The Inhabited Worlds

49:1.1The uni­verses of time and space are grad­ual in de­vel­op­ment; the pro­gres­sion of life—ter­res­trial or ce­les­tial—is nei­ther ar­bi­trary nor mag­i­cal. Cos­mic evo­lu­tion may not al­ways be un­der­stand­able (pre­dictable), but it is strictly nonac­ci­den­tal.

49:1.2The bi­o­logic unit of ma­te­rial life is the pro­to­plas­mic cell, the com­mu­nal as­so­ci­a­tion of chem­i­cal, elec­tri­cal, and other ba­sic en­er­gies. The chem­i­cal for­mu­las dif­fer in each sys­tem, and the tech­nique of liv­ing cell re­pro­duc­tion is slightly dif­fer­ent in each lo­cal uni­verse, but the Life Car­ri­ers are al­ways the liv­ing cat­alyz­ers who ini­ti­ate the pri­mor­dial re­ac­tions of ma­te­rial life; they are the in­sti­ga­tors of the en­ergy cir­cuits of liv­ing mat­ter.

49:1.3All the worlds of a lo­cal sys­tem dis­close un­mis­tak­able phys­i­cal kin­ship; nev­er­the­less, each planet has its own scale of life, no two worlds be­ing ex­actly alike in plant and an­i­mal en­dow­ment. These plan­e­tary vari­a­tions in the sys­tem life types re­sult from the de­ci­sions of the Life Car­ri­ers. But these be­ings are nei­ther capri­cious nor whim­si­cal; the uni­verses are con­ducted in ac­cor­dance with law and or­der. The laws of Neb­a­don are the di­vine man­dates of Sal­ving­ton, and the evo­lu­tion­ary or­der of life in Sa­ta­nia is in con­so­nance with the evo­lu­tion­ary pat­tern of Neb­a­don.

49:1.4Evo­lu­tion is the rule of hu­man de­vel­op­ment, but the pro­cess it­self varies greatly on dif­fer­ent worlds. Life is some­times ini­ti­ated in one cen­ter, some­times in three, as it was on Uran­tia. On the at­mo­spheric worlds it usu­ally has a ma­rine ori­gin, but not al­ways; much de­pends on the phys­i­cal sta­tus of a planet. The Life Car­ri­ers have great lat­i­tude in their func­tion of life ini­ti­a­tion.

49:1.5In the de­vel­op­ment of plan­e­tary life the veg­etable form al­ways pre­cedes the an­i­mal and is quite fully de­vel­oped be­fore the an­i­mal pat­terns dif­fer­en­ti­ate. All an­i­mal types are de­vel­oped from the ba­sic pat­terns of the pre­ced­ing veg­etable king­dom of liv­ing things; they are not sep­a­rately or­ga­nized.

49:1.6The early stages of life evo­lu­tion are not al­to­gether in con­for­mity with your pres­ent-day views. Mor­tal man is not an evo­lu­tion­ary ac­ci­dent. There is a pre­cise sys­tem, a uni­ver­sal law, which de­ter­mines the un­fold­ing of the plan­e­tary life plan on the spheres of space. Time and the pro­duc­tion of large num­bers of a species are not the con­trol­ling in­flu­ences. Mice re­pro­duce much more rapidly than ele­phants, yet ele­phants evolve more rapidly than mice.

49:1.7The pro­cess of plan­e­tary evo­lu­tion is or­derly and con­trolled. The de­vel­op­ment of higher or­gan­isms from lower group­ings of life is not ac­ci­den­tal. Some­times evo­lu­tion­ary prog­ress is tem­porar­ily de­layed by the de­struc­tion of cer­tain fa­vor­able lines of life plasm car­ried in a se­lected species. It of­ten re­quires ages upon ages to re­coup the dam­age oc­ca­sioned by the loss of a sin­gle su­pe­rior strain of hu­man hered­ity. These se­lected and su­pe­rior strains of liv­ing pro­to­plasm should be jeal­ously and in­tel­li­gently guarded when once they make their ap­pear­ance. And on most of the in­hab­ited worlds these su­pe­rior po­ten­tials of life are val­ued much more highly than on Uran­tia.