book review

Bill Bryson- A Short History of Nearly Everything

It's a very big book. My mother's bible looks puny in comparison. And it's also a book that's very hard to pin down. Both in terms of subject matter and in terms of style. Instead, since I've just finished the chapter about DNA i'll write about something that i think i've figured out.

I don't want to have offspring. For a long time I knew this on a very deep level.
And while, as I grew up, everybody around me thought about this attitude of mine as a youthful folie, I kept trying to understand why I was the exception and why people from different backgrounds still have this common denominator. People that are different in all aspects of life want kinds, or at least are not questioning this universal trait of species (or individual) perpetuation.

So why do modern folk still consider kids as part of their life plan?
This may be one of the questions with the most multiple choice answers, ever.

But the one I really like, and it seems to be the right one, is that because our DNA just wants to replicate itself.

It basically goes like this:
DNA is the utmost strangest inorganic substance in our body. It's like an alien
acid that lives right in the center of every cell.
DNA writes software for genes. Genes like good working robots produce proteins. Proteins pretty much control the rest of our bodily functions and the rest is history (or biology) Ok, so we all knew that.
The funny part is that most of the genes don't do squat for our (or any other lifeform's) body. Only very few are in charge of doing stuff like metabolism, eye color, number of limbs, etc. The vast majority is just self self-replication.
It's like a software written for an application that uses 99% of CPU to copy itself onto the hard drive, over and over again, and 1% for that particular application.
Now, read that again and tell me that's not the definition of a virus.

The usual counter argument to the fact that our DNA is only 3% different from that of a bacteria, or that our DNA is less that 1% different from every other human on the planet, is that it's meaningless to think of the tings we have in common with drosophila melanogaster since it's the small single digit percentage that makes all the difference in the world.

But what if it's not? What if the remainder 99% does not belong to us no more than it belongs to the poor fly? What if all life is just a protective and nurturing shell in which DNA can survive and replicate itself. If so, we are nothing but interesting byproducts instead of pinnacles of evolution. Hell, every life form on earth is an interesting byproduct.

And to finish of with the book's leit motif: "Life wants to be. Life does not want to be very much. Life goes extinct."

read it. It gives you head munchies :)