The book starts off with an imitation of the beginning of the Biblical book of Genesis, with “In the beginning was the word.” Matt Ridley later shows that the “word” he talked about was not DNA, rather that it described RNA. Ridley states that RNA is much more chemically active and automatic than DNA, but it is also unstable, thus prehistoric “ribo-organisms” developed DNA over time because it was “more accurate, faster, and more reliable”. He believes that DNA is a sort of language that is spoken, with its own alphabet. Only four letters make up the genetic alphabet: A, T, G, and C. In one sense, a gene is nothing more than a sequence of those letters. LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, is then introduced. LUCA was believed to be a
