IN THE BEGINNING:

Was the Cosmic Bubble

And the Bubble was without form

And brightness was upon the face of the void

A few milliseconds later

Expansion had occurred

And the Universe was lumpy

As it is, lo, unto this day

And the plasma cooled, and the atoms associated

And upon the surface of the newly-formed planets

Yea, and perhaps even also in the interstellar spaces

Surface catalysis caused polymerisations

And on Earth lightning, and deepsea thermal vents

And volcanoes, and hot springs

All of these were energy sources for the cooking of the primal soup

And nucleotides came to be, and short oligoribonucleotides,

And amino acids, and lipids

Bilayers and multilayers did the lipids form

And so did they entrap primitive ribozymes

Which did replicate themselves crudely according to their kinds

And mutated, and made more ribozymes

And to each a different function:

And the reverse transcriptase, and eventually also the DNA, which was a partner to the RNA

And a better information store, though less generally useful

So it came to be that DNA usurped the role of RNA

And RNA was cast out into the proto-cytoplasm

Where it was a messenger, and an enzyme

And a helpmeet to the DNA

Though some of it escaped as viruses

Renegade genomes, beyond the cell

In the outer darkness

Where there is wailing, and gnashing of teeth

For no obvious reason

And the DNA waxed fruitful

And it multiplied bounteously,according to its kinds

And it made new kinds, by mutation

As the polymerases were not so accurate yet

And Urkaryote begat Bacteria and Archaea and Eukarya

And the Archaea and Eubacteria did excise all or most of their introns

And stayed small

While Eukarya kept theirs, and grew

Though there is lately some mystery about eocytes

And divers Bacteria did enter Eukarya

Endosymbiotes they became

Which was greatly pleasing to Lyn Margulis

And begat more unto their kind, and evolved

Mitochondria and chloroplasts did they become

And the kinds did multiply all over the face of the planet

And maybe also on other planets

And did change the face of it, and the air above the ground

To an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere they did change it

By photosynthesis, mainly

And this did allow more energetic metabolic processes to occur

Which allowed more complex organisms

Which meant that, after three billenia

Animals could come to be

And it was so

That slimy things did crawl, with legs

Out of a slimy sea

And although large bolides did rain down upon the Earth

Yea, and comets

So as to cause ice ages and mass extinctions

So did the DNA keep multiplying and evolving

To make ever more complex organisms did it evolve

Until it came to pass

That apes did come down from the trees

In the dry Pleistocene did the apes walk

And swim also, If one is to believe Elaine Morgan

And "The Descent of Woman"

But I digress...

And they evolved to fit the new niche

Larger brains did they acquire

And upright carriage

And other problems

And lo, they did search for Meaning

And Truth

And Food and Sex also

And they did become confused

So they invented religion

To explain that which happened

And it came to govern them, so that they were not free to think

And were reluctant to take their clothes off

Which is the cause of some of the problems

But Mother Gaea will fix it, eventually....

(apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge for the crib from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner")

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RETURN TO VIRUS TUTORIAL

copyright Ed Rybicki, 1992


Last Modified November 24, 1994