The Free Refills Story, Part 4

Wait. Breathing?

Yup. This isn't widely known, but breathing was something that had to be invented. It didn't just happen. The first organisms complicated enough to need to breathe all died of suffocation. They would be born and they would flop around in painful misery for a few minutes and then they would die. But one day, one of them had this great idea. She was flopping around, dying, and she thought, I wonder what would happen if I did this, and she consciously flexed a proto-muscle that previously hadn't seemed to have any purpose, and that proto-muscle turned out to be a proto-diaphragm, and flexing that muscle filled her proto-lungs, and she breathed, and she stopped flopping around dying and suddenly the world was a much more pleasant and less painful place. You can imagine how thrilled she was. And she turned to all the other creatures flopping around dying there on the shores of primordial seas and she said, "Hey, try this!" and she taught them how to breathe. And they all agreed that breathing was a fantastic idea, that it made life a lot more pleasantly compelling than flopping around dying ever was, and they all hailed her idea, and set about the process of evolving and filling up the planet with life.

She had no name--the idea of names wouldn't be invented for many hundred millions of years--but we should all raise a glass in her honor. For breathing was a truly great idea.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *