Free Fragment by Warren Fahy Page B

to challenge conventional wisdom and to engage in scientific reasoning, even if it led to the demolition of the theory being proposed. They had a special prize for that, in fact—the Icarus Award, for the theory that was shot down the fastest.
    It was rapid-fire science, theory in action, method in motion, and often in the flaming death of a hypothesis could be seen the embers of a brilliant solution. Pitching a bold idea to the wolves had a thrilling appeal to Geoffrey. When it didn’t destroy his theories it improved them, so he had carried the tradition with him wherever he went as a test for his most unscrupulous ideas. He thought of these lectures as “peer preview.”
    Now he strode across the stage in a Black Watch tartan kilt and held out a hand to calm the applause as he reached the lectern and tapped the microphone. Whoops and wolf whistles rose from his audience, and Geoffrey stepped out from behind the lectern for a bow.
    With the kilt, he wore a T-shirt dyed rust-red by the mud of the island of Kaua’i. Green block letters across his chest read, “Conserve Island Habitats.” Geoffrey had spent half a dozen summers on the small Hawaiian island, vacationing at his uncle’s stilted house tucked in the narrow strip of rain forest between a vine-strangled cliff and Tunnels Beach. He had found no better way to escape civilization than to don a mask, snorkel, and fins. He’d shoot through the ancient lava vents, chasing Moorish Idols, following nonchalant sea turtles, and feeding urchins to the brash
Humuhumunukanukaapuaha’a
fish that took them right out of his hands. He had worn this T-shirt on dozens of his swims through those tunnels, and it was the only common denominator for every Fire-Breathing Chat: he wore it for every talk.
    He raised a hand to the easel beside him that announced tonight’s topic:
    Predator and Prey:
The Origin of Sex?
    Another round of whistles, applause, and jeers rose.
    Geoffrey took refuge behind the lectern and began.
    “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. First—a brief history of the world.”
    A ripple of amusement crossed the audience as they settled in and the lights dimmed.
    Geoffrey clicked a remote, and an artist’s rendering of two worlds colliding appeared on the screen behind him.
    “After a Mars-sized planet collided with ours and penetrated her surface, spewing a molten plume of ejecta that would congeal into the Moon, Mother Earth remained a cooling ball of lava for a hundred million years.”
    Geoffrey clicked to a close-up of the full Moon over the ocean.
    “It was this fantastic violence that ironically created the hand that rocked the cradle of life. Four billion years ago, as Earth’s lunar child circled in low orbit, the first oceans were churned by its wrenching tides. Four hundred million years later, the Earth and Moon would be bombarded by another wave of massive impacts as our fledgling solar system continued to work out the kinks in the clockwork we observe today.”
    He clicked to a scene of what looked like outer space scattered with clusters of colored spheres.
    “During this inconceivably violent age, known as the Archean Eon, the first self-copying molecules coalesced in Earth’s oceans. Such molecules are easily re-created in our laboratories using the same inorganic ingredients and forces that bombarded our planet’s primordial seas. During the next billion years, the accumulation of replication errors in these molecules created RNA, which not only replicated itself but catalyzed chemical reactions like a primitive metabolism! RNA’s replication errors led to the evolution of DNA—a molecule more stable than RNA that could copy itself more accurately and manufacture RNA.”
    Geoffrey clicked to a computer-generated image of a DNA molecule.
    “From this self-copying molecular machine, the earliest lifeemerged as a simple organization of chemical reactions. The first crude bacteria harnessed methane, sulfur, copper, sunlight, and