Nature keeps a starter culture going,

through it all, meteor strikes and polar shifts, wildfires and tectonic rifts. But the spark never goes out. If it did, it might never come back. There are always survivors, hopefully. You’d hate to have to spark flint and steel again to try and start a fire. It’s much easier to keep the stew going no matter how far it deviates from its original course. They say such ancient species as the Komodo dragon harbor species of bacteria that can quickly kill a man if given the opportunity to infect, species that haven’t seen the light of day in millions of years, yet have found a safe haven in the mouths of dragons. Some bacteria can reproduce more than twice an hour; that’s fifty generations a day. The ten thousand generations that it might take a line of primates to re-speciate in isolation from its mates in some two hundred thousand years, a line of bacteria can do in less than a year. This is not a comforting thought to a TB patient facing six to nine months of antibiotic cocktails while the bacillus speed dials DNA combinations trying to unlock the key that’ll immunize itself against four antibiotics, all at once. We do the same, but it takes much longer. We’re sourdough man dipping our wicks in the perpetual stew. Take all you want, but eat all you take.

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