The first people on Earth were animals that lived in the sea, until one of them—we don’t know her name—invented legs.

The way that one animal revolves into another explains why there are so many different sorts of creature, but doesn’t explain it very well.

Why don’t monkeys turn into crabs? If a fish can decide to have legs, why can’t it decide to have four extra faces or a propeller?

So who made the rules for how animals revolve?

You might think the answer is God.

But, in fact, it’s another old man with a beard: Charles Darling.

Philomena Cunk, Cunk On Everything

Fish and reptiles move side-to-side. If you watch a snake or crocodile move, they are swimming like fish but on the land, with legs.

When you get to mammals, the legs come underneath, the spine and the body come off the ground, and now they’re free to gallop. 

And when whales went back into the water, they kept the up-and-down spinal movement, so they’re still galloping. In the water!

Joy Reidenberg, When Whales Could Walk

Did you know that ants, bees, wasps, and hornets all started from the same wasp ancestor, in the time of dinosaurs, when one little plant-eating fly was born with a strange mutation that made its egg more layable into animals, right through its ovipositor, that stinger-like egg-laying tube?

And from that one moment an incredible radiation of animals from one ancestor occurred, because it was so powerful to be able to lay eggs in any living thing—into a spider, an aphid, another wasp.

Karl Deisseroth, Projections

For centuries, it has been a favorite pastime of many distinguished thinkers to imagine how language first evolved in the human species.

One of the most original theories was surely that of Frenchman Jean-Pierre Brisset, who in 1900 demonstrated how human language (that is to say, French) developed directly from the croaking of frogs.

One day, as Brisset was observing frogs in a pond, one of them looked him straight in the eye and croaked “coac”. After some deliberation, Brisset realized that what the frog was saying was simply an abbreviated version of the question “Quoi que tu dis?” (“Whatever you say?”) He thus proceeded to derive the whole language from permutations and combinations of “coac coac”.

Modern day speculations remain no less speculative, as witnessed by the impressive range of theories circulating for how the first words emerged: from shouts and calls; from hand gestures and sign language; from the ability to imitate; from the ability to deceive; from grooming; from singing, dancing, and rhythm; from chewing, sucking and licking; and from almost any other activity under the sun.

The point is that as long as there is no evidence, all these scenarios remain “just so” stories. They are usually fascinating, often entertaining, and sometimes even plausible—but still not much more than fantasy.

Guy Deutscher, Unfolding Of Language

Every living thing has instructions inside it for how to build it, like an IKEA bookcase. These instructions are called DNA, which is a sort of code.

It took scientists ages to crack the code, even though it’s fairly obvious it’s just writing stuff backward, and if you solve it, it spells “AND.”

Not a very hard code, but scientists sometimes can’t see the woods for the trees, because they’re looking down a microscope.

Philomena Cunk, Cunk On Everything

Genes defined as DNA sequences are rather like the symbols of a written language which in themselves have no meaning other than that which is given to them by the users of the language. Knowing the letters of the English alphabet does not in itself guarantee that one can understand the works of Shakespeare, or even the talk of a young child.

Moreover, the same sequence can have totally different meanings in different contexts within the same language (compare, for example, the English word ‘just’ in ‘just a minute’ and ‘a just war’) and even more so in different languages (compare ‘but’ in English, translated as ‘mais’ in French, with ‘but’ in French, translated as ‘goal’ in English).

DNA sequences are precisely like this. Their meanings in terms of organismal expression have completely changed during the course of evolution, and they may also change during the life history of a single organism.

The ‘language of genes’ has itself evolved. And the key to understanding this ‘language’ is not at the level of DNA. It is at the level of the organism. It is the organism that gives meaning (function) to DNA sequences.

Denis Noble, Dance To Tune Of Life

A cell’s enzymes are capable of actively manipulating DNA to do this or that. A genome consists largely of semi-stable genetic elements that may be rearranged or even moved around in the genome, thus modifying the information content of DNA.

Peter Beurton,
Concept Of Gene In Development And Evolution

The genome is a highly sensitive organ of the cell, monitoring genomic activities and correcting common errors, sensing the unusual and unexpected events, and responding to them, often by restructuring the genome itself.

We know next to nothing about how cells sense danger and instigate adaptive responses to it that often are truly remarkable.

Barbara McClintock, Nobel Prize Lecture

Evolution has been quite conservative in producing completely new DNA sequences, which is why so many species share great proportions of their genomes.

The differences between a worm, a fly, a mouse, and a human have more to do with wholesale reorganization and regulation of the genome that with completely new sequences.

Denis Noble, Dance To Tune Of Life