Category Evolution

Jul 27 2011

Planet Earth has no Immune Response to Viral Attack

Dodo, based on Roelant Savery's 1626 painting ...

The Dodo, extinct since the mid-to-late 17th century (Image via Wikipedia).

The agricultural revolution caused by humans is the single widest ecological change in the 3.5 billion-year history of life, with more profound effects than the (probable) comet that hit Earth 65 mya. years ago. The invention of agriculture allowed humans to manipulate other species for their own use (animals as well as plants) which meant that humans did not need any longer to belong to any ecosystem‘s carrying capacities—hence the human population increased and spread rapidly. With the agricultural revolution, humans ceased to live with nature and began to live outside it.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors played particular roles in their local ecosystems. They had their own niches. With the agricultural revolution, humans stepped outside ecosystems. Agriculture was an overt declaration of war on ecosystems; it meant restricting land to produce a few crops and combat all other life until extermination. With it, native plant species became weeds and all but a few domesticated species of animals became pests.

Then, came the industrial revolution and with it another ecological catastrophe. The use of factories and mass production led to a loss of natural resources, leaving the environment permanently damaged. Deforestation left the wildlife in the forest uprooted and many species became endangered while others disappeared forever. If earlier, the humans had declared war only on those other life forms, which disrupted its own form of living, they now proceeded, in the air and in the seas as well on land, to kill indiscriminately. Extermination became synonymous with collateral damage.

The primary reasons for the extinction of species is environmental change or biological competition. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, many biologically classified species have gone extinct: 83 species of mammals, 113 species of birds, 23 species of amphibians and reptiles, 23 species of fish, about 100 species of invertebrates, and over 350 species of plants. Scientists can only estimate the number of unclassified species that have gone extinct. Using various methods of extrapolation, biologists estimate that in 1991 between 4000 to 50,000 unclassified species became extinct, mainly in the tropics, due to human activities. This rate of extinction is some 1,000 to 10,000 times greater than the natural rate of species extinction (2-10 species per year) before the human agricultural and industrial revolutions.

If with the agricultural revolution, we set ourselves aside the rest of the world and enslaved the very same nature of which we were born, with the industrial revolution, we embarked on a systematic and rapid mass destruction of our planet and its life. The terms weeds and pests assumed yet a broader meaning. We dealt with thousands of species that were in our way efficiently and once and for all; the entire planet became the niche and property of one sole species, other surviving species living at its mercy; and the human population grew virally by billions!

Planet Earth on the Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, seems to have no immune response to the viral attack by this agent called Homo sapiens sapiens.

(To be continued)

Life is great, isn’t it?

R-

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Jul 26 2011

A Newborn is Perfect and You are a Survivor

A newborn is as perfect as it will ever get (Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net).

A newborn is as perfect as it will ever get, its brain and senses wide open. From then on, it can only go downwards. Some go dramatically down (most), repressed and oppressed by the environmental conditions. They survive, though, some better than others. Others (the few lucky ones) only get their potential reduced by a margin dictated by the inexorable selective environmental exposure. Like a mirage, they develop into balanced, happy adults.

Paradoxically enough (inevitable as well), the loving parents, even the educated and well-intentioned, are the cause number one of the newborn’s fall. From day one, parents begin teaching the newborn the science and art of survival, encompassing a variety of skills. They begin limiting the newborn’s potential, creating likes and dislikes, fears and phobias, ambitions and illusions, as well as notions of good and evil, and fixed patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Some of it is inevitable and will serve the newborn well for the rest of its life. Most of it is harmful, serves no practical purpose, and will be excess baggage in adulthood for which one will continually have to pay a high price.

For the balanced, well-intentioned parents, the challenge is to train the newborn to succeed in a world that is not yet there. Parents train their offspring to be successful adults in their own world, not in the world where the offspring will reach adulthood and have to fend for themselves. Most parents teach their offspring particular skills and norms that will be obsolete once they become adults. Partly, this is inevitable once the cultural environment changes faster than any genetic evolution can cope with, which is our case. Our brain is still roughly the same as the brain of our Stone Age ancestors. The environmental and social pressures it has to cope with are not.

So what can we do?  It seems to me that a solid agenda for any parent, one resistant to time and change, is to create for their young a close contact to nature, of which we are a part. We must awaken our sense of the beautiful and the good, of wondering rather than rejecting, of ‘living it’ rather than ‘analyzing it,’ of open-mindedness and acceptance rather than pettiness and oppression. We must re-awaken our values long obscured and repressed by scientism, technomorphia, and political correctness; re-awaken our perception of entirety before particularity.

You are a survivor. You’ve done well, but you don’t need to stop there, no matter the odds. The next step, alas, is the most difficult: to take away the ‘sur’ in ‘survive’, leaving only ‘vive’ behind, which means ‘to live’. ‘Living,’ rather than ‘living despite,’ seems to me to be the ultimate goal.

Keep smiling. Life is great!

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