COSMOS 02: ONE VOICE IN THE COSMIC FUGUE

The Tale of the Heike.

The essence of artificial selection for a horse, or a cow, a grain of rice, or a Heike crab is this: many
characteristics are inherited. They breed true. Humans encourage the reproduction of some varieties
and discourage the reproduction of others. The variety selected for eventually becomes abundant.
The variety selected against becomes rare, maybe extinct. But if artificial selection makes such
changes in only a few thousand years, what must natural selection—working for billions of years—
be capable of? The answer is all the beauty and diversity in the biological world.

Natural Selection

The mechanism of evolution is natural selection was the great discovery of Charles Darwin and
Alfred Russel Wallace. Here’s how it works: nature is prolific, there are many more creatures that are
born than can possibly survive. So those varieties which are, by accident, less well adapted don’t
survive, or at least they leave fewer offspring. Now, mutations—sudden changes in heredity—are
passed on. They breed true. The environment selects those occasional mutations which enhance
survival. And the resulting series of slow changes in the nature of living beings is the origin of new
species.

The first stirings of life

Now, the first living things were not anything so complex as a one-celled organism, which already is
a highly sophisticated form of life. No, the first stirrings of life were much more humble and
happened on the molecular level. In those early days, lightning and ultraviolet light from the sun
were breaking apart simple hydrogen-rich molecules in the primitive atmosphere, and the fragments
of the molecules were spontaneously recombining into more and more complex molecules.

The products of this early chemistry 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 the other molecules in the soup. This was the
ancestor of DNA, the master molecule of life on Earth. It’s made of four different molecular parts,
called nucleotides, which constitute the four letters of the genetic code—the language of heredity.

Now, a mutation is a change of a nucleotide; a misspelling of the genetic instructions.

During the summer, swamps and lakes dried up, so some fish evolved a primitive lung to breathe air
until the rains came. Their brains were getting bigger. If the rains didn’t come, it was handy to be
able to pull yourself along to the next swamp. That was a very important adaptation.

Let’s look at it again compressing 4 billion years of evolution into 40 seconds. Those are some of the
things that molecules do, given 4 billion years of evolution.
Plants are great and beautiful machines, powered by sunlight, taking in water from the ground and
carbon dioxide from the air, and converting them into food for their use and ours.

Every 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—we steal the carbohydrates so we can go
about our business. In eating the plants and their fruits, we combine the carbohydrates with oxygen
which—as a result of breathing—we’ve dissolved in our blood. From this chemical reaction, we
extract the energy which makes us go. In the process, we exhale carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere, which the plants then use to make more carbohydrates.

What a marvelous cooperative arrangement! Plants and animals each using the other’s waste gases;
the whole cycle powered by abundant sunlight. But there would be carbon dioxide in the air even if
there were no animals. We need the plants much more than they need us.

We human beings don’t look very much like a tree. We certainly view the world differently than a
tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, we’re essentially identical to trees. We
both use nucleic acids as the hereditary material, we both use proteins as enzymes to control the
chemistry of the cell, and—most significantly—we both use the identical codebook to translate
nucleic acid information into protein information. Any tree could read my genetic code. How did
such astonishing similarities come about? Why are we cousins to the trees? Would life on some
other planet use proteins? The same proteins? The same nucleic acids? The same genetic code? The
usual explanation is that we are—all of us: trees and people, anglerfish, slime molds, bacteria—all
descended from a single and common instance of the origin of life four billion years ago in the early
days of our planet. Now, how did the molecules of life arise?

In a laboratory at Cornell University we mix together the gases and waters of the primitive Earth,
supply some energy, and see if we can make the stuff of life. But what was the early atmosphere
made of? Ordinary air? If we start with our present atmosphere, the experiment is a dismal failure.
Instead of making proteins and nucleic acids, all we make is smog—a backwards step. Why doesn’t
such an experiment work? Because the air of today contains molecular oxygen. But oxygen is made
by plants. It’s pretty obvious that there were no plants before the origin of life.

But 4 billion years ago, our atmosphere was full of hydrogen-rich gases: methane, ammonia, water
vapor. These are the gases we should use.

Xspecial Things Expt-

Taking great care to ensure the purity of these gases, my colleague, Bishun Khare, pumps them from
their holding flasks. An experiment like this was first performed by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey in
the 1950s. The starting gases are now introduced into a large reaction vessel. We could shine
ultraviolet light on this mixture, simulating the early sun. But in this experiment the gases will be
sparked, as the primitive atmosphere was, by early lightning. After only a few hours, the interior of
the reaction vessel becomes streaked with a strange brown pigment—a rich collection of complex
organic molecules including the building blocks of the proteins and the nucleic acids.
Under the right conditions, these building blocks assemble themselves into molecules resembling
little proteins and little nucleic acids. These nucleic acids can even make identical copies of
themselves. In this vessel are the notes of the music of life, although not yet the music itself.

Well, it’s been found that RNA, like protein, can control chemical reactions as well as reproduce
itself, which proteins can’t do. Many scientists now wonder if the first life on Earth was an RNA
molecule.

And it now seems feasible that key molecular building blocks for the origin of life fell out of the skies
4 billion years ago. Comets have now been found to have a lot of organic molecules in them, and
they fell in huge numbers on the primitive Earth.

We also mention the extinction of the dinosaurs, and most of the other species of life on Earth about
65 million years ago. We now know that a large comet hit the Earth at just that time. The dust pall
from that collision must’ve cooled and darkened the Earth, perhaps killing all the dinosaurs but
sparing the small, furry mammals who were our ancestors. Other cometary mass extinctions in other
epochs seem likely. If true, this would mean that comets have been the bringers both of life and
death.