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I'm really enjoying this book so far. I'm listening to the audio book, which makes it hard (for me, anyway) to go back through and revisit stories about individual scientists. They all sort of blend together. I did like that the one guy in the museum (Goldschmidt?) wrote a 700+ page book just because he was mad about one paragraph in a paper.

One thought that I keep coming back to when listening to this book is that life and evolution are kind of sloppy. It really seems like the whole system that makes us and literally every other living thing work should be a little more robust. I was just listening to a part this morning about how much virus DNA has integrated itself into our own, AND how some of it seems really useful. It's one reason why I don't like biology. I know it holds up and it's good science, but it makes me sort of...uncomfortable? Like, we should have addressed some of these really obvious design flaws in the last 3.8 billion years since life evolved. I have similar feelings about quantum mechanics.

I think the most mind-bending thing that I learned was early on when he was talking about how a lot of animals basically start out on the same template. I knew that embryos don't really start looking like whatever animal they're going to turn into until pretty late in gestation, but I didn't appreciate just how similar all life is. It makes sense because of evolution, but this is another one of those things that makes me vaguely uncomfortable, if I'm honest.

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The Monster Within! The book is starting to pick up for me. Really enjoyed reading about Susumu Ohno!!

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