Cosmos (6 page)

The fossil evidence could be consistent with the idea of a Great Designer; perhaps some species are destroyed when the Designer becomes dissatisfied with them, and new experiments are attempted on an improved design. But this notion is a little disconcerting. Each plant and animal is exquisitely made; should not a supremely competent Designer have been able to make the intended variety from the start? The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament).

When I was a college undergraduate in the early 1950’s, I was fortunate enough to work in the laboratory of H. J. Muller, a great geneticist and the man who discovered that radiation produces mutations. Muller was the person who first called my attention to the Heike crab as an example of artificial selection. To learn the practical side of genetics, I spent many months working with fruit flies,
Drosophila melanogaster
(which means the black-bodied dew-lover)—tiny benign beings with two wings and big eyes. We kept them in pint milk bottles. We would cross two varieties to see what new forms emerged from the rearrangement of the parental genes, and from natural and induced mutations. The females would deposit their eggs on a kind of molasses the technicians placed inside the bottles; the bottles were stoppered; and we would wait two weeks for the fertilized eggs to become larvae, the larvae pupae, and the pupae to emerge as new adult fruit flies.

One day I was looking through a low-power binocular microscope at a newly arrived batch of adult
Drosophila
immobilized with a little ether, and was busily separating the different varieties with a camel’s-hair brush. To my astonishment, I came upon something very different: not a small variation such as red eyes instead of white, or neck bristles instead of no neck bristles. This was another, and very well-functioning, kind of creature with much more prominent wings and long feathery antennae. Fate had arranged, I concluded, that an example of a major evolutionary change in a single generation, the very thing Muller had said could never happen, should take place in his own laboratory. It was my unhappy task to explain it to him.

With heavy heart I knocked on his office door. “Come in,” came the muffled cry. I entered to discover the room darkened except for a single small lamp illuminating the stage of the microscope
at which he was working. In these gloomy surroundings I stumbled through my explanation. I had found a very different kind of fly. I was sure it had emerged from one of the pupae in the molasses. I didn’t mean to disturb Muller but … “Does it look more like Lepidoptera than Diptera?” he asked, his face illuminated from below. I didn’t know what this meant, so he had to explain: “Does it have big wings? Does it have feathery antennae?” I glumly nodded assent.

Muller switched on the overhead light and smiled benignly. It was an old story. There was a kind of moth that had adapted to
Drosophila
genetics laboratories. It was nothing like a fruit fly and wanted nothing to do with fruit flies. What it wanted was the fruit flies’ molasses. In the brief time that the laboratory technician took to unstopper and stopper the milk bottle—for example, to add fruit flies—the mother moth made a dive-bombing pass, dropping her eggs on the run into the tasty molasses. I had not discovered a macro-mutation. I had merely stumbled upon another lovely adaptation in nature, itself the product of micromutation and natural selection.

The secrets of evolution are death and time—the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations that were
by accident
adaptive, time for the slow accumulation of patterns of favorable mutations. Part of the resistance to Darwin and Wallace derives from our difficulty in imagining the passage of the millennia, much less the aeons. What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

What happened here on Earth may be more or less typical of the evolution of life on many worlds; but in such details as the chemistry of proteins or the neurology of brains, the story of life on Earth may be unique in all the Milky Way Galaxy. The Earth condensed out of interstellar gas and dust some 4.6 billion years ago. We know from the fossil record that the origin of life happened soon after, perhaps around 4.0 billion years ago, in the ponds and oceans of the primitive Earth. The first living things were not anything so complex as a one-celled organism, already a highly sophisticated form of life. The first stirrings were much more humble. In those early days, lightning and ultraviolent light from the Sun were breaking apart the simple hydrogen-rich molecules of the primitive atmosphere, the fragments spontaneously recombining into more and more complex molecules. The products of
this early chemistry were dissolved in the oceans, forming a kind of organic soup of gradually increasing complexity, until one day, quite by accident, a molecule arose that was able to make crude copies of itself, using as building blocks other molecules in the soup. (We will return to this subject later.)

