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Life as Slime

Prominent scientists continue to claim life is “just” slime on a spinning rock. However, in an age when the rarity and fragility of life are increasingly evident, it’s time to retire the metaphor.

Visions of animals naturally springing from wet mud go back to the pre-Stoic philosopher Anaximander, but Ritgen had been more immediately preceded by Lorenz Oken, another German naturalist who argued all life comes from “ Urschleim, ” the primordial slime. The poet-scientist Goethe, in 1798, proclaimed that life seen from a high enough altitude looked “like a malignant disease.” Not unsurprisingly, Arthur Schopenhauer — the quintessential cosmic curmudgeon — went further, remarking in 1844 that biology was but a “moldy film” on a “cold crust,” hurtling through “endless space.” As the 19th century dragged to its end, the Parisian novelist, Anatole France, reiterated the same pondering whether our “tiny planet” had become “spoiled and rotten.” Maybe we were merely symptoms “of the disease which has corrupted this bad fruit,” he concluded: indistinct from “bacilli and germs,” “abhorrent to the universal order.” We now know we are descended from one unguaranteed furtive fruiting that may well not have persisted long enough to generate “.” Indeed, since roughly 1980, evidence has emerged that life has gone through several paroxysms — the so-called “Big Five” mass extinction events — which have decimated global biodiversity.

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