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By Root 374 0

bacteria living in rocks deep below the earth’s surface will emerge and reevolve into something like us again. The myth buster here is Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard paleontologist whose numerous books and popular essays on evolution have consistently chipped away at the belief in inherent evolutionary progress, proposing in its stead a theory of evolution that says we are nothing more than a glorious accident, a contingent quirk on life’s landscape. Rewind the tape of life and play it back, Gould says, and nothing like humans would evolve again (the tape is a metaphor, of course, as a Read Only Memory tape would play back exactly as it was originally recorded). The trillion evolutionary steps between basic bacteria and big brains would not happen again in a million playbacks of the film of life. We are unique, literally a once-in-a-lifetime fluke of nature.

To be fair, I must confess a personal preference for this gloriously contingent view of life, so my fuzzy factor may be too high. It is certainly higher than many evolutionary theorists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett would give it, since they see in the pattern of evolution a story of upward progress to ever greater heights and smarts where, if the tape were rewound, another intelligent communicating species would arise. Maybe, but in the 3.5-billion-year history of life that included hundreds of millions of species, only one has made it—us—so I give this heresy a fuzzy factor of .8.

Heresy 4. Oil Is Not a Fossil Fuel

Ever since the energy crisis of the 1970s we have been hearing about how the world is about to run out of such fossil fuels as natural gas and oil, and that we must quickly develop alternative sources. The original doomsayers appear to be wrong since, thirty years on, gas-guzzling SUVs are chugging around and getting their tanks filled at rates well below what inflation has done to most other consumer prices. Still, environmentalists argue, whether fossil fuels run out next year or next decade, they are going to run out relatively soon.

Not if Cornell University’s Thomas Gold is right in his radical theory about the “deep hot biosphere.” Miles below the surface of the earth, deeply embedded in the nooks and crannies of rocks, live primitive thermophilic (heat-loving) bacteria, similar to the microorganisms that have been discovered living in thermovents deep on the ocean bottom and in the hot pools of Yellowstone National Park, and as tough as the extremophiles living within ice sheets in Antarctica and possibly even on meteors in deep space. This deep hot biosphere gets its energy not from the sun like we surface-dwelling creatures do, but from the energy of the earth’s interior. It may be so dense that it cumulatively outweighs all surface life combined, including trees and plants!

Fossil fuels, or hydrocarbons, says Gold, are not the by-product of decaying organic matter as most geologists believe. Instead, long before life formed on earth hydrocarbons developed naturally in the planet’s interior, just as they have been discovered on other planetary bodies and moons in the solar system. From the light gas methane to the heavy liquid petroleum, hydrocarbons exist in prodigious quantities and great depths and could sustain our energy needs for many centuries or millennia to come (George Dubya Bush would love this theory).

The reason scientists think that hydrocarbons have their origin in dead plants is that petroleum contains molecules that are typically the by-product of decaying organic matter. Also, when you pass light through petroleum it exhibits an optical property of rotating in a right-handed fashion, which is the result of having more right-handed molecules than left-handed molecules. (Molecules come in both right- and left-handed versions, but living organisms consist mostly of right-handed molecules, so a preponderance of them would indicate an organic origin.) The reason for this, says Gold, is that petroleum and other hydrocarbons have seeped up through the rocks from tens of kilometers below the surface, and in