Everything Alive Came From Water

Picture the place where this was first said out loud.

Arabia. Sand in every direction. A land where water was so precious that wars started over wells, where a traveller’s life depended on knowing which oasis still had something in it. Water was the rarest thing these people knew.

And into that, chapter 21, verse 30 drops a line that should have sounded ridiculous.

After it tells us the heavens and earth were one mass and were split apart, the same verse says: and We made from water every living thing.

Every living thing.

Not some. Not the fish, which would be the easy guess. Not the plants, which is the obvious one. Every single living thing, including the camel standing in front of you and the man saying the sentence.

Chapter 24, verse 45 says Allah created every moving creature from water. Chapter 25, verse 54 says He created the human being from water.

How strange this should have sounded

If you had said that to a desert Arab in the seventh century, the reasonable reply would have been: look at me. Am I wet? Is this camel wet? We are made of flesh and hair and bone, and water is that thing in the bucket.

He could not have known. There was no way to know.

Your body is somewhere around sixty to seventy percent water. Not carrying water. Made of it. Your blood is mostly water. Your brain is mostly water. Even your bones, which feel like the driest part of you, are roughly a fifth water.

Across the living world the number runs from about fifty percent to well over ninety. A jellyfish is nearly all water. A cucumber is about ninety five percent. A tree trunk that feels like solid timber has water running up through it constantly, and the moment that stops, the tree is finished.

And it goes deeper than the plumbing. Every chemical reaction that keeps a cell alive happens in water. Water is the medium life runs inside. No water, no chemistry, no life. That is why, when we point telescopes and rovers at other worlds and go hunting for life, the first thing we look for is not oxygen or warmth. It is water.

One sentence. Every living thing. And it holds for all of them.

And now, the pairs

Here is a second claim from the same territory, and this one is even harder to explain away.

Ask most people what comes in male and female and they will say animals. Humans, cats, elephants, birds. Living things that move.

Plants? A plant just grows. It sits there. It does not have a family.

That is what everybody assumed, and it stayed assumed for an extremely long time. The idea that plants reproduce sexually, with male and female parts, was only properly established in Europe a couple of hundred years ago. Before that, the notion that a flower had a father would have earned you a strange look.

Chapter 20, verse 53 speaks of Allah sending down water from the sky and bringing out with it pairs of plants, each kind distinct from the others.

Chapter 13, verse 3 says He made of every kind of fruit two of a pair.

A flower is not decoration. It is the plant’s reproductive organ, sitting right there in plain view, which is a slightly comic thing to realise about a rose. The stamens are the male part and carry the pollen. The pistil is the female part. Pollen has to travel from one to the other, and half the natural world is busy arranging that delivery, bees, wind, birds, beetles, all of them running a courier service they do not know they are running.

Even fruits that seem to break the rule do not really break it. A shop banana has no proper seeds in it. Neither do some figs. They still carry the male and female structures. The machinery is there even when the seed is not.

Everything in pairs

Then the Qur’an widens it out, and this is the line that makes people put the book down for a second.

Chapter 36, verse 36 says glory to the One who created all the pairs, from what the earth grows, and from the people themselves, and from things they do not know.

Three groups. Plants, which nobody knew came in pairs. People, which everybody knew. And then a third group left deliberately open. Things they do not know.

That last phrase is doing a lot of work. It is an admission built into the verse that the list is not finished, that there are paired things out there the audience has no concept of yet.

Chapter 51, verse 49 says it again. Of every thing, Allah created a pair, so that people might reflect.

Since then we have kept finding pairs in places nobody was looking. Positive and negative charge. North and south on a magnet. Protons and electrons. And in the twentieth century, physicists discovered that for essentially every particle of matter there exists a matching particle of antimatter, an opposite twin with the charge flipped.

What a good sentence does

Notice the shape of that verse one more time.

It did not say “everything comes in pairs, such as plants and animals, and that is the complete list.” It said pairs from the earth, pairs from yourselves, and pairs from things you have no idea about.

A person guessing would have stopped at the second one. A person guessing writes down what he knows, because what else does he have?

Whoever wrote that third clause left a door open on purpose, and people have been walking through it ever since with microscopes.