The Universe Within (31 page)

The use of the shells of invertebrate animals as
timepieces to measure the length of days over time is found in Z. Zhenyu et al., “The Periodic Growth Increments of Biological Shells and the Orbital Parameters of Earth-Moon System,”
Environmental Geology
51 (2006): 1271–77. The evolution of circadian clocks is discussed in D. A. Paranjpe and V. K. Sharma, “Evolution of Temporal Order in Living Organisms,”
Journal of Circadian Rhythms
3 (2005): 7–17.

A general reference on sleep medicine is Meir H. Kryger, Thomas Roth, and William C. Dement,
Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine
(Philadelphia: Saunders, 2005). A short but pithy review of the relationships between clocks and clinical conditions is in A. R. Barnard and P. M. Nolan, “When Clocks Go Bad: Neurobehavioural Consequences of Disrupted Circadian Timing,”
PLoS Genetics
4 (2008).

The relationship of DNA replication, circadian clocks, and cancer is discussed in S. Mitra, “Does Evening Sun Increase the Risk of Skin Cancer?,”
PNAS
108, no. 47 (2011): 18857–58; S. Gaddameedhi et al., “Control of Skin Cancer by the Circadian Rhythm,”
PNAS
108 (2011): 18790–95; and S. Sahar
and P. Sassone-Corsi, “Metabolism and Cancer: The Circadian Clock Connection,”
Nature Reviews Cancer
9 (2009): 886–96.

The full story of the
Hindostan
grave markers is discussed in E. Kvale et al., “The Art, History, and Geoscience of Hindostan Whetstone Gravestones in Indiana,”
Journal of Geoscience Education
48 (2000): 337–42. More information on the kind of rock that the stones are taken from, called rhythmites, is in B. W. Flemming and A. Bartholomä,
Tidal Signatures in Modern and Ancient Sediments
(Oxford: Blackwell Science, 1995).

The discovery of the
earliest living things, and Barghoorn’s life, are discussed in
Elso Barghoorn’s biographical memoir, published by the National Academy of Sciences, in
Biographical Memoirs
, vol. 87 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2005),
http://www.nap.edu/​html/​catalog.php?record_id=11522
.

A lively personal account of discovery of early life is written by one of Barghoorn’s students, now an eminence in his own right, J. William Schopf,
Cradle of Life
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). A similarly excellent account is Martin Brasier,
Darwin’s Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The recognition of early fossils as the remnants of living things is challenging and often spawns debate, as it has between Schopf and Brasier. A review, and one side of these debates, is in M. D. Brasier et al., “Earth’s Oldest (c. 3.5Ga) Fossils and the ‘Early Eden Hypothesis’: Questioning the Evidence,”
Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere
34 (2004): 257–60. At the time of this writing, the oldest fossil evidence for life is either Schopf’s, described in his book, or Brasier’s, found in D. Wacey et al., “Microfossils of Sulphur-Metabolizing Cells in 3.4-Billion-Year-Old Rocks of Western Australia,”
Nature Geoscience
(2011), doi:10.1038/ngeo1238.

Galileo’s discussion of size and gravity is in the definitive and readable text with translation by Stillman Drake and commentary by Stephen Jay Gould, Albert Einstein, and J. L. Heilbron,
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican
(New York: Modern Library, 2001).

The stories of
van Leeuwenhoek were taken from Clifford Dobell, ed.,
Antony van Leeuwenhoek and His “Little Animals”
(New York: Dover, 1960). The description of his likely microscope is reprinted in Clair L. Stong,
The “Scientific American” Book of Projects for the Amateur Scientist
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960).

Algae and the rise of
oxygen are discussed, and well referenced, in Andrew Knoll’s
Life on a Young Planet
, cited above. The importance of oxygen for the evolution and history of life is discussed in two other engaging books: Nick Lane,
Oxygen: The Molecule That Made the World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003); and Peter D. Ward,
Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth’s Ancient Atmosphere
(Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2006). A general review of oxygen over
geological time (looking at more recent events) is in R. A. Berner et al., “Phanerozoic Atmospheric Oxygen,”
Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences
31 (2003): 105–34.

