Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

The earliest known eukaryotic plankton floating on the surface of the oceans date to about 1.8 billion years ago; the earliest eukaryotes with a sex life to 1.1 billion years ago; the great burst of eukaryote evolution (that would lead to algae, fungi, land plants and animals, among others) to about the same epoch; the earliest protozoa to about 850 million years ago; and the origin of the major animal groups and the colonization of the land to about 550 million years ago.⁸ Many of these epochal events may be tied to the increasing atmospheric oxygen. Since the oxygen is generated by plants, we see life forcing its own evolution on a massive scale. Of course, we can’t be sure of the dates; next week paleontologists may discover examples still more ancient. The sophistication of life has increased greatly over the last 2 billion years, and the eukaryotes have done extremely well—as we have only to look around us to verify.

But the eukaryotic kind of life, very different from the rough-and-ready first organisms, is exquisitely dependent on the near-perfect functioning of an elaborate molecular bureaucracy, whose responsibilities include covering up the fits of incompetence in the DNA. Some DNA sequences are too fundamental to the central processes of life to be able safely to change. Those key instructions simply stay fixed, precisely replicated, generation after generation, for aeons. Any significant alteration is simply too costly in the short term, whatever its ostensible virtues may be in the long, and the carriers of such change are wiped out by selection. The DNA of eukaryotic cells reveals segments that clearly and specifically come from the bacteria and archaebacteria of long ago. The DNA inside us is a chimera, long ACGT sequences having been adopted wholesale from quite different and extremely ancient beings, and faithfully copied for billions of years. Some of us—much of us—is old

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Eventually, there got to be many beings whose cells had specialized functions, just as, for example, the chloroplasts or mitochondria within a given cell have specialized functions. Some cells were in charge of, say, disabling and removing poisons; others were the conduits of electrical impulses, part of a slowly evolving neural apparatus in charge of locomotion, breathing, feelings, and—much later—thoughts. Cells with quite diverse functions interacted harmoniously. Still larger beings evolved separate internal organ systems, and again survival depended on the cooperation of very different constituent parts. Your brain, heart, liver, kidneys, pituitary, and sexual organs generally work together well. They are not in competition. They make a whole that is much more than the sum of the parts.

Our ancestors and collateral relatives were restricted to the seas until about 500 million years ago, when the first amphibian crawled out onto the land. A significant ozone layer may not have developed until about then. These two facts are probably related. Earlier, deadly ultraviolet light from the Sun reached the surface of the land, frying any intrepid pioneer attempting to homestead there. Ozone, as we’ve mentioned, is produced from the oxygen in the upper air by the Sun’s radiation. So that reckless oxygen pollution of the ancient atmosphere, generated by the green plants, seems to have had another accidental and this time salutary consequence: It made the land habitable. Who would have figured?

Hundreds of millions of years later, a rich biology filled almost every nook and cranny of the land. The moving continental plates now carried with them cargoes of plants and animals and microbes. When new continental crust appeared, it was quickly colonized by life. When old continental crust was carried down into the Earth’s interior, we might be worried that its living cargo would be carried down with it. But the conveyor belt of plate tectonics moves only an inch a year. Life is quicker. Ancient fossils, though, can’t jump off the conveyer belt. They are destroyed by plate tectonics. The precious records and remains of our ancestors are swept down into the semi-fluid mantle and cremated. We are left with the odd remnants that by accident escaped.

Before there was enough oxygen, or anything combustible, fire was impossible, an unrealized potential, latent in matter (just as the release of nuclear energy was unrealized during the tenure of humans on Earth until 1942–1945). There must, therefore, have been an age of the first flame, a time when fire was new. Perhaps it was a dead fern, ignited by a flash of lightning. Since plants colonized the land long before animals, there was no one to notice: Smoke rises; suddenly, a tongue of red flickers upward. Perhaps a little thicket of vegetation has caught fire. The flame isn’t a gas, or a liquid, or a solid. It’s some other, some fourth state of matter that physicists call plasma. Never before had Earth been touched by fire.