The History of Life

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De blog gaat over en bevat een gratis een boek dat de geschiedenis van het leven beschrijft.

kleine zelfstandige dingen (atomen, cellen) worden steeds onderdeel van een groter geheel (moleculen, organismen).

Ze verdwijnen daarbij niet: ze blijven bestaan als bouwsteen van dat grotere geheel.

Het boek zet al die stappen op één meetlat/tijdlijn, van heel klein naar heel groot, zodat je ze kunt vergelijken.

    J.Konstapel,Leiden,15-10-2026

    The-History-of-Life-on-the-Net (1)Download

    Life on the Net

    The book in one sentence

    The history of life is one line of closures. Again and again, a form that once lived on its own became a letter of a larger whole. What closes, stays.

    How the book reads

    The book tells the history of life with numbers. Every case gets a date, a size and a duration. And every length and time gets a place on one ladder: a logarithmic scale with base 3. Lengths are measured against 4.56 × 10⁻⁸ m, times against 1.52 × 10⁻¹⁶ s.

    One step up the ladder is a factor of three. The day sits at position 43.50. The year at 48.87. The age of the Earth at 69.11. Because atoms and geological ages share one axis, relations become visible that ordinary units hide.

    An example. All covalent bonds of life run from 74 to 204 picometres. That is one step of three. The chemical frame of life fits inside a single trit of the ladder.

    The book is self-contained and honest about disagreement. Where the record has two readings — the Late Heavy Bombardment as spike or as argon artefact, sponge steranes or algal ones, 700 or zero new hippocampal neurons per day — it states both and keeps going.

    The form language: the Vacuum.Net

    On top of the facts sits one reading frame. It is called the Vacuum.Net. Its parts are simple:

    • The trit. Every crossing of a strand holds one of three values: +1, 0 or −1.
    • The window. Three trits in a row form a window. Of 27 possible windows, 9 are closed: they add up to zero.
    • The closure. What closes, stays. What is open carries tension.

    Windows that repeat one value three times (+1 +1 +1, 0 0 0) are crystals: order that repeats. Windows that hold all three values once are metabolism: the content changes, the form stays closed.

    Several principles run through all 24 chapters:

    1. Form and carrier. A form outlasts its carriers. A water molecule lasts about 11 hours. Its hydrogen bonds exchange every picosecond — 4 × 10¹⁶ times faster. The molecule is the form; the bond is the carrier.
    2. One direction. A living strand has one direction or it does not exist. The rule is symmetric: it does not say which direction wins. It keeps what was laid down first. Life uses L amino acids and D sugars; meteorites carried an L excess of up to 18.5 % before life; autocatalysis raised 0.00005 % to 99.5 % in three rounds.
    3. Rest and discharge. A closure cannot load twice in a row. Every excitable tissue shows this as a refractory period: 3.5 ms in a medusa giant axon, 40–50 ms in a sea-pen net, 29 s in a glass sponge. Extinctions work the same way: long holding, short discharge.
    4. Context. The same rule takes other values in other surroundings. A cell doubles in 37 minutes at 100 °C and in decades in rock. Fire is off below 16 % oxygen and fast above 19 %.
    5. Opened once, filled many times. A new kind of union opens once. Its depth is then filled again and again.
    6. Depths and residues. Each new depth uses the residue of the previous one as its alphabet. A bacterium became a letter of the cell. The cell became a letter of the body. The nerve cell became a letter of the brain. “The residue of depth n is the alphabet of depth n+1.”

    The book states plainly that this language is a way of reading, not a cause: the forms are described beside the history, not as its driver.

    The story, chapter by chapter

    1. Before the cell. The oldest solids of the solar system formed 4,567.30 ± 0.16 million years ago. Within 267 million years — the first 6 % of Earth’s history — liquid water stood at the surface, recorded by a 4,404 Ma Jack Hills zircon. Chemistry without a cell is surprisingly rich: Miller’s archived vials, re-read in 2008, held 22 amino acids; the 1958 sulfide run 23. Cyanide and sulfide under light give nucleotide, amino acid and lipid precursors from one network. RNA catalyses at every size measured: 19 nucleotides (hammerhead), 93 (ligase core), 2,904 (the ribosome’s catalytic core, where no protein atom lies within 18 Å of the bond being made). In 2009 two RNA enzymes were built that make each other indefinitely: the pair, doubling each hour. Fatty-acid vesicles of 65–200 nm grow, compete and divide. The chapter names the net’s basics here: trit, window, ring, depth, edge.

