Fathers and Other Worthwhile Inventions

A billion or so years ago, some eukaryotes dreamed
up the concept of "men"

It's a little-known fact that men were invented by women.  Yep, go back and re-read the sentence, it means exactly what it says.  Men were invented by women.

About a billion or so years ago, in what's called the Proterozoic era, a few unicellular organisms decided to give sexual reproduction a whirl.  Up to then, everybody was pretty much "Mom," giving birth willy-nilly, and men were a pipe-dream thought of by a lunatic fringe of eukaryotes who noticed a drawback to asexual reproduction, or as they called it back then, "the way we've always done it."

The problem is, when a mamma amoeba loves herself very, very much and God gives her a little baby amoeba, the mother and daughter are exactly alike.  This leads to all sorts of conflict in amoeba families, I can tell you, especially around holidays.  So one eukaryote pointed out, "Look, if we invented ourselves some men, there'd be a lot more genetic variation, and we might get out there and evolve for a change.  Besides we'd have someone to take out the garbage."

Now if this proposal had been put forward during the Phanerozoic, it would have been laughed out of the room, but it was heady days back in the good ol' Proterozoic; the amount of oxygen was increasing, the world had its first super-continent, and in things were popping in general, so it seemed like anything was possible.

Of course some eukaryotes may have objected.  "What if," they speculated, "these - for lack of a better word, we'll call them men, don't have enough to do.  I mean, they won't have to give birth because we're keeping that job ourselves, and they'll only need to take out the garbage maybe twice a week.  What if with all that free time on their hands, they just decide to take over all the economic, political, and religious power, and glom up all the good jobs, and we have to spend another few thousand years just trying to get an equal share with these creatures we invented in the first place."

You can imagine the derisive chuckle the other eukaryotes had at that.  That would never happen.  And one of them said, "I don't know about you ladies, but I'm going to make myself a man."  And she did, and the rest is prehistory.

Happy Father's Day and thanks to the eukaryotes.