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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
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