For some odd reason I am feeling singularly philosophical today. Part of the reason may be the peculiar aspects of all that is going on in the news. Goony religious leaders. Members of the Far Right. The mind, or absence there of, of Bush. The Iraqui incursion. The release of a Israeli scientist (by the Israelis) who had the audacity to admit to the world that Israel had the bomb (and of course we did nothing about it since human rights were being violated by an ally).
It is a screwed up world. I fear for all our collective sanities.
However, I digress.
I am currently reading "Time, Love, Memory" by Jonathan Weiner about the quest for the origins of behavior. I just read of the moment when a group of scientists actually placed a behavioral gene from one species into another, and it became that species behaviorally. Admittedly, it was a fruit fly - drosophila, for those of you keeping score, or who took more than Introductory Biology in college.
Just reading those passages hit me hard. It was mini-evolution. And while I was pondering that, the next chapter began with a quote from Delmore Schwartz:
"I am a book I neither wrote nor read."
We all are books that we have neither written nor read.
I like that a lot. It really focused my thoughts. Even if all the information is there embedded in our genes - and the information is there - we will never know even the tiny bit about ourselves. But of more important: self-awareness may very well be a gene that mutated into self-awareness in an early primate ancestor. One generation before, we were just a mammal walking the African plains. The next generation goes, "Eureka! I am."
Did that mutation bear the finger of God? Or was it simply just that - a mutation but nothing more that turned out to be a very favorable gene that gave us a leg up in the evolutionary chain? Now that's a question. Ironically, it's the mutation that led to us even having a concept of God. A very interesting question in the vein of what came first, the chicken or the egg.
But before I leave, I leave you with another behavioral science saying: a hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
Life's a cycle. Deal with it.
It is a screwed up world. I fear for all our collective sanities.
However, I digress.
I am currently reading "Time, Love, Memory" by Jonathan Weiner about the quest for the origins of behavior. I just read of the moment when a group of scientists actually placed a behavioral gene from one species into another, and it became that species behaviorally. Admittedly, it was a fruit fly - drosophila, for those of you keeping score, or who took more than Introductory Biology in college.
Just reading those passages hit me hard. It was mini-evolution. And while I was pondering that, the next chapter began with a quote from Delmore Schwartz:
"I am a book I neither wrote nor read."
We all are books that we have neither written nor read.
I like that a lot. It really focused my thoughts. Even if all the information is there embedded in our genes - and the information is there - we will never know even the tiny bit about ourselves. But of more important: self-awareness may very well be a gene that mutated into self-awareness in an early primate ancestor. One generation before, we were just a mammal walking the African plains. The next generation goes, "Eureka! I am."
Did that mutation bear the finger of God? Or was it simply just that - a mutation but nothing more that turned out to be a very favorable gene that gave us a leg up in the evolutionary chain? Now that's a question. Ironically, it's the mutation that led to us even having a concept of God. A very interesting question in the vein of what came first, the chicken or the egg.
But before I leave, I leave you with another behavioral science saying: a hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
Life's a cycle. Deal with it.
posted by Robert | 10:03 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home