    2. The first cell. The record has two tiers. Older, 3.7–4.28 Ga: single signals in heated rock — light carbon in a zircon at 4.10 Ga, Isua graphite, disputed cones. Younger, 3.40–3.48 Ga, in the Pilbara: hot-spring deposits, sulfate reduction, methanogenesis below δ¹³C −56 ‰, microfossils, a 10 km stromatolite reef. LUCA is dated 4.09–4.33 Ga by one clock, with a gene set of 355 families (one reconstruction) to 2,657 proteins (another) — already carrying viruses and a CRISPR defence. The cell is “the first ring that stays closed while all its content changes”: a 4 nm membrane holding −105 to −150 mV, a field of 3.75 × 10⁷ V/m set by about 9,400 ions per µm².

    3. Bacteria and Archaea. Prokaryotes alone held the Earth for about 2.36 billion years, and still hold most of its cells: 1.2–6 × 10³⁰ of them, 58 % below the surface. They grow from −15 °C to 122 °C, double in 9.8 minutes to 2,000 years. Genes move sideways: the strict tree of descent holds in about 1 % of prokaryotic genes; 75–88 % of gene family expansions came from transfer. A biofilm of a million cells loads and releases potassium in waves, and a second species answers within 22–26 minutes: community as shared prefix. Prokaryotes carry the element cycles: nitrogen fixation by 3.2 Ga, oxygen in the air from about 2.33 Ga, with Prochlorococcus (2.9 × 10²⁷ cells) making up to 20 % of today’s oxygen.

    4. Viruses. Virus hallmark genes put virus-like entities before modern cells, and LUCA’s virome already held the main groups of bacterial and archaeal viruses beside 19 CRISPR effector families. The particle is the crystal: one value repeated in a closed shell, tobacco mosaic virus crystallised like a salt in 1935. Genomes run from 1.7 kb (circoviruses) to 2.5–2.8 Mb (pandoraviruses) — near LUCA’s own reconstructed genome. A giant virus can host a virophage (Sputnik), and partners with their own genome sit at most two deep. In the ocean, 10²³ infections per second kill about 20 % of microbial biomass daily; a particle succeeds in a cell about once per 116 days. Viruses also write themselves into genomes: ~8 % of the human genome is retroviral in origin, and syncytins — captured viral envelope genes — now build the placenta.

    5. The cell that took in a cell. The keystone event. The host lineage nests within the Asgard archaea (sister to Hodarchaeales); the mitochondrial symbiosis is dated 2.053–1.21 Ga; the account by Lynn Sagan (1967) is now widely accepted. The bacterium became a letter: against 834 protein genes in Rickettsia, human mitochondria keep 13 — 1.6 % — while more than 95 % of mitochondrial proteins are now coded in the nucleus. The plastid repeated the step: of 3,168 cyanobacterial genes, the Arabidopsis chloroplast keeps 87. Plastids then passed from hand to hand at second and third hand — at least 8 to 10 times — and the serial red chain (red alga → cryptophyte → ochrophyte → haptophyte) shows memory with reach two: each hand inherits only from the one before. Younger cases stand at earlier stages: the Paulinella chromatophore (about 94 Ma, 29 % of genes kept), the Azolla cyanobiont (100 Myr, 68 % intact), the nitroplast UCYN-A (2024: a nitrogen-fixing organelle). In the mealybug a bacterium holds a bacterium — the deepest measured nesting, two deep, like the virophage. Stolen plastids (kleptoplasty) keep working 15 days to 30 months without the algal nucleus.

    6. Becoming many. Multicellularity arose more than 25 times in eukaryotes — a serious underestimate, one review says — and first in bacteria: multicellular cyanobacteria before 2.4 Ga, with the Great Oxidation. Bangiomorpha (1.047 Ga) is the oldest recognised crown-group eukaryote, with holdfast and gametes. Hyphae evolved once early in fungi; fruiting bodies many times. Two experiments frame it: a bacterial sulfonolipid at 10⁻¹⁵ M switches S. rosetta to rosettes; 600 days of selection grew snowflake yeast 20,000-fold in size under low oxygen and only 6-fold in the other line — the same rule, other values. The maximum size of life rose 16 orders of magnitude in two steps, at about 1.9 Ga (after the eukaryotic cell) and 0.6–0.45 Ga (after multicellularity), both tracking oxygen. Bodies now span 2 µm to a 3,810 m Armillaria genet: 19 steps of the ladder.

