The Chicken or the Egg

                                                               By Winona Ackerman

The answer to the old insoluble riddle quickly becomes obvious if one takes a long view--a very long view. It's the egg, of course, or a sort of an egg that came first.

Most rational people these days believe in evolution. But many have not questioned what life looked like before mammals evolved. Leading scientists in many different fields such as astronomy, physics, geology, biology, chemistry and their various branches have looked farther back, and most of them agree that there was some kind of universal ancestor that transmitted life itself long before life was divided into plant and animal. This universal ancestor, transmitter of life, was likely a one-cell organism. It may have been one that lived in the center of Earth or Mars or some other celestial body. It could be one of the class of bacteria now known to exist that live at super-high temper- atures, much hotter than the boiling point we rely on to kill micro-organisms. It could have been blasted out in a volcanic eruption and traveled for years, decades, centuries, or millenia as a spore before developing in the friendly environment of Mars or Earth. It could have been the sole sur- vivor of billions or trillions of siblings that died during nearly endless orbits in comet dust clouds, for we know that nature is wasteful. And it is cautionary to realize that once Mars was almost surely as green and favorable to life as Earth is now.

So, the egg came first, and it could have come from anywhere in the cosmos, and it could have spent billions of years in incubation and development. This almost hopeless pattern could have been repeated many times before life developed its staying power, but once this universal ancestor had mutated into archaea and then separated into bacteria and eucarya, evolution was well launched. I did not make up these theories. They are the product of much mulling and discussion among scientists and, of course, much research. Pieces that fit in the puzzle include the knowledge that micro-organisms exist that feed on sulfur and iron, crucial information, since early earth had almost no carbon, which is now the essential ingredient in organic life and its chemistry.

I met many of these theories for the first time in Paul Davies' book, The Fifth Miracle: the Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life. I found the book exciting and since I have read it, in nearly every magazine or newspaper I pick up I see an article that fits somehow into theories concerning how, when, and where life began. For example, in the Washington Post of 19 October 2000, an
 article entitled "Oldest Living Bacteria Are Revived" discussed organisms that have been locked in salt crystals for 250 million years. In other words, the book has enriched my life and no doubt will continue to do so.

It is intriguing to wonder whether life was inevitable, whether the development of consciousness was pre-ordained. Some theorists say that our cells know more about information technology than our computers do. What is the next step for life and is it inevitable? Will we be wiped out by a giant asteroid, as it appears dinosaurs were? Each of us must decide how much to concern ourselves with questions like these, but whatever you decide, never, ever say the chicken came before the egg.