A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters, Book 12 of 2022

Each semester, I read a book on evolution with the Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. Until two years ago, the group met Mondays at noon in one of the college houses.  Since March of 2020, like so much of the world, we meet on Zoom. 

The group is mostly retired scientists, but there are also people like me who worked in science museums, libraries and even a few artists and business people.  The group has existed since the 90s. Stephen Jay Gould once visited the campus for a talk and sat in with the group.  Over the years we have read Gould, Richard Dawkins, Charles Darwin, and many of the luminaries of evolution. Most of the books focus on biology. Some, like Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, are sweeping histories.  

The current book, A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters, is a sweeping history focused on geology. Andrew H. Knoll writes with the wit and brilliance his title promises.  His outline is by subject, rather than chronology, but flows from the earth's beginnings to our current state.

The chapters:

1. Chemical Earth
2. Physical Earth
3. Biological Earth
4. Oxygen Earth
5. Animal Earth
6. Green Earth
7. Catastrophic Earth
8. Human Earth

Each chapter presents the development of earth in a different frame, but the narrative tracks the development of earth from the beginning to the present.  Chemical earth explains some basic chemistry and how chemistry determined the history of the planet we live on.  Knoll focuses on zircons and how they help to show the age of the earth and details of earth's history.  Zircons bond with uranium which allows radiation dating. Knoll ends the chapter:

The remarkable drama of Earth's birth--accretion from ancient star stuff, global melting and differentiation that shaped our planet's interior, the formation of oceans and atmosphere--played out on a timescale of 100 million years or less. By 4.4 billion years ago, Earth had recognizably become a rocky planet bathed by water beneath a veneer of air. ... Earth was swaddled by a thick atmosphere, but it was air without oxygen; human time travelers wouldn't last long on primitive Earth. The world we know of large continents, breathable air--and life--was yet to come.

With each succeeding chapter, the story moves forward through the past four billion years in smaller increments until the final chapter, the brief period that the earth has been home to us humans.   

In the chapter "Biological Earth" Knoll tells us how life developed with an emphasis on the oldest evidence of life.  There are traces of single-cell organisms from more than three billion years ago.   As I read of these shadows of life captured in rock, I thought of the many science deniers who are part of my life through family and the Army and other acquaintances.  

Earlier this year, I spoke with a family member who believes God sprinkled dinosaur bones around to make the earth look older, but really, the earth is just six thousand years old.  He knows no science, did not go to college, but believes he is smarter than every scientist since Isaac Newton. (Creationists like Newton.)

The Greeks said philosophy begins with θαυμαζειν, with Wonder.  Until the 19th century, what we call science was called Natural Philosophy.  Wonder is at the center of innovation in science. I wish I could feel the wonder Charles Darwin felt on Galapagos; the wonder I heard Richard Smalley describe when he said he could feel the 60-carbon atom Buckminsterfullene "snap" into spherical existence; the wonder Einstein must have felt when he knew he could prove Special Relativity. 

There is no wonder in science denial, none of the speechless state in awe of the beauty and majesty and surprise of the reality of nature, from Quarks to Quasars.  

Each year, I experience a little more of that wonder, reading books written by those who made the discoveries that more deeply and beautifully describe the depth and beauty of the natural world and cosmos.  

But I am left to wonder how anyone could turn their back on the wonder of life as it is and trade it for the dull, gray certainty of untested belief.  

First eleven books of 2022:

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

The Joy of Work: Packing Supplies for Ukraine

Taking a break for a selfie 

"Neil, we need four-inch bandages."

"Hey, Neil, we need compress bandages."

"Neil, tourniquets."

During the past two weeks I have spent several days in a warehouse in New Jersey packing emergency medical kits for people in Ukraine.  If you want to donate or volunteer visit the Razom for Ukraine website.

Yesterday, I became the guy who refills the boxes for the assembly line putting together the combat medical kits. I worked unwrapping tourniquets until one of the boxes of bandages was low. Then would take a box off of a pallet, cut it open and switch the empty for a full box.

