The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code

Author:Sam Kean [Kean, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9780316202978
Google: E0b2SUbPIo0C
Amazon: B007ME5ETE
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Published: 2012-07-17T06:00:00+00:00

PART III

Genes and Geniuses

How Humans Became All Too Human

10

Scarlet A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s

Why Did Humans Almost Go Extinct?

Crisp mice in golden batter. Panther chops. Rhino pie. Trunk of elephant. Crocodile for breakfast. Sliced porpoise head. Horse’s tongue. Kangaroo ham.

Yes, domestic life was a trifle off at William Buckland’s. Some of his Oxford houseguests best remembered the front hallway, lined like a catacomb with the grinning skulls of fossilized monsters. Others remembered the live monkeys swinging around, or the pet bear dressed in a mortarboard cap and academic robes, or the guinea pig nibbling on people’s toes beneath the dinner table (at least until the family hyena crushed it one afternoon). Fellow naturalists from the 1800s remembered Buckland’s bawdy lectures on reptile sex (though not always fondly; the young Charles Darwin thought him a buffoon, and the London Times sniffed that Buckland needed to watch himself “in the presence of ladies”). And no Oxonian ever forgot the performance art stunt he pulled one spring when he wrote “G-U-A-N-O” on the lawn with bat feces, to advertise it as fertilizer. The word did indeed blaze green all summer.

But most people remembered William Buckland for his diet. A biblical geologist, Buckland held the story of Noah’s ark dear, and he ate his way through most of Noah’s litter, a habit he called “zoophagy.” Any flesh or fluid from any beast was eligible for ingestion, be it blood, skin, gristle, or worse. While touring a church once, Buckland startled a local vicar—who was showing off the miraculous “martyr’s blood” that dripped from the rafters every night—by dropping to the stone floor and dabbing the stain with his tongue. Between laps Buckland announced, “It’s bat urine.” Overall Buckland found few animals he couldn’t stomach: “The taste of mole was the most repulsive I knew,” he once mused. “Until I tasted a bluebottle [fly].”*

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