The Never-Ending Dance

Imagine that you are a single-celled life-form floating in the sea about two thousand million years ago. You haven't much of a brain; actually, as next of kin to a bacterium, you've no brain at all. Luckily, neither does anyone else. So what do you need? First, above all else, when the local food supply runs out you must move. Second, if there are signs in the water pointing to more food, and if you happen to invent senses to detect these signs, you could be better off than others. So being able to distinguish food signs from nonfood signs---a simple piece of information---now becomes more important to you than anything else. Information is the pivot all life's machinery turns around.

Simply detecting things is useless if you cannot also act on them. So you invent a technology to move (muscles won't be invented for a while yet). Of course, once other creatures key in on the advantage of the new technology, they all start moving. Those that don't are outcompeted; they either leave no offspring or become the ancestors of fungi, pond scum, and plants. When everyone can move, simply being mobile is no longer enough. Another thousand million years go by.

You're now a wormlike ribbon of cells and still live in the sea. By now it's roughly seven hundred million years ago, and sex has been invented. Then things really get going. The diversity of living things simply explodes as the new technology for mixing and matching genes leads to rapid change.

Then a terrible calamity happens. Perhaps an asteroid hits, perhaps the earth wobbles, perhaps the sun hiccups. Whatever the reason, many die. But the few survivors don't care, for now the almost-empty ecosystems are fertile ground for a new onslaught. Life explodes everywhere. It's now only five hundred million years ago and you're a kind of bottom-feeding jawless fish. Without knowing it, or planning it, you're slowly inventing the biological technology that will help you, in 140 million years, become an amphibian.

So the long eons march on, while living things, on a long road to nowhere, never giving a thought to the future, occupy themselves (as biologists say) with the four Fs: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and---er---reproduction. Each eon is punctated by a new technology or a terrible calamity resulting in a brief flurry of activity and confusion; the survivors either incorporate a new technology to handle the current crisis or branch off to fill other niches.

Every time evolution throws up a new technology for living life the same thing happens: the eternal arms race starts all over again, with more ammunition or in a different arena. Each arena---each way of living life---becomes a new ecological niche as life-forms compete to live in it. Despite the recurring catastrophes, the eternal competition that is life keeps going---always different, always the same. The names change, but the dance stays the same. That's life at its most elemental: competition and revolution, technology and strife, change and adaptation, chance and necessity.

A Mind of One's Own