PART I: EVOLUTION AND INNOVATION

Chapter 1: Hints of Change

1. According to the biblical story of Creation, every living thing was established during the first six days of life. God had no reason to create a species and let it die out. The extinction of a divine creation implied either that God's handiwork was imperfect or that the world had changed in unexpected ways.

2. From our vantage point in history, it seems incredible that any educated person ever could have believed in total changelessness. Minor yet noticeable changes are so frequent that our view of life is, in large measure, defined by the expectation of change, by the certainty that tomorrow will be different.

3. If we collapse the 100,000 years since modern human beings first appeared down to one 24 hour day, the first 22 hours (until 10 pm) were spent as hunter-gatherers. All of modern industrial life has unfolded in the last three minutes. We are new to change, and it is new to us.

4. Perhaps the best way to grasp the enormity of the chasm separating preindustrial and modern life is by gaining some sense of what daily life was like before sustained economic progress began. Nearly a third of all children died before the age of 15. Life expectancy in the 1690s was 32 years.

5. Newton cracked the secret plan by which God had organized the universe. Using calculus, his own newly invented scientific language, Newton revealed the simple elegance of the rules God used to put the world into a state of perpetual motion and eternal equilibrium.

6. Newton depicted a universe of perfect predictability- a cosmic clockwork mechanism. Objects moved, but the "laws of motion" never changed. History was meaningless in a world of endlessly repeating cycles.

7. In 1665, Denis Papin demonstrated a new device that dealt with the mysterious force of atmospheric pressure. He was one of several trying to design a mechanism that could drive a pump by manipulating the weight of the atmosphere.

8. A decade later, Thomas Savey made an engine a bit more useful than Papin's toy, but it could not pump water more than 20 vertical feet. In the end, the solution was furnished by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. The engine was inherently inefficient because the cold water that condensed the cylinder's steam also cooled the cylinder.

9. James Watt, in 1784, built a model engine with a second chamber, or condenser. The second improvement was a rotative engine. It took several more decades before steam power gained a clear cost advantage.

10. In a little more than a century, an ageless world of perfect stability was cut loose from its historical moorings. Unquestioning belief in the absolute permanence of God's Creation, by both the scientific elite and the educated population, began fraying at the edges.