A Nile shadow 4,500 years long

For billions of years, life’s replenishment has proceeded with a certain leaden regularity. Genetic code is incessantly copied (nearly) verbatim, line by line, word for word, letter for letter. Lineages might be unceremoniously snuffed out, and cataclysms might coldly erase millennia of progress, of evolution, of adaptation. But those are private tragedies, superficial outcomes. Across the eons, across the vast kingdoms of life, the mechanisms fine-tuned to roll out generation upon generation of progeny trundle on, unmoved by fad or fashion. In the animal kingdom, sexual reproduction regularly reshuffles a given species’ extant set of options and mutation occasionally injects a genuine wild card capable of shaking up a whole stolid lineage.

But the mechanism itself? It chugs along unchanged and unchangeable, a wonder of clockwork reliability. Universal and eternal. DNA across the vast plant and animal kingdoms is predictably recombined, transcribed and read according to one basic set of procedures. And it matters not whether the particular copy of a genome comes tidily packed in the seed of a just picked apple, whether it has spent a century and a half bobbing along deep in the ovary of sea turtle, or whether it was just produced Sunday afternoon in a man snoring on his sofa. Or, for that matter, in an ankylosaurus who died 67 million years ago. DNA is DNA. This level of life knows no version of humanity’s Tower of Babel. Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful” chart infinite different life courses, but the secret of their operating instructions has only ever been breathed in one simple four-letter code.

In this, the natural world could hardly be less like the manmade products of our restlessly mimetic species, with our protean languages and dialects that morph daily, our unchecked appetites for borrowing, neologisms and our constantly evolving script conventions. Languages blink out of existence incessantly, and robust language families can chart splits on the scale of centuries, with the Middle English of the Middle Ages scarcely decipherable to English speakers today. Little wonder then that we require a stroke of luck like rediscovering the trilingual Rosetta stone to even begin to decrypt entire long-ago languages, no matter how copiously they might be preserved. And to this day, all too often whole bodies of indelibly inscribed language remain as mute prisoners staring back at us, in plain sight, but utterly incomprehensible, like the Minoans’ Cretan hieroglyphics or Linear A.

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