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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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