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The Greed of Genes

The universe was born in an explosion that goes by the quaint

name of the big bang.  In its first second of existence, the newborn

cosmos began a habit it has never overcome: it started evolving higher

forms.  What began as powerful, inchoate energies soon coalesced into

elementary particles.  Those particles were attracted to each other and

banded together in tight micro-systems called atoms.  From

nothingness and energy, matter in its simplest form had been born.

Obeying the rules of a magnetic square dance, some atoms linked arms

and do-si-doed into the void as molecules.  The universe had taken

another quantum leap up the stairway of complexity.

Molecules spinning through the emptiness were drawn together

by gravity into suns and planets.43   Voila--- the universe lunged once

more up the ladder of intricacy.  In its beautifully mindless way, nature

was disgorging whole fresh batches of inventions.

Then on the face of at least one of the new planets, an assembly

mechanism that used something even more wondrous than the power

of gravitational or electromagnetic attraction arose for the first time.

In the beginning, says Oxford University zoologist Richard

Dawkins in The Selfish Gene,44 the face of the earth was washed by

primitive seas.  On the surface of those waters, lightning and sunlight

knit together molecules of ammonia, water, carbon dioxide and

methane to form the first organic substances.  These substances sloshed

inertly beneath the waves, a slowly accumulating, murky sludge.  One

day a miracle occurred.  Some accident twisted a few of the organic

clumps of atoms together into a new shape, giving them a property the

universe had never seen.  The molecular pretzel could make copies of

itself.  It mindlessly attracted scraps of muck to its surface and--quite

21

21

21

The Greed of Genes

The universe was born in an explosion that goes by the quaint

name of the big bang.  In its first second of existence, the newborn

cosmos began a habit it has never overcome: it started evolving higher

forms.  What began as powerful, inchoate energies soon coalesced into

elementary particles.  Those particles were attracted to each other and

banded together in tight micro-systems called atoms.  From

nothingness and energy, matter in its simplest form had been born.

Obeying the rules of a magnetic square dance, some atoms linked arms

and do-si-doed into the void as molecules.  The universe had taken

another quantum leap up the stairway of complexity.

Molecules spinning through the emptiness were drawn together

by gravity into suns and planets.43   Voila--- the universe lunged once

more up the ladder of intricacy.  In its beautifully mindless way, nature

was disgorging whole fresh batches of inventions.

Then on the face of at least one of the new planets, an assembly

mechanism that used something even more wondrous than the power

of gravitational or electromagnetic attraction arose for the first time.

In the beginning, says Oxford University zoologist Richard

Dawkins in The Selfish Gene,44 the face of the earth was washed by

primitive seas.  On the surface of those waters, lightning and sunlight

knit together molecules of ammonia, water, carbon dioxide and

methane to form the first organic substances.  These substances sloshed

inertly beneath the waves, a slowly accumulating, murky sludge.  One

day a miracle occurred.  Some accident twisted a few of the organic

clumps of atoms together into a new shape, giving them a property the

universe had never seen.  The molecular pretzel could make copies of

itself.  It mindlessly attracted scraps of muck to its surface and--quite