Snark
Near the end of the book, the author allows herself to engage a snarky attitude to make a point about the how short term “concerns” tend to overpower long term potential catastrophes in the mind of people simply going about their daily lives. Even though the scientific record points clearly toward a future that is going to make the planet a significantly different place to live than it has been for everybody alive today, people can be expected to make a much bigger deal about a “crisis” like a bad call by the referee or spilling red wine on a favorite white shirt:
“Among the many lessons that emerge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
The Life Aquatic
Snorkeling off One Tree Island situated at the southernmost tip of the Great Barrier Reef is described by most who have dived their as good as it gets. The imagery used by the author to describe her first underwater adventure there transforms the world underwater Down Under to a dream state:
“Schools of small fish were followed by schools of larger fish, which were followed by sharks. Huge rays glided by, trailed by turtles the size of bathtubs. I tried to keep a mental list of what I’d seen, but it was like trying to catalog a dream…minifin parrotfish, Pacific longnose parrotfish, somber sweetlips, fourspot herring, yellowfin tuna, common dolphinfish, deceiver fangblenny.”
Mnemonic Imagery
Although for most people the opportunity to actually use it won’t come up often enough to make the effort required to commit it to memory, those for whom it does come up will definitely be a distinct advantage by making that effort. The thing is, you can never be completely sure whether or not you will ever need to remember the chronological order of the geological periods of the last half-billion years, so better safe than sorry:
“Camels Often Sit Down Carefully, Perhaps Their Joints Creak (Cambrian-Ordovician-Silurian-Devonian-Carboniferous-Permian-Triassic-Jurassic-Cretaceous). The mnemonic unfortunately runs out before the most recent periods: the Paleogene, the Neogene, and the current Quaternary.”
Mutant Humanity
At every turn, humanity is defined through its actions as one strange creature. The species is unique in so many ways that what really separates us from all other animals is our capacity for weirdness: doing things for no immediately recognizable evolutionary purpose:
Neanderthals were extremely similar to modern humans; probably they were our very closest relatives. And yet clearly they were not humans. Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.