    7. The first animals. Four kinds of evidence: molecules, clocks, fossils, living animals. Crown animals by clock: 833.5–649.8 Ma; most bilaterian phyla diversified in the Ediacaran, over 100 Myr before the Cambrian. Sponge choanocyte chambers (16–56 µm) pack 1,876–35,175 per mm³; sponges filter up to 900 body volumes per hour, and individuals stand for thousands of years. The comb jellies keep a nervous system apart from all others (no serotonin, acetylcholine, dopamine; L-glutamate as candidate transmitter). Trichoplax was carried through 2,000–4,000 generations in 11 years of clonal culture and stayed the same sheet. Within some 35 Myr after the first complex fossils (574 Ma), bodies with muscle, tentacles, skeletons and bored holes had all appeared. A recurring note: the parts of the synapse (scaffold, secretion, channels) were whole in single cells before any nerve — the residue became the alphabet.

    8. Plants take the light. From cyanobacteria through red, green and brown algae, onto land, into trees and flowers. Prochlorococcus divides once a day, replication in the afternoon, division at night — metabolism held in a day. Land plants: cryptospores at 473–471 Ma; the arbuscular union with fungi at about 480 Ma by clock, “morphologically identical” arbuscules at Rhynie by 411.5 Ma. The oldest forests (Gilboa, Cairo, about 385 Ma) already show three root systems and 8 m trees. Cones and sunflower heads follow Fibonacci parastichies: 73.6 % of 768 counts, and cone-scale quotients cluster near 0.618. Extreme ages: a bristlecone pine of 4,900 years, a Lomatia clone of at least 43,600, a Posidonia genet of up to 200,000. The tallest tree stands near the mechanical limit of 122–130 m. Today’s forests hold about 3.04 trillion trees, 46 % fewer than before civilisation.

    9. Fungi. The sister kingdom of animals. Fungus-like filaments in 2.4 Ga basalt; crown Fungi about 1,020 Ma; the arbuscular symbiosis at 480 Ma — before the land plants it now serves, with plant signalling genes already closed in green algae. Plants pass 3.58 Gt C per year into the mycorrhizal mesh; ectomycorrhizal mycelium reaches 2,000 m per cm³ of soil. Lignin-degrading peroxidases closed once, around the end of the Carboniferous, then were lost at least four times; the depth filled with about a thousand white-rot species (the coal question gets both readings, fungal and climatic). Fungus-farming ants went from lower farming (61–57 Ma) to leaf-cutting (19–18 Ma); termites farm once, in Africa. Chytridiomycosis has contributed to the decline of 501 amphibian species, 90 of them extinct in the wild. Named fungi: 120,000–155,000 of an estimated 2.2–3.8 million.

    10. Ashore together. The land was not colonised once. Microbial mats by 3.22 Ga; animals burrowed in Ordovician soils before any rooted plant; arthropods walked out with spiracles by about 414 Ma (Pneumodesmus, redated); tetrapod trackways at Zachełmie are 18 Myr older than the first body fossils. Herbivory opened once, at 417 Ma, then filled tissue after tissue. Trees with deep roots cut CO₂ from about 2,000 to 278 ppm over 400–300 Ma; oxygen rose above 26 %, and giant insects flew in it. The chapter’s planetary lesson: the air’s oxygen turns over in 0.8–2.1 Myr, yet charcoal shows the composition held for hundreds of millions of years — the content flows through while the form holds.

    11. Earth and life together. The elements in time order, each step carried by one kind of organism: sulfur (sulfate reduction, 3.47 Ga), nitrogen (nitrogenase by 3.2 Ga), oxygen (2.33 Ga, within roughly 10 Myr), carbon, phosphorus, water. The Azolla bloom in the Arctic Ocean (about 48.5 Ma, 800 kyr) drew CO₂ down by 55–470 ppm. Today: NPP 104.9 Pg C per year, split evenly land–sea, while 450 of 550 Gt of living carbon stands on land. Soil turns its carbon over in 15 years and keeps a radiocarbon age of 4,830. Seabirds carry 591 Gg N and 99 Gg P from sea to land each year. People now fix about half of all reactive nitrogen: Haber-Bosch alone is 2.07 times the natural land fixation.

