Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

Enough of that. My terrible night. Not a nightmare this time. Insomnia. And of the worst kind, insomnia laced with the blackest of thoughts about myself. Earlier I mention to you the little man at the hinge of my unconscious-my dwarf, my Rumpelstiltskin. On the right of the split in my personality is me, my conscious mind. On the left, my feminine side and my dark side, my subconscious. I am not always thus, I dare say, but it seems that now I can reach neither except through that ugly little walnut of a creature some part of me has placed on guard.

Sometimes he allows darkman or imperfect female to swarm across the split and fog me out. My reaction to events is dulled, blunted, so it is as if I playact the emotions other people actually feel.

At such moments, I am a fist that cannot smash through the barrier no matter how hard I try. The barrier on the other side of which is the other half of me. What can I do except act out of this wound? What can I do except kill?

Thus, I am only about Death.

Is there no way I can be about Life?

“Life!” exclaimed Will Dalton zestfully. “At last, life is appearing on earth!

“But it is the lowest, one-cell sort of life, so we often can’t tell whether it is actually alive alive-o or not. Or if it is plant or animal. There is even evidence that some unicellular mites switch back and forth between plant and animal at will-or do so as if they had a will.

“Let’s hear Genesis on this exquisite moment in the history of planet Earth: ‘And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life.’

“Actually, the Genesis writers, being devoted to a hierarchy, a pyramid of creation with man at the top-made at the end of the sixth day-thought grasses and herbs and fruit trees came before animate life. They had no way of knowing we are 70 percent seawater, and that the sea, the primordial soup, is mother to us all. As desert nomads, they would think life, of necessity, had to have begun on dry land.

“Even some gradualist evolutionists reject the fits-and-starts, contingency theory of Darwinism: they favor a direct line from most simple to most complex life-forms-in inexorable progression from primordial ooze to freeway gridlock. We’ve already addressed the error (and arrogance) of this while talking about the randomness of evolution, but let’s explain it better.

“Since the biotic sophistication of life-forms has indeed increased, single-cell life has been around longer than complex, multicellular creatures like ourselves. But countless different kinds of single-cell bacteria still exist. And algae. And yeasts. Indeed, many of the body’s one-celled parasites are degenerated forms of more complex life-forms. So we are not the apex of anything. Just another, and probably quite surprising, step along the road, evolving ourselves even as I speak.”

Listening from his post against the back wall, Dante kept on being amazed that he was understanding it. Maybe Rosie was right. Maybe he wasn’t a total dummy. But he had to stay alert for Raptor. The assassin’s time to act, unless he intended to wait until after the lecture was over, was growing short.

“Science sees life beginning a unicellular existence in the sea,” said Will. “Single molecules, slow, careless, inefficient, whose appearance is relatively quick. Not in the creationists’ twenty-four-hour day, but quick by earth science standards.

“The sun, remember, was born about 5 billion years ago. The earth as a planet we might recognize had shape about 4.6 b.y. ago. The magma ocean ended 4.4 b. y. ago.

“Many organic particles that form the elemental building blocks of life had been rained down from asteroids and worldlets and dusts and gases during the 400 million years our conditions fluctuated from sun-warmed eons-when the atmosphere was essentially clear of detritus-to freezing periods when impact ejecta obscured the sun. Our primitive planet seems to have been heavily dosed with the stuff of life: chains of carbon hooked to hydrogen, nitrogen, and other essential organic molecules.

“Anyway, sometime during this seesaw, the spark of life appeared (perhaps once, perhaps several times, perhaps a million times, to be snuffed and spark again), and the flame steadied and grew. Our earliest fossil evidence, sketchy and delicate as it is, suggests that life (or at least the first complex organic molecules) was here by 4 b.y. ago.

“What went on in the 3.5 billion years from the birth of these first molecules able to make crude blueprints of them selves, to the Cambrian multicellular explosion? Well, half a billion years after the molecules we had prokaryotes, the first unicellular life. By 1.4 b. y. ago, life was seeking complexity. It forced certain molecules to have accessory molecules, either to scour needed building blocks from the surrounding warm seas, or to act like DNA polymerase to midwife genetic instructions for change. These molecules evolved a trap, a sheath, a membrane to prevent other essential molecules from drifting away again. Nucleus-celled eukaryotes had appeared. There was no turning back.

“We would expect to find evidence of this in the fossil record, and we do. Among the earliest fossils are stromatolites, layered mats of organic sediment, often the size of a watermelon, sometimes the size of a football field. Stromatolites, dramatic proof of individual cells living together in harmony, are still being generated in the warm waters of certain sheltered tropical bays and lagoons by microscopic organisms-in Baja California, western Australia, and the Bahamas. Something modern man with all his technology cannot duplicate.

“Of course-and this is very important because it tells us something essential about life-even then some free-swimming single-celled microbes, instead of manufacturing food as the photosynthetic stromatolite communities did, ate other microbes. Eating food is less trouble than making it, so this laborsaving idea appeared early in the chain of life, and never disappeared.

“Six hundred million years after the eukaryotes, we had multicellular sponges and algae; a mere 2.5 m.y. later came the exuberant multicellular ‘Cambrian explosion’ of chordate life, so beautifully recorded in the Burgess shales of 540 m.y. ago.

“To me that certainly qualifies as God saying, ‘Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life.’ I see no destructive friction between Bible and science.

“Another interesting parallel: Christianity says the one true God created all life on earth; science says that despite its fits and starts, all life on earth sprang from a single line. Proof of a single source for all life does not depend on what either the Bible or the stones and bones tell us; we need only look to biological facts of medicine that work every day to keep us all (and scientists and creationists alike) alive.

“Basically, all organisms work alike. They’re made alike, they’re made from the same basic stuff, and their genetic blueprints and molecular constructions are extremely close. All species’ DNA has the same essential architecture, all species hold many proteins in common. Everything that lives is kin to everything else.

“So those species fossilized in the Burgess shales that made it through the post-Cambrian mass extinction sprang from the same hereditary line as those species that didn’t. They were all water-dwellers, and they were all invertebrates-none of them had backbones.

“‘And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind… And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas.’

“Whales are mammals, not fish, but the writers of Genesis couldn’t know that. What about the fish that were fish? Well, the first primitive fishlike vertebrates appeared a mere 50 million years after the Burgess shales were laid down.