In the Beginning

Ralph A. Lewin (1977)

In the beginning the earth was all wet;

We hadn't got life—or ecology—yet.

There were lava and rocks—quite a lot of them both—

And oceans of nutrient Oparin broth.

But then there arose, at the edge of the sea,

Where sugars and organic acids were free,

A sort of a blob in a kind of a coat—

The earliest protero-prokaryote.

It grew and divided: it flourished and fed;

From puddle to puddle it rapidly spread

Until it depleted the ocean's store

And nary an acid was found any more.

Now, if one considered that terrible trend,

One might have predicted that that was the end—

But no! In some sunny wee lochan or slough

Appeared a new creature—we cannot say how.

By some strange transition that nobody knows,

A photosynthetical alga arose.

It grew and it flourished where nothing had been

Till much of the land was a blue shade of green

And bubbles of oxygen started to rise

Throughout the world's oceans, and filled up the skies;

While, off in the antediluvian mists,

Arose a few species with heterocysts

Which, by a procedure which no-one can tell,

Fixed gaseous nitrogen into the cell.

As the gases turned on and the gases turned off,

There emerged a respiring young heterotroph.

It grew in its turn, and it lived and it throve,

Creating fine structure, genetics, and love,

And, using its enzymes and oxygen-2,

Produced such fine creatures as coli and you.

This, then, is the story of life's evolution

From Oparin broth to the final solution.

So, prokaryologists, dinna forget:

We've come a long way since the world was all wet.

We owe a great deal—you can see from these notes—

To photosynthetical prokaryotes.