    12. Partners. Every union with its date: the lichen before the plant (spores 460 Ma, arbuscule 411.5 Ma); insect symbionts with the smallest cellular genomes (Nasuia 112 kb; Sulcia + Nasuia together make 10 essential amino acids and have both lost their own ATP synthesis); coral-dinoflagellate symbiosis by 212 Ma; Wolbachia in 40–66 % of arthropod species. Each kind of union opens once and fills many times: ectomycorrhiza at least 66 times in fungi, lichenisation 20–30 times, nodulation about 8 times after one predisposition. The human body is a community too: 3.8 × 10¹³ bacteria in 4,644 species against 3.0 × 10¹³ human cells. Coral bleaching, with its median return time now 6 years, is the same form breaking under context.

    13. Eating and being eaten. The oldest parasitism: Lower Cambrian kleptoparasites on a brachiopod, 47.8 % infested. Drilling rises through the Palaeozoic, falls almost silent for 120 Myr, returns with a higher ceiling — rest and discharge. Insect herbivory relates to diversification across 31 orders and explains about 25 % of richness; in all five sister pairs the more herbivorous clade is the richer. Plants answered: spines at least 55 times, latex in about 10 % of species, and a wasp reads the plant’s answer to the caterpillar as a sign of the caterpillar — reading. Parasitism itself opened at least 223 times. Today herbivores eat 5.3 % of the world’s leaf tissue per year on land and 51 % of aquatic production; trophic transfer efficiency averages 10 %; and the measured scaling of metabolic rate changes exponent by grade of organisation — no universal allometry.

    14. Flowers and their animals. Pollination begins on gymnosperms: long-proboscid scorpionflies (about 165 Ma) on five hosts, a 62-Myr interval. Bees at about 123 Ma; the oldest direct insect pollination of a eudicot at 99 Ma. Fleshy seeds precede their carriers; obligate pairs follow, each dated on the insect side first. Ant dispersal arose at least 101 times, and ant-dispersed lineages hold about 2.24 times the species of their sister groups. Megafaunal fruits survive their carriers: 103 Brazilian species still carry a syndrome for animals that are gone. Pollination networks lose plants only after 70–80 % of random pollinators are removed — but roughly linearly if the most-linked go first. Excluding vertebrate pollinators cuts fruit or seed production by 63 %. Defaunation has cut by more than half the seeds dispersed far enough to track climate change: the fruit stays; its carriers go.

    15. Animals spread out. Nine groups, two measures: repeated units and handedness. Segment counts: millipedes to 330 segments and 750 legs (Illacme); a homeotic module of 16 leg pairs; centipede counts odd and stepping by 2. Handedness everywhere: snail faunas 75–99 % dextral, one Partula population 97.9 % sinistral; a snake’s right-jawedness spares 87.5 % of sinistral snails and no dextral ones; fiddler crabs hold 50.3 : 49.7 over 8,088 males; flounder eye sides fixed in 708 of about 715 species; human left-handedness 10.60 % over 2.4 million people. Each body keeps one direction for life; populations differ in which one. Myelin arose at least four times (vertebrates, two annelid lines, copepods); the fastest axon known, a penaeid shrimp fibre of 120 µm, conducts over 200 m/s. The Greenland shark matures at 156 ± 22 years.

    16. The great dyings and the refilling. Five events, one pattern. Two ways to fall: raised extinction (end-Ordovician, end-Permian at 60 ± 48 kyr, end-Cretaceous with the impact within 33 kyr) or stalled origination (“mass depletion” in the late Frasnian and end-Triassic). Refilling lags in three bands: years to 300 kyr at the Chicxulub crater (“Life reappeared in the basin just years after the impact”), 0.65–3 Myr for reefs and mammal richness, 8–26 Myr for stable ecosystems and body size. Background loss is about 0.1–2 E/MSY; today’s rate is near 1,000 times that, and on current trends the threshold of the big five could be reached “in as little as three centuries.”

