Sex, mutations and marketing. How the Cambrian explosion set the stage for runaway consumerism.

realized that ‘sex sells’. At the biological level, their interplay goes much further back to the Cambrian explosion around 530 million years ago. During this period of rapid evolutionary expansion, multicellular organisms began to evolve elaborate sexual ornaments to advertise their genetic quality to the most important consumers of all in the great mating market of life: the opposite sex. Maintaining the genetic quality of one’s offspring had already been a problem for billions of years. Ever since life originated around 3.7 billion years ago, RNA and DNA have been under selection to copy themselves as accurately as possible [1]. Yet perfect self-replication is biochemically impossible, and almost all replication errors are harmful rather than helpful [2]. Thus, mutations have been eroding the genomic stability of single-celled organisms for trillions of generations, and countless lineages of asexual organisms have suffered extinction through mutational meltdown— the run away accumulation of copying errors [3]. Only through wildly profligate self-cloning could such organisms have any hope of leaving at least a