This was the earliest ancestor of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, the master molecule of life on Earth. It is shaped like a ladder twisted into a helix, the rungs available in four different molecular parts, which constitute the four letters of the genetic code. These rungs, called nucleotides, spell out the hereditary instructions for making a given organism. Every lifeform on Earth has a different set of instructions, written out in essentially the same language. The reason organisms
are
different is the differences in their nucleic acid instructions. A mutation is a change in a nucleotide, copied in the next generation, which breeds true. Since mutations are
random
nucleotide changes, most of them are harmful or lethal, coding into existence nonfunctional enzymes. It is a long wait before a mutation makes an organism work better. And yet it is that improbable event, a small beneficial mutation in a nucleotide a ten-millionth of a centimeter across, that makes evolution go.

Four billion years ago, the Earth was a molecular Garden of Eden. There were as yet no predators. Some molecules reproduced themselves inefficiently, competed for building blocks and left crude copies of themselves. With reproduction, mutation and the selective elimination of the least efficient varieties, evolution was well under way, even at the molecular level. As time went on, they got better at reproducing. Molecules with specialized functions eventually joined together, making a kind of molecular collective—the first cell. Plant cells today have tiny molecular factories, called chloroplasts, which are in charge of photosynthesis—the conversion of sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates and oxygen. The cells in a drop of blood contain a different sort of molecular factory, the mitochondrion, which combines food with oxygen to extract useful energy. These factories exist in plant and animal cells today but may once themselves have been free-living cells.

By three billion years ago, a number of one-celled plants had joined together, perhaps because a mutation prevented a single cell from separating after splitting in two. The first multicellular organisms had evolved. Every cell of your body is a kind of commune, with once free-living parts all banded together for the common good. And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.

Sex seems to have been invented around two billion years ago. Before then, new varieties of organisms could arise only from the accumulation of random mutations—the selection of changes, letter by letter, in the genetic instructions. Evolution must have been agonizingly slow. With the invention of sex, two organisms could exchange whole paragraphs, pages and books of their DNA code, producing new varieties ready for the sieve of selection. Organisms are selected to engage in sex—the ones that find it uninteresting quickly become extinct. And this is true not only of the microbes of two billion years ago. We humans also have a palpable devotion to exchanging segments of DNA today.

By one billion years ago, plants, working cooperatively, had made a stunning change in the environment of the Earth. Green plants generate molecular oxygen. Since the oceans were by now filled with simple green plants, oxygen was becoming a major constituent of the Earth’s atmosphere, altering it irreversibly from its original hydrogen-rich character and ending the epoch of Earth history when the stuff of life was made by nonbiological processes. But oxygen tends to make organic molecules fall to pieces. Despite our fondness for it, it is fundamentally a poison for unprotected organic matter. The transition to an oxidizing atmosphere posed a supreme crisis in the history of life, and a great many organisms, unable to cope with oxygen, perished. A few primitive forms, such as the botulism and tetanus bacilli, manage to survive even today only in oxygen-free environments. The nitrogen in the Earth’s atmosphere is much more chemically inert and therefore much more benign than oxygen. But it, too, is biologically sustained. Thus, 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere is of biological origin. The sky is made by life.

For most of the four billion years since the origin of life, the dominant organisms were microscopic blue-green algae, which covered and filled the oceans. Then some 600 million years ago, the monopolizing grip of the algae was broken and an enormous proliferation of new lifeforms emerged, an event called the Cambrian explosion. Life had arisen almost immediately after the origin of the Earth, which suggests that life may be an inevitable chemical process on an Earth-like planet. But life did not evolve much beyond blue-green algae for three billion years, which suggests that large lifeforms with specialized organs are hard to evolve, harder even than the origin of life. Perhaps there are many other planets that today have abundant microbes but no big beasts and vegetables.

