Salmonella men on Planet Porno: stories - By Yasutaka Tsutsui Page 0,97

forms, in accordance with a major law of orthogenesis that pervades the entire cosmos.’ You would disagree with that, would you?”

Now I felt compelled to reply. “Yes, but he went on to say that ‘There are life forms which, in appearance, seem to differ from planet to planet. This is merely an embodiment of the Law, to a certain degree of probability, depending on environment and conditions.’ My view is that there could be a planet that doesn’t fit that principle. Depending on its environment and conditions, of course.”

“More twaddle!” Mogamigawa snarled in his customary way of intimidating his opponent as a precursor to shouting. “Utter tripe! What on earth are you talking about?! No matter what synthetic culture medium we use for our research, the first thing to appear will be bacteria, followed by protozoa that eat the bacteria. The excretions of the protozoa become nutrients on which algae multiply. Then, and only then, will the first multi-cell organism come into being and the symbiotic system stabilize. Whatever the environment or conditions, the cycle of succession in living organisms is always from small to large, from microbes to flora, from flora to fauna. I have never witnessed an ecosystem on any planet that has any other form of succession. Evolution is always the same. Only when there is something to eat can something exist to eat it. It is utterly unthinkable that the birds came first, followed by the insects and seeds that are eaten by them.”

“So you’re saying the idea that humans came first is nonsense?”

“But of course!”

“Even so, a friend of mine has the following theory. First there was man. A being that regressed from man became the common ancestor of humans and apes. That being evolved into an ape, and a being that regressed from the original being became the ancestor of the insectivores, and so on and so on, until finally single cell protozoa were formed. In other words, a theory of reverse evolution.”

“Ha,” Mogamigawa scoffed. “Of course, he cannot be serious, but it’s a pity he didn’t make the argument more intriguing all the same. He’s a scientist, is he?”

“A psychoanalyst. Yasha Tsuchini. It was he who discovered the universal human desire for a regression theory. He claims that the theory of evolution is what humans find most problematic, since they always want to believe in the superiority of the human race. The regression theory is one of the myths that lie deep and unnoticed in the bosom of modern man. This applies equally to biologists, he says. Their theories are merely the reverse of an intrinsic belief in human supremacy, as witnessed in the claim by Professor O.E. Kenzabroni that ‘Humans who take the side of animals are extremely cruel towards other humans’. To give a more concrete example, even Konrad Lorenz, who won the Nobel Prize for biology some centuries ago, sometimes seemed to extol the superiority of the human race precisely because he was a neo-Darwinist.”

“And yet he was an evolutionist. All right, he supported discrimination based on eugenics, but what’s wrong with arguing the superiority of the human race?”

“Nevertheless, even some modern biologists who’ve been influenced by Lorenz say there could be no such thing as evolution, since everything is determined genetically. According to them, adaptation is achieved through population dynamics in all species.”

“Yes, I know about them. Fools to a man!” Mogamigawa started to shout again. “Incorrigible anti-evolutionists will always appear in one guise or another. You make it sound as if all evolutionists are conservative while regressionists are universally progressive. Or perhaps the modern trend is in that direction anyway. Well, I can’t accept that. Come to think of it, there are even some bacteriologists who argue that humans evolved from single-cell protozoa. Take the theory of ‘Devolution’ proposed by Professor Edmond Hamilton of SFM University. He suggested that intelligent beings that were actually single-cell protozoa from the galaxy Altair, hundreds of thousands of light years from our own galaxy, created a civilization through telepathy and came to earth, the ‘poisonous planet’, billions of years ago, where they gradually regressed, subdivided into lower and lower forms of life, and finally produced the lowest, most grotesque life form of all – man. You’re one of those fools, are you.”

“Surely Hamilton’s claims are meant as a rebuttal of the ‘black superiority’ of evolutionists who regard the human race as the ultimate product of evolution, the highest natural creation in the cosmos. You see—”

“Not all evolutionists are discrimination theorists, you know!”