Cosmic Fugue

Cosmic Fugue

For a long time, the varieties of organisms could arise only from the accumulation of random mutations – the selection of changes, letter by letter, in the organic codes. Sex seems have been invented around two billion years ago. Before then evolution must have been agonizingly slow, but with the invention of sex could whole paragraphs, pages and books of their DNA instructions, producing new varieties ready for the sieve of selection.

Today organisms are selected to engage in sex and those who find it uninteresting quickly became extinct. And this is true not only of the microbes of two billion year ago, as we, humans also have a palpable devotion to exchanging segments of DNA.

Celestial Worlds. Celestial Worlds. Image : © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

We may mount from this dull Earth, and viewing it from on high, consider whether Nature has laid out all her cost and finery upon this small speck of Dirt. So, like Travellers into other distant countries, we shall be better able to judge of what’s done at home, know how to make a true estimate of, and set its own value upon every thing. We shall be less apt to admire what this World calls great, shall nobly despise those Trifles the generality of Men set their Affections on, when we know that there are a multitude of such Earths inhabited and adorned as well as our own. 

(Christian Huygens, the Celestial Worlds Discovered, c. 1690).