The timing of the rise of oxygen, called the Great Oxygenation Event, appears as not a single increase but several scattered over hundreds of millions of years. Scientific papers include L. R. Kump, “The Rise of Atmospheric Oxygen,”
Nature
451 (2007): 277–78; A. Bekker et al., “Dating the Rise of Atmospheric Oxygen,”
Nature
427 (2004): 117–20; and H. Holland, “The Oxygenation of the Atmosphere and Oceans,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
361 (2006): 903–15.

Befitting such a complicated situation as the rise of oxygen, there are a number of different hypotheses for its cause. The one discussed here is outlined in L. R. Kump and M. E. Barley, “Increased Subaerial Volcanism and the Rise of Atmospheric Oxygen 2.5 Billion Years Ago,”
Nature
448 (2007): 1033–37.

The
Darlington-
Barbour “dropping the frogs off the roof of the MCZ” story was the stuff of legend when I was a graduate student there in the 1980s. That, and the adventure with the
crocodile, are discussed in the National Academy of Sciences’ biographical memoir of
Philip Darlington written by his Harvard colleague E. O. Wilson, in
Biographical Memoirs
, vol. 60 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1991),
http://www.nap.edu/​catalog.php?record_id=6061
.

J. B. S. Haldane’s essay “On Being the Right Size” was originally published in 1926 and is available at
http://www.physlink.com/​Education/​essay_haldane.cfm
.

The study of the relationship between size and other biological features is known as
allometry. The literature in the field is vast, but a number of reviews can get one up to speed pretty rapidly. After Haldane’s paper, there is the seminal paper of
Stephen Jay Gould, produced when he was a college student. It remains an important contribution over forty-five years later: “Allometry and Size in Ontogeny and Phylogeny,”
Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society
41 (1966): 587–638. The history of the concept is in J. Gayon, “History of the Concept of Allometry,”
American Zoologist
40 (2000): 748–58. A general book in the field, with extensive references, is William A. Calder,
Size, Function, and Life History
(Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1996). The eminent biologist John Tyler Bonner has written an outstanding volume for general audiences on the consequences of size:
Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales
, rev. ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011).

The challenges for small creatures moving about in fluids are captured in E. M. Purcell, “Life at Low Reynolds Number,”
American Journal of Physics
45 (1977): 3–11. Went’s musings on the importance of size for our abilities are in
F. W. Went, “The Size of Man,”
American Scientist
56 (1968): 400–413.

Preston
Cloud’s worldview, written for a general audience, is in his
Cosmos, Earth, and Man: A Short History of the Universe
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980). His National Academy biographical memoir holds the trajectory of this career and anecdotes discussed herein; see
Biographical Memoirs
, vol. 67 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1995).

A general review, with lots of references, of the factors that
control size in flies is in S. Oldham et al., “
Genetic Control of Size in
Drosophila
,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
355 (2000): 945–52.

A review of
size-control genes and their similarity in flies and people is in J. Dong et al., “Elucidation of a Universal Size-Control Mechanism in
Drosophila
and Mammals,”
Cell
130 (2007): 1120–33.

The cost of size, particularly that resulting from living in an oxygen-rich environment, is outlined in Q. Zeng and W. Hong, “The Emerging Role of the Hippo Pathway in Cell Contact Inhibition, Organ Size Control, and Cancer Development in Mammals,”
Cancer Cell
13 (2008): 188–92; D. Pan, “The Hippo Signaling Pathway in Development and Cancer,”
Developmental Cell
19, no. 4 (2010): 491–505; and C. Badouel, A. Garg, and H. McNeill, “Herding Hippos: Regulating Growth in Flies and Man,”
Current Opinion in Cell Biology
21, no. 6 (2009): 837–43.

