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more likely."
"All right then. If we assume that mutational control is behind all this, then
we have some sort of specification for our mystery agent. What sort of an
organism can control mutations? A virus that unites with the chromosomal
material and gives it the property of self-repair? Perhaps but how do we
explain these gross changes in the life-system? How does a virus carry the
information necessary to carry out repairs at the molecular level and all
other levels as well, up to and including the whole biosphere? This organism
is a sculptor. It's redesigned an entire ecosystem from the ground up. How can
it possibly be so small as to be invisible to the naked eye?"
"Perhaps it isn't."
"Perhaps not." He paused to think. "Suppose we're assuming too much. Suppose
it hasn't done all we've credited it with. Suppose, for a start, that sexual
reproduction as we know it never evolved here in the first place. The male of
any species is, when all is said and done, a spurious luxury. Suppose that on
Pharos, parthenogenesis is and always has been a universal principle. Without
sexual reproduction we can still imagine a moderately conventional
evolutionary pattern the same kinds of organism evolving to fit the same sorts
of niche. The absence of sexual reproduction would only slow things down the
absence of recombination would merely mean that there was a heavier reliance
on mutation. And that fits!
Mutational manipulation could have evolved here as an alternative to sexual
reproduction, you see? The material which carries the genetic information and
the generative potential on this world the chromosomes or their
equivalent isn't made up in the same way that it is on most worlds of this
type. It behaves spontaneously in a different fashion, and it's become
stabilised in a different way. It must be self-
mutating to a high degree, and instead of coping with mutation by evolving the
sexual screening process, it s evolved a different kind of screen, involving
some sort of testing. All life systems evolve toward stability that s what
life is: the maintenance of order in an entropic system which tends towards
disorder. Our life-system tried one way, the Pharos life-system went a
different way. But mutational control has worked -
on Pharos, at any rate
This world did follow a normal pattern for a long time it explored the
same range of variation. But it explored it in a different way. The Earth-type
system is basically dialectic the present state of variation determines the
next, and so on. On
Earth there s no way of scrubbing out the mistakes and trying again. Here,
there is. I
don t quite know how, but there never has been any real competition on this
world.
What happened wasn t sudden at all. What I said earlier that this is an
organised metamorphosis was true in more than a metaphorical sense. This
life-system has always been a co-operative, like a giant hive. It tried to
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reach a balance through predator-prey situations, but when it failed to reach
balance in that way, it just went straight back to the drawing boards. It took
what it had, got rid of what it couldn t use,
and used what it could.
To build a paradise.
You re implying a sort of sentience, I pointed out. You re saying that this
whole life-system is a single unit, and that it knew what it was doing when it
metamorphosed.
I m ascribing no more sentience to it than to a hive of bees, he said. I m
implying vast complexity in the generative system, but no more complexity than
there is in the Earth Biosphere. It s just a different pattern. You re making
the old mistake of assuming that if something is ordered then there must be
logic behind it. Not so, the whole basis of life is that complex patterns form
spontaneously.
Complex molecules grew in the primeval soup just as crystals grow out of their
own solutions. Logic is a simulation of the properties of matter, not the
other way around. This life system isn t sentient, or intelligent or
self-aware it s totally mechanistic. It doesn t need
intelligence to create order. It does perfectly well without. It s our
life-system the alternative method, or alternative method which needed
intelligence and self-
an determination in order to become more efficient, and we won t know for a
very long time yet that our way works if it does. In the end, our kind of
organism may be forced to discover some kind of direct mutational filter to
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