Evolution

Last week I attempted to explain the concept of halos from a biochemical perspective. This week I want to ground down into the animal side of humanity.

So just as artists have been portraying the spiritually noble around us as emitting light, art is littered with people adorned with horns hoofs, wings, tails, and other animals feature. Despite whatever moments of transcendence we have, no matter how sophisticated we perceive ourselves to be, there is no escaping we humans are not merely animalistic, but animals. Like any other animal have various biological parameters we must stay in to maintain life and health. While many believe that we must strive to overcome our animalistic nature I contend the more we choose to honor these biological realities the healthier (and I mean that in all way, physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, spiritually, etc) we will grow.

This idea that we are of animal nature is not just one captured through art. Science has no qualms with reducing humanity to just one more animal roaming the earth. Darwin published Origin of species in 1859. Although he skirts around whether humans are subject to the same natural laws that govern all other life, he does say in the distant future “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” What I find most remarkable about Darwin's* writings is just how much his ideas were already practiced at the time. He is constantly referring to how farmers select certain traits or characteristics for what they are breeding. There was nothing really new in his writing as I can tell aside from a functional way of expressing these ideas.

Darwin certainly was not alone in trying to explain how all life is always in a perpetual feedback loop with its environment. 50 prior to the "Origin of Species" Jean-Baptiste Lamarck wrote “Philosophie Zoologique” which explained evolution slightly differently. He wrote about organisms not only passed down traits through unchangeable units of information that would soon be called genes, but of how these traits could be influenced by the behavior of the organism. The classic example, which provides Lamarck with his greatest notoriety is giraffes having to stretch their neck pass along a longer neck to their offspring. This example is used in many biology textbooks, showing the wrong think people had before Darwin. And to be fair after the discovery of genes, but before the study of epigenetics, I can easily see how this could be thought of as naive thinking. Now though we know through the study of epigenetics genes are not any more static than anything else in nature. We have ways of understanding genes, while not thought of as alive, are in a constant state of communicating with their environment. Simply put genes like people express different parts of themselves depending on the environment. This is what determines whether one of our cells that has an identical DNA sequencing as any of our other cells becomes a skin cell, a bone cell, a fat cell, etc. It also gives us exponentially more control over our health. It's not just the genes we are dealt but How we play those genes.

Anthony Bruni

* I haven't actually read Darwin's book cover to cover but have thumbed through it at various times. What struck me was he seemed to be explaining a theory which explained why the practices that were already employed worked.