A Short History of Nearly Everything: Part V

by Bill Bryson
In this engaging work of nonfiction, Bill Bryson explores profound questions about the origins of the universe, the development of life on Earth, and modern civilization.

Here are links to our lists for the book: Introduction–Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. presage
    indicate by signs
    Howard divided clouds into three groups: stratus for the layered clouds, cumulus for the fluffy ones (the word means "heaped" in Latin), and cirrus (meaning "curled") for the high, thin feathery formations that generally presage colder weather.
  2. predilection
    a predisposition in favor of something
    Unfortunately, human beings have a careless predilection for disrupting this cycle by putting lots of extra carbon into the atmosphere whether the foraminiferans are ready for it or not.
  3. hydrosphere
    the watery layer of the earth's surface
    The water realm is known as the hydrosphere and it is overwhelmingly oceanic. Ninety-seven percent of all the water on Earth is in the seas, the greater part of it in the Pacific which covers half the planet and is bigger than all the landmasses put together.
  4. detritus
    loose material that is worn away from rocks
    So it came as something of a surprise when, in 1860, one of the first transatlantic telegraph cables was hauled up for repairs from more than two miles down, and it was found to be thickly encrusted with corals, clams, and other living detritus.
  5. polymer
    a naturally occurring or synthetic compound
    The actual chemistry of all this is a little arcane for our purposes here, but it is enough to know that if you make monomers wet they don’t turn into polymers — except when creating life on Earth.
  6. incipient
    only partly in existence; imperfectly formed
    Without an atmosphere ultraviolet rays from the sun, even from a weak sun, would have tended to break apart any incipient bonds made by molecules.
  7. organelle
    a specialized part of a cell; analogous to an organ
    But once the stage was set, and apparently quite suddenly, an entirely new type of cell arose — one with a nucleus and other little bodies collectively called organelles (from a Greek word meaning "little tools").
  8. eukaryote
    an organism of one or more cells with membrane-bound nuclei
    Compared with the new eukaryotes the old prokaryotes were little more than "bags of chemicals," in the words of the geologist Stephen Drury.
  9. apogee
    a final climactic stage
    Singlehandedly Woese had discovered an unsuspected division of life, so fundamental that it stood above the level of kingdom at the apogee of the Universal Tree of Life, as it is rather reverentially known.
  10. phylum
    the major taxonomic group of animals and plants
    In taxonomy the category that describes the basic body plans of all organisms is the phylum, and here, Conway Morris concluded, were drawer after drawer of such anatomical singularities — all amazingly and unaccountably unrecognized by the man who had found them.
  11. propitious
    presenting favorable circumstances
    Never would there be a more propitious time to find an alternative environment to water.
  12. fecundity
    the state of being fertile or capable of producing offspring
    Life’s extraordinary fecundity is amazing, even gratifying, but also problematic.
  13. esoteric
    understandable only by an enlightened inner circle
    What is nearly always most arresting in any ramble through the scattered disciplines of modern science is realizing how many people have been willing to devote lifetimes to the most sumptuously esoteric lines of inquiry.
  14. equable
    not easily irritated
    Wallace, still in the distant East learned of these maneuverings long after the event, but was remarkably equable and seemed pleased to have been included at all.
  15. nadir
    the lowest point of anything
    Perhaps the apogee (or nadir) of this faith in biodeterminism was a study published in the journal Science in 1980 contending that women are genetically inferior at mathematics.
Created on Wed Feb 22 20:40:09 EST 2017 (updated Tue Jul 01 13:26:07 EDT 2025)

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