    17. The excitable cell becomes a nerve. Every cell measured carries a membrane voltage; the nerve adds nothing new — it is a cell whose edge tension travels along its length. Channels were already in prokaryotes (KcsA: one ion per 10 ns, 10,000 K⁺ per Na⁺; bacterial Na⁺ and Ca²⁺ channels exist). The synapse’s parts predate the neuron; the sponge holds a nearly complete post-synaptic scaffold with dlg’s 13 ligand-binding residues 100 % identical to human. Speeds run 3 cm/s in a sea-pen to 200 m/s in myelinated shrimp. Energy: one spike and its aftermath cost 4.5 × 10⁸ ATP; one bit about 24,000. The FlyWire connectome holds 138 million neurons’ worth of wiring in 149 m of total path; the human brain holds 86 billion neurons, 69 billion of them in the cerebellum. Adult cortical neurons do not divide — the body keeps them for life.

    18. Senses, rhythms, memory. A sense is reading: “a homomorphic image that keeps the relations and drops the rest.” The ear reads 20–20,000 Hz; the eye 380–720 nm. Opsins: more than a thousand, nine paralogs already in the bilaterian ancestor; a focused eye can evolve in a few hundred thousand years; the first dated eyes (515 Ma) carry 16,000 ommatidia. The intrinsic human clock runs 24.18 h — 10.8 minutes slow per day, reset by light; food sets the liver’s clock. Memory has two phases (early, protein-free; late, needing transcription) everywhere measured — Aplysia, bee, rat — and its durations run from 20 ms to 50 years in a human “permastore,” 10.9 decades of the ladder.

    19. Many minds. Seven groups carry complex brains — insects, octopuses, teleosts, corvids and parrots, whales, elephants, primates — in three great bilaterian lineages, each with its own multimodal centre. The smallest insect keeps a brain 37.4 µm on edge and dissolves the nuclei of 95 % of its neurons; the pilot whale’s neocortex holds about 37 billion neurons, almost twice a human’s; the elephant brain holds 3 times our neurons but one third our cortical density. And the record of consciousness declarations widens by date: mammals, birds, octopuses (2012); insects (2016); all cephalopods and decapods (2021–2022); “at least a realistic possibility” in all vertebrates and many invertebrates (2024).

    20. The human. From Toumaï (7.2–6.8 Ma) through Australopithecus (a brain flat at ~450 cc for 1.5 Myr — then a step at 2.10 Ma to eleven times the rate: rest and discharge), Lomekwi tools at 3.3 Ma, fire secured in Wonderwerk at 1.0 Ma. A narrow neck: effective size about 10⁴; Neandertal DNA 1.5–2.1 % outside Africa; Denisovan up to 5 % in Melanesia. Omo at ≥233 ka; Misliya at ≥177 ka. The brain costs 20 % of resting energy at 2 % of mass, 129 g of glucose a day. Each child is a new carrier with about 73 new mutations. Weaning at 2.8 years; menopause shared with wild chimpanzees at Ngogo (0.195 post-reproductive representation, about half ours); the longest verified life 122 years.

    21. Language and culture. Codes are older than the human: three monkey calls for three predators that narrow with age; vocal learning in 3 bird and 5 mammal groups; a “Chimpanzee Stone Age” at 4,300 years — and human disturbance erases the traditions before it erases the animals: the form goes before the carriers do. The dated record steps down: eagle talons at Krapina 130 ka; shell beads at Skhul 100–135 ka; the Blombos ochre workshop ~100 ka; rock art at 67.8 ka minimum; flutes at 35 ka. Writing begins as bookkeeping: 85.6 % of early Uruk texts are administrative. From ~800 proto-cuneiform signs to 22 Phoenician letters — each letter the residue of a sign, one alphabet opened once and filled six scripts. Print doubled manuscript output by a factor of 51 in three centuries; world literacy rose from 12 % (1820) to 87.7 % (2024).

    22. The human net. One species gathered other species, land, energy and mass into one connected whole. The dog first (two branches, 14,000–6,400 ya); cereals and four livestock in the Near East within 3,000 years; maize by 8,700; rice by 6,900. Twelve thousand years ago nearly three quarters of Earth’s land was already shaped by people. Population doubled eight times since 1800. Human energy use, 600 EJ, equals 15 % of all photosynthesis. Humans and livestock hold 94 % of mammal mass. Megacities rose from 8 (1975) to 33 (2025). Computing information grew at rates doubling in 1.5 to 12 years; one frontier training run equals 8.1 years of El Capitan. Six billion people are online; 11,000 active satellites stand over them. And each body of the net is itself a community of partners — up to 400,000 protein families in a single mouth, most of unknown function.

