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Assumptions are more striking than ideas.
Alexander Hiam E volutionary progress in life on Earth is evident in the long series of steps that lead from prokaryotic life almost four billion years ago to the variety of multi-celled eukaryotic creatures with specialized organs, tissues, systems and features that exist here today. It is driven by the accumulation of new genes, the encoded instructions for life. We would like to understand this progress. Energy reaches Earth from the sun, of course, but encoded instructions do not. We have long believed that evolutionary progress takes place in a biologically closed system, because we thought, until recently, that life could not survive in space.