THE PHYSICAL SIMILARITIES between Terrans and Hyadeans, not just in general appearance but in terms of chemistry and genetic codes as well, had been devastating to Earth's prevalent theory of life and its origins, but had come as no particular surprise to the aliens. They had listened skeptically but with interest to the idea of how ooze could turn itself into a jellyfish and a jellyfish into a horse by selectively accumulating random mutations, and when the evidence claimed to support it proved not to, they dismissed it as another of Earth's secular religions, invented to displace an earlier one.
In a way that fitted well with the Hyadeans' catastrophic account of the origins and development of planetary systems, Darwin's original notebooks were filled with observations of evidence written worldwide of epochs of sudden, cataclysmic change. But twenty years later when he published, he had come around to adapting to biology Lyell's principle of gradualism, by then established as the guiding paradigm of geology. Under the new scheme of things, no catastrophic upheavals needed to be invoked to explain the past. Everything could be accounted for by the processes seen to be taking place in the present, provided they were allowed operate for a sufficiently long time. Hence, from an ideology were constructed the immense spans of time that the Hyadeans found it astonishing anyone from Earth could look at the surface of their own planet and believe in.
Earth's history fascinated the Hyadeans. Revolution in the American colonies and then France had terrified the ruling houses of Europe. Napoleon's armies had carried notions of rising up against traditional authority from Catholic Spain to Tsarist Russia, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the continent was seething with militant political movements advocating socialism. All it needed now was for science to declare that violent upheaval was the natural way of change. The new scheme, however, depicted change as a slow, gradual accumulation of tiny advantagesso slow that little significant difference should be evident even in the course of a lifetime. And on the other hand, an explanation for life that did away with the supernatural served the new, technocratic wealth, based on commerce and industry, by completing the undermining of the authority on which the old power structure rested. Expedient and intellectually satisfying, it was embraced from all sides and rapidly enthroned as science. When the evidence that had been predicted failed to materialize, and contradictions continued to accumulate, ingenious and imaginative possibilities were devised to explain the facts away. No serious consideration was given to the possibility that the reason so little proof could be found of life's having evolved from simple molecules on Earth might be simply that it hadn't; it had arrived there.
Yet it had long been known that bacteria and other microorganisms exhibited an extraordinary tolerance to extremes of such quantities as radiation, temperature, and pressure, that was difficult to account for by any selection process on the surface of the Earth, where such conditions had never existed. But it made them ideally preadapted for space. Carbonized structures uncannily suggestive of familiar forms of microbe had been discovered inside meteoritesand yes, with the possibility of contamination excluded beyond reasonable doubt. Refractive indexes in part of the interstellar clouds matched those of biological objects more closely than any of the alternatives put forward to explain them. Some scientists over the years had pointed to these findings as a case for supposing that the genes that directed life had originated from somewhere else. The mainstream scientific community saw warnings of the theological can of worms opening up again, and their general reaction was to ridicule the suggestion or leave it alone.
The Hyadeans had made the same observations. Having neither supernatural nor secular fundamentalism to defend, they accepted the evidence as meaning what it said and concluded that living organisms were constructed on planetary surfaces from local materials under the direction of genetic information with which space was seeded. These incoming code units were combined into complex genetic programs that built organisms suited to local conditions. Infection was the principal mechanism for spreading new genetic combinations around and establishing initially compatible breeding populationsmuch faster and more efficient than sexual transmission, the slowness of which was another problem with Terran theoryespecially given that the enormous time spans contrived to make it seem plausible were wrong anyway. The programs were ruggedly constructed in possessing a degree of adaptability to cope with environmental fluctuations, and this had been extrapolated into an explanation of everything.
The upshot was that similar kinds of places would originate similar kinds of life. Life did indeed evolve on planets, but not in the way Terran scientists had thought. Chryse was roughly like Earth, even if worn down and not reworked as recently, and that was why Hyadeans were roughly like humans.
Since they had never observed genetic information originating either through a mechanistic or an intelligently guided process, the Hyadeans hadn't asked how it came together in the first place. About the only possibility they seemed to have considered was that it could be an advanced culture's way of propagating itself through the galaxy using a radically different form of starship. Where that culture might have come from wasn't the kind of thing that Hyadeans were going to spend a lifetime worrying about.
Hence, the Hyadeans rejected Terran evolutionary theory as a construct having more to do with Earth's political religions than scientific reality. What captivated them, however, and came as a totally new revelation to their thinking, even if the Terrans who had first dreamed it up were now rejecting it, was the concept that life itself might have a purpose. So while Terrans were contriving mechanisms to deny all the meaning in, and reasons for, existence that they had once believed, the Hyadeans were discovering questions that it had never occurred to them to ask.