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We're talking 'bout sex!
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A billion and a half years ago our home planet was unrecognizable. The earth spun faster in those ancient times, an enormous yellow moon, much closer than it is now, illuminated the alien landscape during the short nights. On land there was virtually nothing but barren rock, scoured by howling wind and pelting rain. The dense air was a poisonous yellow-orange haze of nitrogen and carbon compounds with only the barest presence of free oxygen. But the olive green oceans bloomed with swarms of single-celled critters. It was the golden age of the Proterozoic Eon, a world ruled by microscopic creatures of dazzling diversity.
Some zipped around like tiny aircraft, powered through the viscous media by rows of cilia or single whip-like flagella. Others lazily poured themselves into one advancing pseudopod after another, moving and engulfing their prey like the blob. Most were microscopic, but in a world of microbes some may have been mega-fauna rivaling the gigantic Xenophyophores found in the deep ocean today. A few found safety in numbers and grouped in sticky biofilms, or bulky mats preserved to this day as stromatolites. And here and there, perhaps a handful had organized into groups of specialized cells making up a single super-organism -- ancestors of the first metazoans. But there’s a revolutionary change in the works, and it will become all the rage: We're talking 'bout sex!
The precise details of the origin of sex remain a mystery. Since it probably happened in subtle molecular steps starting two billion or more years ago stretching across countless generations of microbes and the earliest multi-cellular conglomerates, it's likely no discernible sequential record was preserved into our own time. If so, we may never know exactly what events transpired. One guess based on what we can observe now is that some microbes or colonies of microbes evolved a more organized system of swapping out sequences of genetic material, perhaps aided by either domesticated or pathogenic viral elements, and over time, the genetic components and related structures that facilitated this process were slowly crafted through the ages by selection. Eventually, cells became specialized at performing functions we'd now identify as a male or female role.
However it happened, it's hard to argue wth the result. Fast forward a 1.5 billion years and sexual species make up a huge portion of the familiar blue-green biosphere we call home. True, much of the modern environmental infrastructure developed and still rests on a foundation of asexual bacteria and archaea, and of course without microbes there would be no beer -- egad! But the crops we harvest, the meat we consume, the plants we use for decoration, the trees-tops our primate ancestors evolved in; almost all of them are sexually reproducing species. And sex created something else. Before gene swapping was formalized, all creatures were, for lack of a better term, mothers, and all her descendants were daughters. But afterward, a new element came into the picture: Dads.
Moms may have had a three-billion year headstart on fathers, but fathers have certainly made up for lost time. On earth today they may be found clothed in chitin, scales, feathers, or fur. They can be deadly to outsiders while doting to their children. Males of every species are spread across the world and throughout the animal kingdom, from penguin fathers tending eggs during the harsh Antarctic spring to our alpha male primate relatives presiding over clans in dwindling pockets of rainforest.
One day is hardly enough to recognize a billion years of evolution or commemorate a lifetime of love and protection. But for what it's worth, from all the grateful sons and daughters at the Examiner to you: don’t forget tomorrow, to tell your dad Happy Fathers Day!
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