greater instability. Elizabeth Kolbert says the last thing you’d want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it. It being the Earth its climate.

28 The Mysterious Biped

In search of the earliest humanoids. Various early man parts were found and discounted. Bryson traces various finds and the early struggles to put them in the right chronological and geographical orders. Also are they human or ape or some crossover? And then there is the uneven distribution across time and location.

Talks about Lucy.

And then about the discovery of footprints by Leaky. The New York Museum has a diorama. The tableau is done with such conviction that it is easy to overlook the consideration that virtually everything above the footprints is imaginary.

Being upright has a number of disadvantages-not as fast, cannot climb as well, childbirth is problematic. But Faced with attack, modern humans have only two advantages. We have a good brain, with which we can devise strategies, and we have hands with which we can fling or brandish hurtful objects. We are the only creature that can harm at a distance. We can thus afford to be physically vulnerable.

29 The Restless Ape

Tools and tool making is included in this chapter. Talks about Neandertals and homo sapiens being around the same time frame in the same locations, but unknown about relationships.

There are a couple different theories about human development. One has it that there are at least a couple of different stocks humans have developed from-this could lead into racist naratives. This is from a thought that human evolution has been continuous. Another is that we are missing steps in our examination of human development.

A note about, it does raise the question in my mind about what to do with science and data which leads to a hypothesis which is out of step with societal norms? If it was shown that different races ascended from different homo species, what do we do with the implications? Do we call the people who are reporting on a shown hypothesis as being racists and let it go at that? Or do we follow things to a conclusion, even if it is uncomfortable?

Acheulean tools: the type site of Saint-Acheul, is an archaeological industry of stone tool manufacture characterized by distinctive oval and pear-shaped "hand-axes" associated with Homo erectus and derived species such as Homo heidelbergensis.

Mitochondrial DNA : the DNA located in mitochondria, cellular organelles within eukaryotic cells that convert chemical energy from food into a form that cells can use, adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Mitochondrial DNA is only a small portion of the DNA in a eukaryotic cell; most of the DNA can be found in the cell nucleus and, in plants and algae, also in plastids such as chloroplasts.

Mitochondrial DNA showed that we are not descended from Neandertals, and probably have things in common enough that we are descended from common ancestry, not from different homo species. But there are also anomalies in this as well.

The bottom line is that there are, or at least was 20 years ago, things which we do not understand under one set of theories or another set of theories. None of it is consistent. Depending on how you trace back the various DNA, you go back to various different places.

30 Good-bye

In talking about extinction, Bryson says that there is no better way to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of human beings than the bringing forth of Newton’s Principia or the man-caused extinction of the dodo bird.I wonder about the use of the words divine and felonious. Are these used in a specific way? Or are they more words which are used for effect? They both appeal to something beyond ourselves.

The question that arises is whether the disappearances of the Stone Age and disappearances of more recent times are in effect part of a single extinction event—whether, in short, humans are inherently bad news for other living things. Or are there other explanations?

Bryson’s conclusion is that if you were designing a universe, you would not put humans in charge of managing it. Very much a dig at the Genesis story. I have a slightly different take. We were given the mission of naming the animals and to manage the world. From what Bryson is describing, we have gone overboard on the naming and cataloging and collecting of specimens, but failed at the managing part. What Bryson did not bring up was the other part of the equation which Genesis talks about-our fallenness corrupted the plan. Bryson’s conclusion is It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. If you follow what Bryson says throughout the book, the supreme achievement would not follow. If as he alludes to there is life out there and it may be abundant, it would follow that there are probably beings more advanced than us.

From Byrson, the conclusion is that it is luck for us to be here and luck for us to continue. I think I would rather believe in a God who created us and wants us to continue.

Evaluation:

Bill Bryson is a master wordsmith. You can read and hear his words and become enchanted. That includes this book as well. But is this the type of book which you want a storyteller to tell?

He takes us through the beginnings of the universe, the Big Bang and works his way first through the creation of matter, then how solar systems were put together. Then our own solar system. Finally how our own planet was formed and continues to change. Then he talks about what life looked like at the start and then built. Not only built, but had several fits and starts and rebuilds. Till finally we are where we are at now. About ⅓ of the book is about the creation of the biology of this planet.

Does Bryson’s book, A Short History of Nearly Everything deliver on what the title suggests?First, coming in at 500+ pages, it is not “short”, even though you can argue it could be every so much longer. Next, I think he delivers on about half of “everything”. He goes through the creation of the Universe and the physics and chemistry well. He also talks about the evolution of life on earth. Is that everything? What about humans themselves? Such as psychology or sociology? History, religion and philosophy? And all the other “ologies”?

One thing which Bryson does is give an overview of how the science behind his subjects evolved. You learn that discovery and understanding are non-linear, and there are a lot of regressions as well as development. There are feuds, and temper tantrums among the scientists. One question which I was left with was, with all of the fits and starts the development of scientific thought has, how can we say our current set of descriptions are adequate or correct?

I would have liked the book a bit better if Bryson had ended the book on what we do not know and hope to discover-even if it was twenty years ago, rather than we are lucky to exist at all and will be lucky to continue to exist. It seems like Bryson makes several quasi-religious appeals (people are both divine and felonious) then ends with the “lucky secular ending”. This all seems inconsistent.

The answer to my first question is No. I appreciate the way Bryson puts together words in this book. But there are times he gets too cutesy, about overtaken by his words, masking what he is trying to get across.I think the question is, would I rather read Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time, or this book by Bryson? Even though Bryson is an easier read than Hawkings, Hawkings I think I would trust to get the story right.

Notes from my book group:

Do you think Bryson was accurate in his reporting of the science in the recounting of the development of our current status of science?

When you encounter errors in a book, even if it is typographical, how does that change your perception of the book?

It has been twenty years since Bryson wrote this book. What has changed in the areas Bryson has talked about?

What place do amateurs scientists have in Bryson’s book? In today’s world, can amateurs do any significant science? What does it take to be a contributor? Is this of interest to you?

Does it surprise you that there were so many personal affronts happening in the world of science as Bryson reported? Do you know of any personal disagreements in today’s world of science? How do disagreements affect how the results of scientific work is viewed?

Bryson talks about how at times, earth has had very destructive events-sometimes it has happened in an instance such as a large meteorite or a prolonged period of cold or a volcanic explosion. What does this say about life on this planet? What does this say about what humans should expect? What does this say about how to live your own life?.

Bryson talks about how it was determined that Carbon-14 testing resulted in dates about 3% newer than actuality. It was decided not to adjust the dates on things previously dated. Why did they not adjust the dates? When you read this, what was your reaction to this “fidgeting” with dates?

Throughout the book, Bryson uses terms like “created by”, “powerful impulse”, “obligatory manifestation“, “allowed”, “drive”, “divine” … Are these just shortcomings in Bryson’s presentation or a recognition of the unexplained or something else?Why is it so hard to talk about science without talking about causes behind the science?

What is life?

It is an underlying theme of Bryson’s book that our understanding of our world is a developing one. The understanding has changed significantly, sometimes contradicting previous knowledge. When you view a scientific tenant of today, how do you evaluate how solid statements are made? How do you distinguish between what is solid and will not change versus that understanding which is evolving?

Where do you get your scientific information from? How do you judge its veracity?

What science did Bryson leave out of his book? Why did he not include things which are dealing with humans, such as psychology or sociology?