Our assembly line

Nearly sixty years ago, when I was 12 years old, I started working summers and Saturdays at Food Center Wholesale Grocers in Charlestown, Massachusetts.  I swept floors and picked up trash in the two-acre warehouse with dozen of truck and railcar loading doors and shelves more than thirty feet tall.  I earned $1.60 per hour, paid taxes and paid into the Social Security account I have been getting checks from for more than six years.

For two decades, I worked in warehouses, loading docks and was a soldier. I liked working with my hands, but at age 32 I got a job as a writer at an ad agency and left labor for white collar work.  

Coming back to lifting boxes after all these years has been delightful. When I leave, I am sore and dirty and have the good feeling of being a part of something worthwhile.  While we pack supplies, we laugh, joke, and share the joy of doing something will truly help people who are under attack by an evil regime.  

The Five People I Would Love To Have Dinner With

Marie Curie after receiving the first of two Nobel Prizes

 A friend keeps a changing list of the five people she wants to have dinner with. It would be a one-time dinner party. The guests can be contemporary or from any time past. 

I like the idea and decided to make my own version. I get to pick the dinner venue and get to say at what age my guest joins the party. Even if they are living, I want to say at what age they are at dinner. At dinner, everyone is fluent in English, or maybe everyone is fluent in French, but no translators: we understand each other.

Also, I added a sixth guest whom I know is on the top of the guest list of the majority of the current world. 

 1.  Marie Curie at age 52. By the time Marie Curie was 52 years old, World War I had ended and she had achieved things no one thought possible.  In 1903 at age 34 she received the Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering research in radiation. Eight years later she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium. She was the only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes in science. When World War I broke out she organized mobile x-ray labs that saved as many as a million lives of wounded soldiers. I want to talk to her when that terrible war is over.

2. Theodor Herzl at age 38. He is called the founder of Israel, yet he died more than 40 years before Israel became a country in 1948.  Herzl was the founder of modern Zionism and inspired Jews around the world to see the possibility of a Jewish homeland after 2,000 years of exile. In 1898 he went to Jerusalem at the same time as the Kaiser of Germany went to petition the Kaiser for support for a Jewish homeland. I want to talk to him after that trip.

3. John F. Kennedy at age 44. With nuclear threats by Russia in the air, I want to talk to JFK after he faced down the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world was on the brink of nuclear war, and Kennedy brought the confrontation to a peaceful conclusion.  Nikita Krushchev was out of power within two years after losing to Kennedy.  There is a lot to love in what JFK did. 

4.  Alexis de Tocqueville at age 30. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville began a nine-month journey in America. He was 26. In 1835, when he was 30, the first volume of his Democracy in America was published.  This 900-page book is the single best work ever published on politics in the United States of America, maybe the best book about America, period. Abridged versions omit the heart-rending descriptions of slavery and the treatment of the First Americans. When I read it again, I will read the translation by Harvey Mansfield. His lectures on Tocqueville are wonderful.

5.  Thomas Jefferson at age 33. In his biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jon Meacham describes a man who in  addition to all of his other qualities was a wonderful dinner guest. He would stop at a rural tavern and eat with whomever was at the table. One man wrote he only found out much later that the man who was curious about everything and everyone was also the man who wrote The Declaration of Independence.  In 1776 when he wrote the founding document of America, Jefferson was 33. In his draft, Jefferson called for the abolition of slavery in the new nation. The Continental Congress removed the passage.  I would like to have Jefferson at dinner before he became the 3rd President of the U.S.  In a famous toast at a White House dinner in honor of 49 Nobel Prize winners, President John F. Kennedy said, 

“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” 

6. Volodymyr Zelenskyy this month. Courage is always admirable and the center of the universe on the subject of courage is the President and people of Ukraine.  At the beginning of 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky was the unpopular President of a poor country. Now he is Winston S. Churchill in Eastern Europe, the spokesperson for Democracy, the leader of the nation fought the Russian army to a standstill against every prediction. Zelenskyy is 44 years old. May he live to be 100.

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Where with the dinner take place?  At Maison Fournaise. I wrote about this restaurant earlier this week. It is a victim of COVID, but it can come back for this dinner.  We will eat on the porch where Renoir painted "The Boating Party."