    23. The next depth. The whole history has one movement: a closed form that once lived on its own became a letter of a larger closure. The human net now stands where those larger closures once stood: at an opening. After every opening came a filling — multicellularity 25+ times, eyes at least 40, eusociality 8, nectaries at least 457 — and the filling at the human depth has begun: three regions of domestication, four of writing, 12,000 cities, four exascale machines, 33 models above 10²⁵ FLOP. The fourth step, “reading that counts itself,” widens in the record year by year (2012 → 2024). The next depth, the book suggests, is such a reading carried by many bodies, with each human a carrier as each neuron is in a brain. And every closure leaves a rest — the mitochondrion keeps 13 genes, the body keeps its cortical neurons — and the rest is the alphabet of the next depth. The ladder has no last depth.

    24. The ladder of life. 2,702 positions on one scale: 767 lengths, durations, ages. From an atom’s diameter (−5.57) to a 3,810 m fungal genet (22.89); from a hydrogen-bond exchange (9.06) to the first solids of the solar system (69.12). “A ladder driven by a rest cannot end.”

    What makes the book unusual

    • Measurability. Every case is a row in a catalogue of 8,761, with value, position and source. Every calculation is shown.
    • One scale. Atoms, bodies and geology become commensurable.
    • One pattern. Closure, rest and discharge, one direction, context, opened-once-filled-many, form and carrier — from crystal to metabolism to brain to net.
    • Fairness to the record. Controversies are stated as such, both readings kept, and the form language is offered as a reading, not a cause.

    An annotated reference list

    The book cites over 2,000 numbered sources. Below are the ones that carry its most important claims, with a note on what each does in the book. Bracketed numbers are the book’s own reference numbers.

    The early Earth and the first chemistry

    • [1] Connelly et al. (2012), Science. Uranium-lead chronology of the oldest solids: 4,567.30 ± 0.16 Ma. The anchor date of the whole timeline.
    • [2] Wilde et al. (2001), Nature. The 4,404 Ma Jack Hills zircon with heavy oxygen: the earliest evidence for continental crust and oceans.
    • [4] Mojzsis et al. (2001), Nature. Oxygen-isotope evidence for surface water interacting with crust by 4,300 Ma.
    • [6] Abramov & Mojzsis (2009), Nature. The Hadean crust stayed habitable through the bombardment: “no plausible situation in which the habitable zone was fully sterilized.”
    • [5] Boehnke & Harrison (2016), PNAS. The 3.9 Ga impact spike as an argon-loss artefact. The book keeps both readings side by side — a model of its honesty.
    • [38], [39], [41] Miller (1953); Bada et al. (2008, 2011). The spark experiments and the re-reading of Miller’s archived vials: 5 amino acids in 1953, 22 in 2008, 23 with sulfur in 1958. What changed was the detector, not the chemistry.
    • [84] Lincoln & Joyce (2009). Two RNA enzymes that build each other indefinitely, doubling in about an hour: the book’s measured “pair.”
    • [91], [90] Hanczyc et al. (2003); Chen et al. (2004–05). Clay-catalysed vesicle growth, osmotic competition and division without loss of contents: protocell behaviour in chemistry.

    Cells, genes and the two domains

    • [96] Bell et al. (2015). Graphite inclusions in a 4.10 Ga zircon with δ¹³C −24 ‰: possibly the oldest trace of life.
    • [113] Weiss et al. (2016), Nature. LUCA as anaerobic, CO₂-fixing, H₂-dependent, with 355 gene families.
    • [97] Moody et al. (2024), Nature Ecology & Evolution. LUCA at 4.09–4.33 Ga, a genome of 2.75 Mb with 2,657 proteins and CRISPR effectors: the cell opened once and has been filled ever since.
    • [170] Eme et al. (2023), Nature. Eukaryotes nested with high confidence within Asgard archaea, sister to Hodarchaeales: the host of chapter 5 identified.
    • [164], [194], [195]. Lateral gene transfer counts: the strict tree holds in ~1 % of prokaryotic genes; the rest is a net.

