Binary Fission Quotes

I don’t even know what the big deal is. If you ask me, society really does make way too much out of it. It’s like we want to glorify the process of procreation. You have these authors like Byron who make physical familiarity out to be some amazing, soul-consuming, meaning of life, like an end-of-the-world thing, and it’s not like that. It’s…” I waved my free hand in the air, trying to find the right words. “It’s like having someone else pick your nose or floss your teeth. It requires a lot of coordination and planning. For instance, you can’t do it unless you’ve had a shower within so many hours ahead of time. If you fall out of that time window, then you have to stop reading comics or whatever you’re currently doing, go take a shower, dry off, get dressed, blah blah blah. What a hassle. I think bacteria have the right idea; humans should procreate via binary fission.

Duality is particularly widespread within biological order, from the ‘base-pairs’ of (RNA and) DNA code, through the binary fission of bacterial propagation, the (binary) sexual difference of meiotic reproduction, to the bilateral symmetry of the typical vertebrate organism with consequent pairing of limbs (arms, legs), sense-organs (eyes, ears), lungs, brain-hemispheres, etc. ‘Dual-organization’ provides a basic model for primordial human kinship structure.

Later that day Frisch looked me up and said, “You work in a microbiology lab. What do you call the process in which one bacterium divides into two?” And I answered, “binary fission.” He wanted to know if you could call it “fission” alone, and I said you could.

No one knows how old E. coli is precisely, but estimates hover between three and four billion years. The organism has no nucleus and reproduces by the primitive but extremely efficient process known as asexual binary fission (in other words, by splitting in two). Imagine a cell filled, essentially, with DNA, that can take in nutrients (usually from other cells that it attacks and absorbs) directly through its cellular wall. Then imagine that it can simultaneously copy several