Page 27 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Archaeontogeny

at the limitations on inquiry imposed by the orthodoxy of his peers.
Then he became a full professor and spread his wings.
His renown had gained him support for several research projects
not normally within the purview of a physical anthropologist. The
results were mixed, but made for fascinating reading. In the early days
of gene study, vast tracts of chromosomal encoding were labeled
“junk DNA,” owing to their apparent lack of function in producing
useful proteins for embryonic development and postnatal elaboration
of structure. The phenomenon, initially puzzling as an inefficiency of
nature requiring explanation, had thus been considered an example of
nature’s conservatism, like the vermiform appendix; in this case,
evolution had merely shunted aside once-useful blueprints for
characteristics no longer helpful in the struggle to survive. That
opinion has recently shifted, of course, in the light of more subtle
investigations of the genome, but at the time Professor Cutter saw an
opportunity and came up with his own provocative hypothesis.
An avid fan of detective and science fiction, he seriously
considered the possibility that certain long sequences of ACGT—the
building blocks of the double helix—among the strings believed to
be meaningless, were in fact keys to abiogenesis waiting for a good
sleuth to decode. In Cutter’s view, the vagrant interstellar organic
material claimed by the proponents of panspermia as the origin of
terrestrial life had arrived on Earth as encapsulated DNA just barely
adequate to encode simple organisms adaptable to conditions on this
planet. That would be inevitable, given both the differences to and
similarities with our world and any other from which this flotsam
could have come. Once here, reasoned the professor, the rapidly-
evolving survivors might indeed have preserved their original DNA
despite its obsolete functionality—perhaps one day an organism from
Earth would be launched into the cosmos, landing somewhere that
the previously-useful code could be of use once again. Elementary,
pronounced the gene detective, and designed an experiment to tease
out the environmental requirements of such exobiology from our
“junk DNA,” going as far back as the simplest organisms to find the
common thread. Perhaps the information thus gained could even
guide astronomers to locate that planet of origin.

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