ABSTRACT
T ucked away, if it were possible, within the hollow o f the tip o f a dart gun needle aimed at man or beast one could make a memorable discovery. Just a moment after skin penetration the overwhelming impression would be ‘sameness\ A human, a pachyderm, a mouse, a rat, donkey, ape, in all cases the first experience is the epidermis, then the dermis, a layer o f fat and collagen followed by muscles and sometimes a hard landing on a bone. If the needle were fine enough to penetrate the cell membrane and the nuclear envelope, the likeness would stretch to almost all o f life because one would see strings o f A TCGTA CGCGG-as far as the eye reaches. How can the core o f everything be so alike when creatures are as different as elephants and humming birds or tunicates and pigs? By reflex most biologists will point to a common ancestor that lived during the Hadean.lt 2 The new model suggests that the common ancestor did not live but that the universality o f the physics that underlies chemistry had played the role o f the pluripotent ancestor.3 The number o f possible chemical compounds is nearly limitless which raises questions as to how fun damental mechanisms could have come out so uniform.
