Chapter 2 / Evolution 1: The Greatest Story Ever Told
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That this should ever be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
— Samuel Coleridge Taylor,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Current scientific belief states that four billion years ago, about half a billion or so years after the formation of the Earth, RNA and its sister molecule, DNA — those 4-bit codes that both bind us all together and distinguish us from each other — came into existence on Earth. Nobody was there to report on how it happened, but the formation of these information storage systems arranged into single strands (for RNA) and double helices (for DNA) allowed for the codes that informed the growth of all life and form on Earth.
How much of this code fits into a creature? The amount of DNA in a single human body laid out end to end would stretch across our entire solar system twice. That is a shit-ton of code.
These marvelous molecules allowed for the formation of bacteria, which became a smorgasbord for the newly evolved Protista, and the planet grew an ocean full of slime. Slime ruled the seas for a couple of billion years while bacteria colonized the land. Then the first terrestrial slime molds crept out of the ocean to munch on the plentiful bacteria basking in the sun. While it seems the bacteria never get a break, it was nonetheless lucky for later and bigger critters that this was the beginning of soil, which allowed for land plants, more oxygen, bigger creatures, vertebrates, and eventually the capstone critter (they would have us believe) humans, that arrived only a couple of million years ago.
An eyeblink in the foregoing history, we climbed to the top of the heap to claim our “dominion … over all the Earth.”
But what if it was something else that climbed to the top of the heap?