> All complex life on earth shares a common ancestor, a cell that arose from simple bacterial progenitors on just one occasion in 4 billion years.
This strikes me as a commonly held but deeply flawed origin story, and a close read suggests Gates doesn't buy it either, but fell into the literary trap of writing it anyway.
If we believe the first form of life occurred on the sea floor, why shouldn't we believe that new forms of life are spontaneously occurring on the sea floor all the time? By now the overwhelming majority of those new forms are probably eaten by an existing critter, but in the early days, there were many, many, many events. And, like he says, there were many, many times when one cell ate another cell. I rather doubt it only succeeded to result in eukaryotes once.
This strikes me as a commonly held but deeply flawed origin story, and a close read suggests Gates doesn't buy it either, but fell into the literary trap of writing it anyway.
If we believe the first form of life occurred on the sea floor, why shouldn't we believe that new forms of life are spontaneously occurring on the sea floor all the time? By now the overwhelming majority of those new forms are probably eaten by an existing critter, but in the early days, there were many, many, many events. And, like he says, there were many, many times when one cell ate another cell. I rather doubt it only succeeded to result in eukaryotes once.