引言(4)

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely, make that miraculously fortunate in your personal ancestry.

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so.

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result-eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you.

This is a book about how it happened, in particular how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also some of what happened in between and since.

That's a great deal to cover, of course, which is why the book is called A Short History of Nearly Everything, even though it isn't really.

It couldn't be. But with luck by the time we finish it will feel as if it is. ,