A short history of nearly everything

molecules in it, and in two minutes every one of them will have been drained dry and another billion will have taken their place. Every day you produce and use up a volume of ATP equivalent to about half your body weight. Feel the warmth of your skin. That’s your ATP at work.

When cells are no longer needed, they die with what can only be called great dignity. They take down all the struts and buttresses that hold them together and quietly devour their component parts. The process is known as apoptosis or programmed cell death. Every day billions of your cells die for your benefit and billions of others clean up the mess. Cells can also die violently-for instance, when infected-but mostly they die because they are told to. Indeed, if not told to live-if not given some kind of active instruction from another cell-cells automatically kill themselves. Cells need a lot of reassurance.

When, as occasionally happens, a cell fails to expire in the prescribed manner, but rather begins to divide and proliferate wildly, we call the result cancer. Cancer cells are really just confused cells. Cells make this mistake fairly regularly, but the body has elaborate mechanisms for dealing with it. It is only very rarely that the process spirals out of control. On average, humans suffer one fatal malignancy for each 100 million billion cell divisions. Cancer is bad luck in every possible sense of the term.

The wonder of cells is not that things occasionally go wrong, but that they manage everything so smoothly for decades at a stretch. They do so by constantly sending and monitoring streams of messages-a cacophony of messages-from all around the body: instructions, queries, corrections, requests for assistance, updates, notices to divide or expire. Most of these signals arrive by means of couriers called hormones, chemical entities such as insulin, adrenaline, estrogen, and testosterone that convey information from remote outposts like the thyroid and endocrine glands. Still other messages arrive by telegraph from the brain or from regional centers in a process called paracrine signaling. Finally, cells communicate directly with their neighbors to make sure their actions are coordinated.

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 father’s sake he tried to study medicine at Edinburgh University but couldn’t bear the blood and suffering. The experience of witnessing an operation on an understandably distressed child-this was in the days before anesthetics, of course-left him permanently traumatized. He tried law instead, but found that insupportably dull and finally managed, more or less by default, to acquire a degree in divinity from Cambridge.

A life in a rural vicarage seemed to await him when from out of the blue there came a more tempting offer. Darwin was invited to sail on the naval survey ship HMS Beagle, essentially as dinner company for the captain, Robert FitzRoy, whose rank precluded his socializing with anyone other than a gentleman. FitzRoy, who was very odd, chose Darwin in part because he liked the shape of Darwin’s nose. (It betokened depth of character, he believed.) Darwin was not FitzRoy’s first choice, but got the nod when FitzRoy’s preferred companion dropped out. From a twenty-first-century perspective the two men’s most striking joint feature was their extreme youthfulness. At the time of sailing, FitzRoy was only twenty-three, Darwin just twenty- two.

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. That Darwin was trained for the ministry was central to FitzRoy’s decision to have him aboard. That Darwin subsequently proved to be not only liberal of view but less than wholeheartedly devoted to Christian fundamentals became a source of lasting friction between them.

Darwin’s time aboard HMS Beagle, from 1831 to 1836, was obviously the formative experience of his life, but also one of the most trying. He and his captain shared a small cabin, which can’t have been easy as FitzRoy was subject to fits of fury followed by spells of simmering resentment. He and Darwin constantly engaged in quarrels, some “bordering on insanity,” as Darwin later recalled. Ocean voyages tended to become melancholy undertakings at the best of times-the previous captain of the Beagle had put a bullet through his brain during a moment of lonely gloom-and FitzRoy came from a family well known for a depressive instinct. His uncle, Viscount Castlereagh, had slit his throat the previous decade while serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer. (FitzRoy would himself commit suicide by the same method in 1865.) Even in his calmer moods, FitzRoy proved strangely unknowable. Darwin was astounded to learn upon the conclusion of their voyage that almost at once FitzRoy married a young woman to whom he had long been betrothed. In five years in Darwin’s company, he had not once hinted at an attachment or even mentioned her name.

In every other respect, however, the Beagle voyage was a triumph. Darwin experienced adventure enough to last a lifetime and accumulated a hoard of specimens sufficient to make his reputation and keep him occupied for years. He found a magnificent trove of giant ancient fossils, including the finest Megatherium known to date; survived a lethal earthquake in Chile; discovered a new species of dolphin (which he dutifully named Delphinus fitzroyi); conducted diligent and useful geological investigations throughout the Andes; and developed a new and much-admired theory for the