    The symbioses

    • [341] Andersson et al. (1998), Nature. Rickettsia prowazekii as the nearest relative of mitochondria: the bacterium that became a letter.
    • [347] Anderson et al. (1981) and successors. Human mtDNA: 16,569 bp, 13 protein-coding genes. The “residue” kept by the letter.
    • [352] MitoCarta3.0. 1,136 human mitochondrial genes, of which 13 are organelle-encoded: 1.1 %. The quantification of the letter’s reduction.
    • [336] Reyes-Prieto et al.; [357], [361]. Plastids from a single primary event, then second- and third-hand transfers: opened once, filled at least 8–10 times.
    • [210] Coale et al. (2024). UCYN-A described as a nitrogen-fixing organelle (the “nitroplast”): the letter-wording still under way, caught in the act.

    Multicellularity, land and partnership

    • [410] King (2004); [415], [416] and successors. Multicellularity 25+ times; multicellular cyanobacteria before 2.4 Ga.
    • [407] Alegado et al. (2012). A bacterial sulfonolipid at femtomolar concentration switches S. rosetta to rosettes: another organism sets the switch.
    • [470] Bozdag et al. (2023). 600 days of snowflake-yeast selection: 20,000-fold size gain under low oxygen, 6-fold in the other line. Context, measured.
    • [913] Floudas et al. (2012), Science. Class II peroxidases and the origin of lignin decay around the end of the Carboniferous.
    • [905] Hawkins et al. (2023). 3.58 Gt C per year from plants to mycorrhizal fungi: the union of Rhynie, still flowing.
    • [566] Hughes et al. (2018), Science. Coral bleaching return time down to 6 years: a closure breaking above a fixed line.

    Nerves, senses, minds

    • [477] Sakarya et al. (2007). The sponge’s nearly complete post-synaptic scaffold, with dlg PDZ residues 100 % identical to human: the synapse before the neuron.
    • [479] Moroz et al. (2014). The comb-jelly genome: a nervous system built on different transmitters, evolved apart.
    • [1619] FlyWire (2024). The full fly brain connectome: 138 million neurons mapped, 149 m of wiring.
    • [1518] Azevedo et al. (2009); [1516] Herculano-Houzel (2014). 86 billion human neurons; the elephant brain with 3 times our neurons at one third our cortical density.
    • [1723] Czeisler et al. (1999). The intrinsic human clock at 24.18 h, in both young and old: the form held for life while cortisol clears 22 times per turn.
    • [1836] The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness (2024). “At least a realistic possibility” in all vertebrates and many invertebrates: the widening record of minds.

    The human line

    • [1842] and related dating studies. Toumaï bracketed at 6.8–7.2 Ma; Omo at ≥233 ka; Misliya at ≥177 ka.
    • [1861] Florio et al. (2015), Science. ARHGAP11B: a single human-lineage gene that folds the mouse cortex.
    • [1865] Berna et al. (2012), PNAS. Wonderwerk Cave: the earliest secure evidence of fire, about 1 Ma.
    • [1948] Vanhaeren et al. (2006). Skhul shell beads at 100–135 ka; [1949] Henshilwood et al. (2011), Science. the Blombos ochre workshop: symbolic culture, dated.
    • [1965] Hawkins, L. (2019), Unicode proposal. The proto-cuneiform counts: 85.6 % of the earliest Uruk texts are administrative — writing born as bookkeeping.
    • [1985] Bar-On et al. (2018); [1984] Elhacham et al. (2020). Humans and livestock at 94 % of mammal mass; human-made mass equal to living biomass: the human depth, weighed.
    • [2003], [2006] TOP500 and Epoch AI data. Four exascale machines, 33 models above 10²⁵ FLOP: the newest layer of the net, counted.

    How to read the sources

    The factual layer rests on peer-reviewed science — Science, Nature, PNAS, and standard references (Stryer, Milo & Phillips, NIST, OpenStax) — with each number traceable to its study. The Vacuum.Net form language is not part of that literature: it is the author’s own reading frame, offered as a lens and not as a cause.

    Summary based on a full reading of: J. Konstapel, “The History of Life on the Net — A Reference Work on Evolution and the Vacuum.Net”, Constable Research, Leiden, first edition 14 October 2026, version 1.0 (684 pages, 24 chapters, 8,761 catalogue cases, 2,702 ladder positions).