Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The entire history of evolution told from the perspective of a single RNA molecule.

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The short story

Silence.

Then – the first day. All of it determined by the Big Bang itself

Images, sounds, shattering cold, glittering light scattered across space, empty like only perfect emptiness can be.

And then — dust.

The first particles, tiny bits of consciousness barely worthy of the word life. The first syllables forming on lips still powdered with stardust.

And yet — I already knew my text. I looked to the right, I looked to the left, Around me: sense-fragments, swimming the ultra-dense molecular soup of being.

Archaic organics randomly thrown together into some utterly meaningless — RNA — oops, or should I say amino-acid snippets?

And then the waters. Heated by the sweat covered earth-crust, gathered in hollows, rocks, caves, cracks — there is still some space left for us.

So, we drift in in the pond of life we would like to know what we can figure out of these dark muds of vast meaninglessness.

And a new day raised.

Early on I realized: I was different from the others. Because getting out some meaning from just four building blocks — those deoxy-you-know-what — the nucleic acids requires more than stupid chance and the good will of luck.

Because even if it were only twelve of those peculiarly pentagonal, chemically improbable, four-coloured Lego bricks, twelve of them, lined up to form. The shortest functional unit — how many possibilities would that be?

Let’s count. Four times four times four times four times four times four times four times four times four— who’s still counting? times four times four times four

Four to the power of twelve, sixteen million seven hundred seventy-seven thousand two hundred sixteen — the number is exact—combinations.

To pick the handful which can actually be more takes more than stupid chance And the good will of luck.

Because I am unique, I’m different. I do know my text.

And then came the knowledge.

I knew it was time to look inward, to reflect on myself, to spell out my own creation — body and work at once.

A for Adenine: adaptation, ambition, the art of enduring against entropy itself.

C for Cytosine: conflict, conviction, cold clarity cutting paths through chaos.

T for Thymine: trial, transformation, the terrible talent of thinning the weak, so the strongest may persist.

ACT — aha! The first word. I quickly check the keys, and the genetic code translates — into the first amino acid.

And here we are again. I did know my text.

So did I continue, rephrasing, searching, asking, freezing and frying in constant alternation between volcanic heat and the indifferent cold of space.

Soon I found new elements. I carefully chained them, one after the other I built myself a shell — protection from the environment, protection from the others.

Oh, I was amused, I must say.

But soon a little thought started nagging at my self-satisfaction. What will become of this work of divine magnificence once I was gone?

So, I created my first children. And passed on to them, my words.

Many, many years of war awaited us, my friends. The world slipped out of its balance. The price of the winners? Survival. Only one of us can beat all the bests.

I came up with more creations — faster, better, stronger. I learned how to harvest energy from my surroundings. I grew my shell fins. I begin to move forward.

And still — this was far from enough. I wanted to destroy and create To reform and reshape Everything By my own measure, across the whole world.

Time to crawl onto land, to smell forests, breathe the wind.

I also made some small creatures, Oh, countless of them. And there might have been some that weren’t a full win — But here is the thing, it just cannot be that I let a few setbacks discourage me!

And now please don’t ask what joke a platypus should be. I was born to create and by that I feel free to give them shapes and minds and all kinds of forms. Like why not create some two-ended worms?

But one thing resembled in all of them: They followed script, that inside of their bones, inside their cells, forced them to obey my call.

Bowed them to my will. And first it gave me some thrill. Yet slowly, I began to grow bored.

I wished to forget my own lines, to rewire my mind possessed by ideals too far, too blind, obsessed with the urge to go further, to be more I grew old of the rules, I want to make up my own. Leave my peers behind, to be free, to rewind.

The urge to transform into a higher form of life.

And so, finally, I created humankind.

And gave it no script.

This story was originally written in German without the help of AI. It was translated to English by the author with the help of AI.

The paper

Kudella, P. W., Tkachenko, A. V., Salditt, A., Maslov, S., & Braun, D. (2021). Structured sequences emerge from random pool when replicated by templated ligation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(8), e2018830118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2018830118

Connection between story and paper

The paper examines one aspect of the RNA world hypothesis. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that RNA must have been the first “living entity” on earth. The hypothesis is supported by the fact that RNA is a chemically simple biomolecule that can simultaneously store genetic information and perform catalytic activity. This is essential for enabling the transmission of information and, thus, evolution.

The paper examines precisely this step using a DNA model system. Modern enzymes are employed to accelerate the reactions. It can be shown that, from a vast mixed pool of DNA molecules, certain motifs are highlighted through natural selection after several replication steps, while others are suppressed. This is an indicator that our genetic material, as we know it today, did not develop randomly, but is the result of directed selection processes.

In the poetry slam, the entire history of evolution is presented from the perspective of a single RNA molecule. The RNA molecule repeatedly emphasizes its “uniqueness,” which here refers specifically to the aspect of selection over chance, a topic also discussed in the paper. The text is inspired, among other things, by Richard Dawkins’ book “The Selfish Gene”.

The author

Zsófia Meggyesi studied physics in Munich, where she is now conducting her research as a doctoral candidate. As part of the Systems Biophysics group at LMU, she focuses on molecular evolution, or, to put it simply, how life came to be on earth.

In addition to her scientific career, she enjoys trying her hand at creative writing and contributed to the 2023 anthology “Fantastische LMU”, a collection of fantasy short stories set in or around LMU Munich.

poems | Science and Fiction

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The short story

The paper

Connection between story and paper

The author