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Friends,
To keep going with the themes of symbiosis from AEWCH 91, I thought I’d present my short essay series on the origins of sex, Life Superlives, as an episode. The gist of it is this – what are the bacterial origins of sex, and what can we learn about our lives today from these scientific origin stories?
Rather than present show notes as usual, I’ve reproduced the original essays here, along with a bibliography below.
Enjoy this solo episode! Back to the conversations next week.
XO
CH
1. Sex in the Gaze of the Sun
For all the problems that accompany sex in our lives — shame and fear, jealous lovers, unplanned pregnancies, STIs — one might be surprised that, according to the scientific narrative, sex began as a healing act which diverted crisis.
Once upon a time, billions of years ago, the Sun’s violent and ultraviolet rays cascaded over an ozone-less Earth, greeting the only lifeforms with harsh light. These were the bacteria; prokaryotes, so named for their lack of nuclei (pro = before, karyon = nut or core).
These beings arose only to dissolve in the radiated presence of light. They already had a way to repair themselves, or life would have never survived its bright beginning. Their DNA — the double-stranded molecule that many of us know about but that scientists still have trouble understanding — had begun to replicate itself through a series of gestures from various enzymes. If one part of a DNA strand was damaged, it was amputated by an enzyme that could cut the DNA bonds apart (a nuclease), and then another enzyme arrived to create wholeness and heal the void.
In the gaze of the Sun, the tiny prokaryotic innards were often too damaged to recombinate on their own. So these beings reached, in the mordial soup, for the ejected DNA of their dead kin, the floating pieces of bodies amongst them. They used their own enzymes in conjunction with the dead to repair themselves.
This was the beginning of sex for living organisms.
It was a co-mingling of partners. The Sun was there first. It aroused the prokaryotes, initiated sex, and then the presence of the dead infused the living with a new possibility for life.
Experiments today that replicate ultraviolet early-Earth intensities prompt similar responses in bacteria.
Life’s first sexual partner was a star.
That also means that by evolutionary implication, our first sexual partner was a star. The ancestors of all our ancestors undulated across the Earth, under a pulsing sexual sphere.
As children, we stare at the Sun, and it blots out our perception. As adults, we know better. When we look at the Sun, we turn away, flushed. It remains a flirtatious, sexual glance cast upon an unbearably beautiful face.
2. The Orgy Against Identity
Life threads through the world, not just living, but superliving, creating more life and more possibilities for what life can be. Every individual has within itself the potential to change, utterly, all potentials.
First, bacteria and the Sun embraced over vast distances, and created sex. After sex was created, different forms of sex were possible.
Bacterial sex can take the form of gene-swapping on a “lateral” level. In other words, genes flow freely from bacterium to bacterium, breaking from an initial host and finding their way into another.
If this happened in humans, “…a man with red hair and freckles might wake up, after a swim with a brunette and her dog, with brown hair and floppy ears.”
Because of their freely exchanged genes, bacteria are engaged in the largest and most continuous orgy of all time.
Or maybe it’s microscopic self-love. It depends on how you define bacterial species:
“(Since) all strains of bacteria can potentially share all bacterial genes, then strictly speaking, there are no true species in the bacterial world. All bacteria are one organism, one entity capable of genetic engineering on a planetary or global scale.”
Look closely at the world, and you will see that life defies scale: Are the tiniest organisms really just the largest organism alive, spreading across the planet and into its pores, a giant body with infinite organs? Life superlives.
In another form of bacterial sex, conjugation, a “donor” bacterium transfers genetic material into a “recipient.” The ordinary terms are biological sex — “male” and “female” — are useless in the underlying current of life: hen the donor transfers its genetic material to the recipient, it loses its donor characteristics, and the recipient receives them. Bacteria fuck their identities into each other.
Look closely, again, at the world. You will see the slippage of identity.
3. Carnal Incarnations
Life was born, and it superlived.
Early organisms brushed up against each other, and when they did, they consumed each other. But not always. Encounter after encounter between them gave rise to a new form of union: symbiosis.
Here’s an example. Imagine a tiny, ancient oxygen-respiring bacterium. Small, but hungry, it was was a fierce predator. Now imagine a larger, blobbier organism – a thermoplasm, contracting and expanding itself through its shapeless life. The two come together again and again, usually leading to the thermoplasm being invaded and eaten from the inside out by its smaller relative. But not every invasion killed the thermoplasm, and soon – how? We don’t know – the invader organism was taken up by the invaded, incorporated into its being. Permanently.
The thermoplasm could now resist the death-bringing properties of oxygen, and the bacterium found rest from the hunt.
Symbiosis is the ultimate procreative sex act. Two beings merge and form a third. Not a separate being, but a reincarnation of both selves.
Symbiosis is the origin of all multicellular organisms, and likely one of the main motivators of the rise of new species.
Symbiosis is sex, super-sexing.
This creative act is the foundation of human life. Let me explain.
Many protoctists (usually mislabeled “protozoans” – there is no “zoo” in them, since they aren’t animals) like the thermoplasm, reproduce through cell division, also called mitosis, in which an organism copies its own DNA and then pulls itself in two. A startling feature of mitosis is that, even though it’s called cell “division,” it doesn’t actually divide the number or chromosomes, structures in the cell that bear many of the cell’s genes.
In the procreative variety of sex that humans have, sperm and egg cells merge to create a new being. Sperm cells and egg cells have only half the chromosomes compared to the other cells in human beings. When sperm and egg meet, each carries a complimentary half of those chromosomes. This is how sperm and egg meet and form a new being. Rather than dividing (mitosis) humans are created by compliment (meiosis).
Our cells have forms that are meant to meet. They await each other. In other words, human beings are formed through a sort of predestined symbiosis.
Look at your hands, now. They are composed of cells upon cells, grouped together in the whorls and arches of your skin, the bones beneath, the connecting tendons. Your hands are a gathering of cells. And those cells are the ancient agreements of bacteria.
Sex is us. It’s what makes our cells, it’s what made us capable of making new forms of sex and new beings.
And it’s more than just us.
From its inception, sex has been a meeting of forces far beyond bodies and desires.
4. Sex Before Life
We end this series with a story from before the beginning.
Once upon a time,
biology tells us,
Before bacteria…
Before the superliving hypersex of symbiosis…
Before life…
the Earth was teeming with bonds of sugars, phosphates, and nitrogenous substances.
These bonds, or ribonucleic acid (RNA), huddled into themselves, and stretched their ways throughout the surface of the planet.
For these molecules, language was form. When they encounter each other, they strained to understand each other through strange acts of translation. They wrapped themselves up into each other, and this act of language, this braiding of being, created new forms.
A mysterious correspondence: an exchange of material, packed with meaning. This was the exuberant world full of RNA, and this was the birth of sex.
This story provides us with a new and sideways answer to the old question of chicken and egg. Did two chickens having sex make the fertilized egg from which another chicken sprung?
Or did the first chicken spring from a pre-existing egg?
When we look into the origins of sex, we discover an unexpected truth.
Q. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
A. Sex.
Sources
Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan. Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan. What Is Sex? New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Serres, Michel. Variations on the Body. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012.
Conner Habib 