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The Body Electric
rebuilding, pulsing with, well, life, even developing to a liquid crystal
stage and climbing free of their stony nests like Cadmus' dragon's teeth
or the lizards in an M. C. Escher print—all this may seen a bit bizarre.
Yet it's really no more strange than imagining the same transformation
from droplets of broth. The change happened somehow.
The biggest hurdle for this theory is accepting the idea that life could
develop in the dry state, either out of the oceans or in the rocks under-
neath them. Since the mid-1960s it has seemed more plausible, for it
was then that H. E. Hinton, of the University of Bristol, England,
learned that at least one organism spends part of its life completely with-
out liquid water. Certain flies of the Sahara desert lay their eggs in the
brief pools formed by the rare rains. The larvae go through several meta-
morphoses in the water, but they're almost always interrupted by the
evaporation of the pool. Though completely desiccated, in a state Hin-
ton named cryptobiosis, they survive months or years until the next
rainstorm, whereupon they take up where they left off. The larvae can be
quick-dried and stored in a vacuum bottle for many years. Placed in
water, they resurrect in a few minutes. If a larva is cut in two when
active, it takes six minutes to die. If it's flash-dried in the first minute,
the two pieces can be kept on a shelf for years, but when returned to
water they'll live out their remaining five minutes. Contrary to common
sense, it appears that in this case life doesn't need water, but death can't
occur without it.
Getting rid of the water-equals-life assumption makes the crystalline
theory more believable. Conditions on the young planet favored forests
of crystals: It was hot; volcanoes were constantly firing new materials
into the dense, dark shell of turbulent gases. However, the crystals
would still have needed outside energy to overcome the entropy of non-
living matter. With an organizing principle built into them from the
start, it's not too hard to imagine them acquiring other kinds of mole-
cules, including the organics raining from the sky and dissolving in the
waters. Then life would have been on its way to developing the bio-
chemistry we now know—the genetic system and the consequent ap-
pearance of sexuality—which is the basis of all the creatures now alive or
known from the fossil record. Still, we need an energy source for the
transition. Lightning won't work in this context. We also need an expla-
nation for the exclusively left- or right-handed molecules.
In 1974 F. E. Cole and E. R. Graf of New Orleans made a theoretical
analysis of the Precambrian earth's electromignetic field that fulfilled
both needs.
They reasoned that since the atmosphere was much larger
then, it must have pushed the ionosphere much
farther out than it is