Spontaneous Generation

It is one of my mother’s favorite stories to tell: When she was a newlywed she sought to impress my father with her baking skills. So she chose to make poppy seed rolls from scratch. But as she was placing the tiny black seeds on the top of the bread dough something peculiar kept happening—it appeared as if the poppy seeds were walking right off the roll.

Upon closer inspection she determined that the seeds truly had been walking----and not simply rolling off. The poppy seeds had—in my mother’s words “made bugs.”

It was this exact wording that my brother always liked to correct whenever my mother recounted her tale. He enjoyed reminding her that nonliving things cannot “make” living things. The poppy seed bugs had hatched from microscopic eggs, not poppy seeds.

Because there is no such thing as spontaneous generation--it is something that all kids learn in school--Louis Pasteur had proved it long ago: life only arises from life.

But all that flies in the face of The Big Bang Theory—the idea that life began on earth when all the chemicals floating around in the sea—the primordial soup—randomly stirred itself into RNA and then mitochondrial DNA and then bacteria.

Seemingly we are all descended from a random chemical reaction--a scientific version of spontaneous generation.

So maybe my mother was not completely incorrect. Maybe bread (or a poppy seed roll) is not too far off from being the staff of life afterall.