Poem of Prokaryotes

I am reading the book Waiting for Aphrodite by Sue Hubbell which is a story about a search for knowledge about invertebrates. It has been compared to Walden's Pond. She includes a poem in her discussion about sponges, which is written by the biologist Ralph Lewin, who was a specialist in algae.

 In the Beginning

In the beginning the earth was all wet;

We hadn't got life--or ecology--yet.

There were lava and rocks--quite a lot of them both--

And oceans of nutrient Oparin broth.

But then there arose, at the edge of the sea,
Where sugars and organic acids were free,

A sort of blob with a kind of coat--

The earliest protero-prokaryote.

It grew and divided: it flourished and fed;

From puddle to puddle it rapidly spread

Until it deleted the ocean's store

And nary an acid was found any more.

Now, if one considered that terrible trend,

One might have predicted that that was the end--

But no! In some sunny wee lochan or slough

Appeared a new creature--we cannot say how.

By some strange transition that nobody knows,

A photosynthetic alga arose.

It grew and it flourished where nothing had been

Till much of the land was blue shades of green

And bubbles of oxygen started to rise

Throughout the world's oceans, and filled up the skies;

While, off in the antediluvian mists,

Arose a few species with heterocysts

Which, by a procedure which no-one can tell,

Fixed gaseous nitrogen into the cell.

As the gases turned on and the gases turned off

There emerged a respiring young heterotroph

It grew in its turn, and it lived and it throve,

Creating fine structure, genetics, and love,

And using its enzymes and oxygen-2,

Produced such fine creatures as coli and you.

This, then, is the story of life's evolution

From Oparin broth to the final solution.

So, prokaryologists, dinna forget:

We've come a long way since the world was all wet.

We owe a great deal--you can see from these notes--

To photosynthetical prokaryotes.