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| Take that cell and configure it into a colony of many similar cellsa simple multicellular organism such as a spongeand each cell must stay in intimate contact with the surrounding ocean in order to maintain this electrolyte stress and health. With a multicellular organism that has several distinct layers of specialized cells, it becomes necessary to pump Mother Ocean through the organism so that the cells that lay within the mesodermal layer get their fair share of manipulatable sodium-potassium imbalance. They too, must absorb and excrete, no matter how buried they are in the sea slug or fish. |
| No matter how complex the animal or plant in this ocean, each cell must have access to a bath of sodium-rich and potassium-poor sea water . . . either directly or through the carefully maintained substitute of a closed-system imitation of the surf, a circulatory system that diffuses sea water through and over deeply buried masses of specialized cells. |
| In even the largest organism, each cell maintains the primordial necessity of being bathed in excess sodium while hoarding internally an excess of potassium and using its membrane to manipulate absorption and excretionto, in effect, maintain itself as if it were a single cell floating in salty water. |
| This seemingly labored method of treating each cell as if it lived autonomously is all fine and dandy when you are living right in the middle of that very same salty water: the ocean. A method as inefficient as the workings of the internal combustion engine in an automobile, its how things are done, how they have always been done. It does, after all, work. |
| Living on the Land |
| When life forms first started to creep onto dry land (400 to 500 million years ago, give or take an eon), they took with them this tried-and-true method of sodium and pot- |
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