Soon after the Cambrian explosion, the oceans teemed with many different forms of life. By 500 million years ago there were vast herds of trilobites, beautifully constructed animals, a little like large insects; some hunted in packs on the ocean floor. They stored crystals in their eyes to detect polarized light. But there are no trilobites alive today; there have been none for 200 million years. The Earth used to be inhabited by plants and animals of which there is today no living trace. And of course every species now on the planet once did not exist. There is no hint in the old rocks of animals like us. Species appear, abide more or less briefly and then flicker out.

Before the Cambrian explosion species seem to have succeeded one another rather slowly. In part this may be because the richness of our information declines rapidly the farther into the past we peer; in the early history of our planet, few organisms had hard parts and soft beings leave few fossil remains. But in part the sluggish rate of appearance of dramatically new forms before the Cambrian explosion is real; the painstaking evolution of cell structure and biochemistry is not immediately reflected in the external forms revealed by the fossil record. After the Cambrian explosion, exquisite new adaptations followed one another with comparatively breathtaking speed. In rapid succession, the first fish and the first vertebrates appeared; plants, previously restricted to the oceans, began the colonization of the land; the first insect evolved, and its descendants became the pioneers in the colonization of the land by animals; winged insects arose together with the amphibians, creatures something like the lungfish, able to survive both on land and in the water; the first trees and the first reptiles appeared; the dinosaurs evolved; the mammals emerged, and then the first birds; the first flowers appeared; the dinosaurs became extinct; the earliest cetaceans, ancestors to the dolphins and whales, arose and in the same period the primates—the ancestors of the monkeys, the apes and the humans. Less than ten million years ago, the first creatures who closely resembled human beings evolved, accompanied by a spectacular increase in brain size. And then, only a few million years ago, the first true humans emerged.

Human beings grew up in forests; we have a natural affinity for them. How lovely a tree is, straining toward the sky. Its leaves harvest sunlight to photosynthesize, so trees compete by shadowing their neighbors. If you look closely you can often see two trees pushing and shoving with languid grace. Trees are great and beautiful machines, powered by sunlight, taking in water from the
ground and carbon dioxide from the air, converting these materials into food for their use and ours. The plant uses the carbohydrates it makes as an energy source to go about its planty business. And we animals, who are ultimately parasites on the plants, steal the carbohydrates so we can go about
our
business. In eating the plants we combine the carbohydrates with oxygen dissolved in our blood because of our penchant for breathing air, and so extract the energy that makes us go. In the process we exhale carbon dioxide, which the plants then recycle to make more carbohydrates. What a marvelous cooperative arrangement—plants and animals each inhaling the other’s exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.

There are tens of billions of known kinds of organic molecules. Yet only about fifty of them are used for the essential activities of life. The same patterns are employed over and over again, conservatively, ingeniously for different functions. And at the very heart of life on Earth—the proteins that control cell chemistry, and the nucleic acids that carry the hereditary instructions—we find these molecules to be essentially identical in all the plants and animals. An oak tree and I are made of the same stuff. If you go far enough back, we have a common ancestor.

The living cell is a regime as complex and beautiful as the realm of the galaxies and the stars. The elaborate machinery of the cell has been painstakingly evolved over four billion years. Fragments of food are transmogrified into cellular machinery. Today’s white blood cell is yesterday’s creamed spinach. How does the cell do it? Inside is a labyrinthine and subtle architecture that maintains its own structure, transforms molecules, stores energy and prepares for self-replication. If we could enter a cell, many of the molecular specks we would see would be protein molecules, some in frenzied activity, others merely waiting. The most important proteins are enzymes, molecules that control the cell’s chemical reactions. Enzymes are like assembly-line workers, each specializing in a particular molecular job: Step 4 in the construction of the nucleotide guanosine phosphate, say, or Step 11 in the dismantling of a molecule of sugar to extract energy, the currency that pays for getting the other cellular jobs done. But the enzymes do not run the show. They receive their instructions—and are in fact themselves constructed—on orders sent from those in charge. The boss molecules are the nucleic acids. They live sequestered in a forbidden city in the deep interior, in the nucleus of the cell.