Baby, I love you.

This all began two billion years ago
when our profligate prokaryote ancestors
played messy gene-swapping games of
conjugation, transformation and transduction.
That works great, especially if you need to
quickly evolve resistance to antibiotics,
but it doesn’t lend itself to stability,
so those ephemeral unicells never had time
to grow differentiated colonies.
That required also a little cell wall strength,
so eukaryotes grabbed that niche right away
and 1.2 billion years ago it was a eukaryote
who invented true sex.

Baby, I love you.

(10 June 2020)