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Viruses in Space?
You have written about viruses arriving from space, influencing evoution even now. What is your present view about that?
Our last book [Our Place in the Cosmos], that should have been published in soft back last month gives, I think, the correct picture — after lots of thrashing around earlier. I take the view that all the genes that we have were already here, and the event that added them to the Earth was 570 million years ago. You know, the beginning of the Cambrian, that great event. And that everything that we have subsequently used has been simply a question of permuting and combining what came in at that time. That's the only way I can see, that I'm comfortable with the logic.
