ABSTRACT
First, a little about that famous birthplace of ours, where the human race still finds itself only too often: in the soup. Given amino acids detected in the primeval ooze, a dispassionate observer could be forgiven for supposing that the idea that these damp chemicals might one day evolve systems that enabled its descendants to speak, to claim a Self, and indeed to become biologists, would go beyond the wildest excesses of science fiction. You certainly wouldn’t gamble on the possibility. But consider that well-worn, half-serious thought-experiment, that if you gave a monkey writing equipment and an infinity of time to make marks it would eventually write the plays of Shakespeare. Well, we, or at least one of us, did, and the sonnets too. Nor did it need infinity, but only a few million years from the first hominids to the great dramatist. However, even given the power of Darwinian theory many feel that there has not been enough time for us to develop from chemicals. I think this is partly due to a profound and subjective misapprehension about time itself.
