Amoebas at the start Were not complex; They tore themselves apart And started Sex.

In four brisk lines, Guiterman compresses a comic “origin story” of sexual reproduction. The rhyme and jaunty meter mimic a nursery jingle while the subject—amoebic fission and the advent of sex—belongs to biology, creating humorous incongruity. The poem plays on the idea that early life was “not complex” because it reproduced by simply splitting, and that “sex” arrives as a later evolutionary development associated (in popular imagination) with greater complexity and complication. The wit depends less on scientific precision than on a satiric, modern sensibility: even the most fundamental natural processes can be rendered as light verse, and “sex” becomes the punchline that redefines what “complex” means.