CHAPTER 25 DARWIN’S SINGULAR NOTION

“Everyone is interested in pigeons . . .” quoted in Boorstin, Cleopatra’s Nose, p. 176.

“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching . . .” Quoted in Boorstin, The Discoverers, p. 467.

“The experience of witnessing an operation . . .” Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p. 27.

“some ‘bordering on insanity’ . . .” Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, p. 199.

“In five years . . . he had not once hinted . . .” Desmond and Moore, p. 197.

“atolls could not form in less than a million years . . .” Moorehead, Darwin and the Beagle, p. 239.

“It wasn’t until . . . Darwin was back in England . . .” Gould, Ever Since Darwin, p. 21.

“How stupid of me not to have thought of it!”Sunday Telegraph, “The Origin of Darwin’s Genius,” December 8, 2002.

“It was his friend the ornithologist John Gould . . .” Desmond and Moore, p. 209.

“These he expanded into a 230-page ‘sketch’ . . .”Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 5, p. 526.

“I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before.” Quoted in Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p. 239.

“Some wondered if Darwin himself might be the author.” Barber, p. 214.

“he could not have made a better short abstract.”Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 5, p. 528.

“This summer will make the 20th year (!) . . .” Desmond and Moore, pp. 454-55.

“whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.” Desmond and Moore, p. 469.

“all that was new in them was false . . .” Quoted by Gribbin and Cherfas, p. 150.

“Much less amenable to Darwin’s claim of priority . . .” Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile, p. 336.

“He referred to himself as “the Devil’s Chaplain’. . .” Cadbury, p. 305.

“felt ‘like confessing a murder.’ ” Quoted in Desmond and Moore, p. xvi.

“The case at present must remain inexplicable . . .” Quoted by Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 57.

“By way of explanation he speculated . . .” Gould, Ever Since Darwin, p. 126.

“Darwin goes too far.” Quoted by McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, p. 190.

“Huxley . . . was a saltationist . . .” Schwartz, pp. 81-82.

“The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder.” Quoted in Keller, The Century of the Gene, p. 97.

“absurd in the highest possible degree . . .” Darwin, On the Origin of Species (facsimile edition), p. 217.

“Darwin lost virtually all the support that still remained . . .” Schwartz, p. 89.

“It had a library of twenty thousand books . . .” Lewontin, It Ain’t Necessarily So, p. 91.

“known to have studied Focke’s influential paper . . .” Ridley, Genome, p. 44.

“Huxley had been urged to attend by Robert Chambers . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 79.

“bravely slogged his way through two hours of introductory remarks . . .” Clark, p. 142.

“One of his experiments was to play the piano to them . . .” Conniff, p. 147.

“Having married his own cousin . . .” Desmond and Moore, p. 575.

“Darwin was often honored in his lifetime . . .” Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin, p. 148.

Darwin’s theory didn’t really gain widespread acceptance . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p. 45.

“seemed set to claim Mendel’s insights as his own . . .” Schwartz, p. 187.

CHAPTER 26 THE STUFF OF LIFE

“roughly one nucleotide base in every thousand . . .” Sulston and Ferry, p. 198.

“The exceptions are red blood cells . . .” Woolfson, Life Without Genes, p. 12.

“guaranteed to be unique against all conceivable odds . . .” De Duve, vol. 2, p. 314.

“to stretch from the Earth to the Moon . . .” Dennett, p. 151.

“twenty million kilometers of DNA . . .” Gribbin and Gribbin, Being Human, p. 8.

“among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules . . .” Lewontin, p. 142.

“It was discovered as far back as 1869 . . .” Ridley, Genome, p. 48.

“DNA didn’t do anything at all . . .” Wallace et al., Biology: The Science of Life, p. 211.

“The necessary complexity, it was thought . . .” De Duve, vol. 2, p. 295.

“Working out of a small lab . . .” Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin, p. 259.

“no consensus ‘as to what the genes are’ . . .” Keller, p. 2.

“we are in much the same position today . . .” Wallace et al., p. 211.

“worth two Nobel Prizes . . .” Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, p. 327.

“not to give Avery a Nobel Prize.” White, Rivals, p. 251.

“a member of a highly popular radio program called The Quiz Kids . . .” Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation, p. 46.

“without my learning any chemistry . . .” Watson, The Double Helix, p. 28.

“the results of which were obtained ‘fortuitously’ . . .” Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p. 356.

“In a severely unflattering portrait . . .” Watson, The Double Helix, p. 26.

“in the summer of 1952 she posted a mock notice . . .” White, Rivals, p. 257; and Maddox, p. 185.

“apparently without her knowledge or consent.” PBS website, “A Science Odyssey,” undated.

“Years later Watson conceded. . .” Quoted in Maddox, p. 317.

“a 900-word article by Watson and Crick titled ‘A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.’ ” De Duve, vol. 2, p. 290.

“It received a small mention in the News Chronicle . . .” Ridley, Genome, p. 50.

“Franklin rarely wore a lead apron . . .” Maddox, p. 144.

“It took over twenty-five years . . .” Crick, What Mad Pursuit, p. 74.

“That Was the Molecular Biology That Was.” Keller, p. 25.

“rather like the keys of a piano . . .”National Geographic, “Secrets of the Gene,” October 1995, p. 55.

“Guanine, for instance, is the same stuff . . .” Pollack, p. 23.

“you could say all humans share nothing . . .”Discover, “Bad Genes, Good Drugs,” April 2002, p. 54.

“they are good at getting themselves duplicated.” Ridley, Genome, p. 127.

“Altogether, almost half of human genes . . .” Woolfson, p. 18.

“Empires fall, ids explode . . .” Nuland, p. 158.

“Here were two creatures . . .” BBC Horizon, “Hopeful Monsters,” first transmitted 1998.

“At least 90 percent correlate at some level . . .”Nature, “Sorry, Dogs-Man’s Got a New Best Friend,” December 19-26, 2002, p. 734.

“We even have the same genes for making a tail . . .”Los Angeles Times (reprinted in Valley News), December 9, 2002.

“dubbed homeotic (from a Greek word meaning “similar”) . . .” BBC Horizon, “Hopeful Monsters,” first transmitted 1998.

“We have forty-six chromosomes . . .” Gribbin and Cherfas, p. 53.

“The lungfish, one of the least evolved . . .” Schopf, p. 240.

“Perhaps the apogee (or nadir) . . .” Lewontin, p. 215.

“How fast a man’s beard grows . . .”Wall Street Journal, “What Distinguishes Us from the Chimps? Actually, Not Much,” April 12, 2002, p. 1.

“the proteome is much more complicated than the genome.”Scientific American, “Move Over, Human Genome,” April 2002, pp. 44-45.

“they will allow themselves to be phosphorylated, glycosylated, acetylated, ubiquitinated . . .”The Bulletin, “The Human Enigma Code,” August 21, 2001, p. 32.