Fun Facts About Life (Part 1)

Over the summer I had to read a book for AP Biology. It is called "A Short History of Nearly Everything." I was told to read this book by the teacher that originally was going to teach the class (the teacher told everyone to read it). Well when I got to school I had a totally different teacher and the new teacher never even mentioned this book. Sigh.

Now this book wasn't very encouraging and I found a lot of stuff that (when I really thought about) isn't very nice. So I thought I'd share my findings and thoughts with you.

The third paragraph of the first chapter says "Imagine if you can, which of course you can't..." Why would you tell me to imagine something if you already know that I can't? That just doesn't make sense. It's like saying, "Hey! Can you see that! Of course you can't because you're blind!" Rude.

Did you know we have the genes to grow a tail? Well now you do! The genes just aren't turned on if that makes sense. (I think this is the most exciting thing I learned from this book.)

Apparently a common newt is "more genetically splendorous than we are, by a factor of five." Doesn't that just make you feel so loved? Well don't worry about it because later on in the book it says that it's not how many genes you have, but what you do with the genes you have. So I guess we are smarter than the newt. Well let's hope anyway.

The Earth is not as stable as we thought it was apparently. Isn't that comforting? Apparently it goes violently between periods of hot and really cold. Good to know that we are living on a planet that can't decided if it's hot or cold.

Now the book is saying that ice ages might occur because of a rise in temperature. I don't know about you but that doesn't sound good to me. With global warming and what not I would say we are due for another ice age.

I realize this has nothing to do with this has very little to do with this
post but it's a good movie and you should see it.
http://reelauthors.com/blog/screenplay/ice-age-4/

For two chapters now it has been talking about our ancestors and I'm pretty sure I was daydreaming through the whole first chapter. However I'm now in the second chapter and apparently we know more about other hominids than we do about ourselves. The Google definition of hominid is: "A primate of a family (Hominidae) that includes humans and their fossil ancestors." So we know more about our ancestors (which according to this book we don't know much about them either) than we do about ourselves. Good to know...I guess.

That brings me to another problem with this book. While reading this I have realized that the term "We don't know much" appears on practically every page. So we are a smart species but we don't know much. That's nice.
~Scooby

P.S. You might have noticed the "part 1" in the title. Yes I do have more complaints about this book. But I thought I would spread it out so you don't get a mean science overload.

P.S.S. Should I be mean and wait a month to post the second part to this? You know kind of like suspense to make you come back and get impatient because you want to learn more about mean science that this book told me about? Well I guess we will see right?