Two Billion Years of Procreation and Recreation
E-Book, Englisch, Band 11, 320 Seiten
Reihe: Shortest Histories
ISBN: 978-1-913083-52-6
Verlag: Old Street Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
How did sex begin?
How did it evolve to be so varied in humans?
What might sex look like in the future?
The Shortest History of Sex traces the long evolution of human sexuality from the first microscopic couplings two billion years ago to today's somewhat baffling array of passions, impulses and fetishes.
From the basic underlying chemistry to the tortuous complexities of the 21st-century human, David Baker lifts the lid on one of nature's primary forces. This is an erudite and entertaining book that tackles large questions with humour and insight – an essential guide for the curious reader.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
CHAPTER 1 A Sexless Universe
13.8 billion to 2 billion years ago Wherein the ingredients for life emerge from an inanimate cosmos • Those ingredients make their way to a newly formed Earth • Life evolves at the bottom of Earth’s oceans • DNA begins its endless quest to replicate itself • Numerous catastrophic disasters compel the evolution of an unlikely, inefficient, and slightly absurd process—sex Despite its somewhat suggestive name, the Big Bang created a Universe that was both sexless and lifeless for most its history. As far as we know, for roughly 10 billion of the past 13.8 billion years, the cosmos was devoid of life and thus lacked any potential for sex. Yet all the ingredients for life were there at the very moment of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. All the particles that make up every living thing that ever was—or will be—were trapped in the ultra-hot singularity that existed at the beginning of space and time. That fledgling matter has merely changed form since then, in a cascade of cosmic and biological evolution, with tiny particles coupling and decoupling, drifting across thousands of light years to become a part of a newly created Earth. And the cream of the crop of those lifeless elements, bubbling away in Earth’s early oceans, became the living, sexually intricate beings about which this story is written. It is in that sense that the matter in your body is 13.8 billion years old, whereas sex is a more recent invention. Sexual selection, alongside natural selection, has played a pivotal role in the transformation of species in the past two billion years since it first evolved from microscopic asexual creatures, impregnating the natural world with its rich and brilliant diversity of forms, and making us humans the sexually complex (and confused) creatures that we are today. By traveling straight down our evolutionary lineage, we can find the origin of every blush, moan, and tingling sensation that reminds us we are alive, along with many of the instincts (both good and evil) that reside in the deepest, most innate parts of our being. By understanding how we transformed from such simple inorganic material into complex living beings, with convoluted body chemistry and fragile neurology, we can understand the heart and core of the overpowering human need for intimacy, love, and sex. 13.8 billion years ago 13.8 billion years ago: First hydrogen for DNA 3 min after Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago: First carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorous for DNA fused in the belly of stars 4.5 billion years ago Formation of the solar system and Earth 4 billion years ago Formation of the first oceans 3.8 billion years ago Evolution of the first life 3.4 billion years ago Evolution of photosynthesizers 3–2.5 billion years ago The Oxygen Holocaust 2.2 billion years ago Formation of the ozone layer 2 billion years ago First Snowball Earth, the first eukaryotes, the evolution of sex Intergalactic Aphrodisiac
At the core of all sex is DNA, an unassuming dollop of acid, a chemical that creates a panoply of instincts and peculiar bodies in its blind, single-minded effort to reproduce itself. And the core ingredients of DNA are the fundamental elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous, none of which existed at the start of the Universe. We begin our story by explaining how that innocuous glob of acid—which eventually became responsible for every breathtaking, body-spasming, toe-curling orgasm that has ever been experienced (or faked)—came to be. A split second after the Big Bang, the first tiny pinpricks of matter that make up your entire body were created from pure energy, then mind-bendingly hot, at around 20.3 octillion degrees Fahrenheit. After three minutes, the Universe cooled to ten million degrees, producing clouds of hydrogen, the first ingredient of DNA and the simplest, most common element in the cosmos. In fact, hydrogen makes up approximately 75 percent of all matter in the Universe to this day. Over the next fifty million years, the Universe grew dark and freezing cold. Wispy clouds of hydrogen slowly began to clump together into dense pockets, and the gas at the center of them began to generate a ferocious heat. The pressure became so intense that atoms started to smash together, letting off continuous nuclear explosions, creating brand new elements. Thus, the stars ignited and burst forth into existence, warming the Universe again for the first time in millions of years. These stars were so massive that they burned extremely hot and quickly exhausted themselves, after only a few million years. In their cores, they used up all their fuel and began to fuse together to create heavier and heavier elements such as the carbon atoms, which are vital to every cell in your body, linking all other chemical combinations into a patchwork of bone, skin, and sinew. Also fused in the belly of the first stars, only a few million years after the Big Bang, were the oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorous atoms that would one day complete the double helix of DNA. We now had all the ingredients for sex, in separate atoms at the core of a giant disorganized lump of gas we call a star. When these giant stars could no longer fuse any more atoms, they collapsed and exploded in blinding supernovas, flinging the ingredients for DNA across the Universe. For countless eons, our atoms traveled across the vast stretch of space that, roughly ten billion years ago, became our Milky Way galaxy. About a light year away from where we are now, gravity sucked most of matter back into a dense cloud again, creating a second-generation star, seeded with the ingredients for future life. Then, roughly 4.6 billion years ago, that star also exploded in another furious supernova, converting even more hydrogen into heavier elements, and sowing them across the patch of space where our solar system now resides. Approximately 4.567 billion years ago, the elements hurled into our solar system by the supernova rapidly got sucked together into a third-generation star: our Sun. As the dust of the solar system clumped together to form objects the size of rocks, then boulders, then mountains, their collisions became increasingly violent. Twenty-five million years later, the solar system had eight large planets, of which the newly formed Earth was third rock from the Sun. During these many apocalyptic collisions that created Earth, there was absolutely no way anything as fragile as life could have existed. So where were the ingredients of DNA? The hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorous were heated by a molten Earth into the form of gases and ejected out of cracks in the frail surface of Earth as steam. This was because, as Earth differentiated and heavier elements sank through the molten sludge to the core, lighter elements like those that constitute DNA bubbled to the top. In other words, we began our history on Earth as clouds in a fire-soaked sky. We swirled around in Earth’s angry atmosphere, in a sky of blood red. The Origin of Life
Around four billion years ago, the surface temperature of Earth fell below the boiling point of 212°F (100°C). The steam that had been belched out of Earth’s crust into the atmosphere began to fall back to Earth as rain, in a torrential downpour that continued for millions upon millions of years without cessation. The trenches and low-lying areas of Earth began to fill up with water, producing the world’s first oceans. Among the raindrops that fell to the surface at this time were the ingredients that would soon form into life: the same organic materials that have been recycled over billions of years and currently form your body. They found a home in the swirling chemical soup of Earth’s virgin seas. At the bottom of Earth’s oceans were underwater volcanoes and piping hot sea vents, emitting extreme heat from a still newly molten planet. The surface of Earth was still grey, rocky, and lifeless. Not a single creature, not an inch of greenery. Nothing. It more closely resembled the Moon than the verdant, luscious Earth of today. Then, approximately 3.8 billion years ago, somewhere in the depths of the sea, the first life began to form. Organic chemicals clung together as they floated around in the swirling oceans of Earth’s primordial soup. Eventually, these chemicals began to form highly complex...