The theory of
plate tectonics was sprung by a network of scientists around the globe. There are several excellent resources on the history of the theories of
continental drift and plate tectonics, notable among them Naomi Oreskes and H. E. Le Grand, eds.,
Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2003); Naomi Oreskes,
The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and David M. Lawrence,
Upheaval from the Abyss: Ocean Floor Mapping and the Earth Science Revolution
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

Eduard Suess’s quotation and life story are taken from his obituary, written by an American eminence in earth science, Charles Schuchert of Yale,
Science
, June 26, 1914, 933–35.

Alfred Wegener’s life, work, and impact are discussed in Roger M. McCoy,
Ending in Ice
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

The oral history project in which
Marie Tharp talks of her work is at
http://www.aip.org/​history/​ohilist/​22896_1.html
.

One of the classics, describing the accumulation of evidence in support of
the theory, is a short book, written over thirty years ago, that is well worth a read to expand the treatment in this chapter: Seiya Uyeda,
The New View of the Earth
(San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1978). Consult also Philip Kearey and Frederick J. Vine,
Global Tectonics
(London: Blackwell Science, 1996).

Frederick Vine’s paper is F. J. Vine and D. H. Matthews, “Magnetic Anomalies over Oceanic Ridges,”
Nature
199 (1963): 947–49.

A short biography of
John Tuzo Wilson is at
http://gsahist.org/​gsat/​gt01sept24_25.htm
. For insights into the discoveries discussed in this chapter, see J. T. Wilson, “A Revolution in Earth Science,”
Geotimes
13 (1968): 10–16; and J. T. Wilson, “Did the Atlantic Close and Then Re-open?”
Nature
211 (1966): 676–81. You can watch Wilson describe his theories of faults at
http://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=OmrXy65O6fY
as well as his approach to science at
http://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=fdSwEFyurDY
.

The link between mammalian biology (placentation, size, and metabolism) and tectonic change is found in the work of Paul Falkowski and his colleagues: P. Falkowski et al., “The Rise of
Oxygen over the Past 205 Million Years and the Evolution of Large Placental Mammals,”
Science
309 (2005): 2202–4. For other proposed effects of oxygen on the history of life, see also Ward,
Out of Thin Air
, and Berner et al., “Phanerozoic Atmospheric Oxygen,” for perspective on the importance of oxygen and its links to other planetary processes.

William Smith, his map, and his struggles are the topic of Simon Winchester’s
Map That Changed the World
(New York: Viking, 2001).
John Phillips’s ideas and work are in Jack Morrell,
John Phillips and the Business of Victorian Science
(London: Ashgate, 2005). See Phillips’s
Treatise on Geology
(Surrey: Ashgate Media, 2001) for a firsthand account of his views.

For one-stop intellectual shopping on the ideas and writings of
Cuvier, see M. J. S. Rudwick,
Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Histories of the concept of
extinction are found in a number of highly readable accounts, including Walter Alvarez,
T. rex and the Crater of Doom
(New York: Vintage, 1999); David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse, eds.,
The Paleobiological Revolution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and M. J. S. Rudwick,
The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

Details of
Norman Newell’s career were taken from his obituary in the
Journal of Paleontology
80 (2006): 607–8. Papers of his relevant to extinction include “Crises in the History of Life,”
Scientific American
208 (1963): 76–92;
and “Mass Extinctions at the End of the
Cretaceous Period,”
Science
149 (1965): 922–24.

The fifty volumes of the
Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology
remain available at the University of Kansas Paleontological Institute (
http://paleo.ku.edu/​pdf/​brochure.pdf
).

Newell was one of several calling out loud for the reality of mass extinction. Another passionate voice was Otto Schindewolf: see his “Über die möglichen Ursachen der grossen erdgeschichtlichen Faunenschnitte,”
Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Palaöntologie. Monatshefte
(1954): 457–65.

The
impact hypothesis for the
end-Cretaceous event is discussed in
Alvarez’s book written for a general audience,
T. rex and the Crater of Doom
. The original scientific paper describing the impact hypothesis is L. W. Alvarez et al., “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary Extinction,”
Science
208 (1980): 1095–108.