Numb
I just finished a three day weekend at Dinosaur State Park. I feel numb. It wasn't the job; at least I have no reason to think.
I had death anxiety at work today. It was a lull in the day, I was writing about the evolutionary tree of life and the science behind it. The task was for a upper high school target group, and I tried to imagine that which would invigorate and interest a 17 year old version of myself. I figure now is as good as time as any to recapitulate it.
"How do we know about the history of life on Earth? Simply, the reference we use is DNA and the comparative anatomy of living things. However, just looking at the genetic sequence or physical traits of an organism is meaningless without a framework. The architecture of the history of life on earth is built on evolutionary trees.
So why are we at a Dinosaur Museum? (You might be asking yourself). I'll try to answer that question too: For quite some time Dinosaurs were seen by biologists the same way you might. Dinosaurs are a mild curiosity really most useful for attracting families with young children to entertain and dump money at the gift shop. Dinosaurs are for children--right?
It is one thing to find a fossilized cockroach, or a fossilized salamander. These are 'simpler' organisms, by human convention, that have been around for millions of years and live near the base of food chains. However, finding the bones belonging to beasts which dwarf any apex predator we know of today is significant. It turns out that Dinosaurs were large, and some were intelligent and even warm blooded. These complex animals might be better adapted to the environment today--I'd bet on a Deinonychus over a Lion any day. This challenges the fundamental assumptions we made about plants and animals in our everyday world for centuries.
The evolution of life is much more complex than a simple principle moving things towards more complexity, resulting in "the human condition". As we continue to construct the tree of life, everything has been challenged. Species and the environment that surrounds them are not fixed. If you look outside, yes, the forests and wetlands seem relatively stable. However, in evolutionary time, where a million years is but a blink of an eye--mountains, oceans and deserts are in constant upheaval. The very continents we know today have been moved and have collided dozens of times. The Atlantic Ocean didn't even exist when the dinosaurs of Connecticut made footprints preserved under our feet.
Life flows like running water: It never stands still, but we know the path it has taken. Massive changes in response to natural selection are abrupt. New adaptations allowing an organism to spread and diversify makes it appear like entire continents are populated overnight.
Despite this rapid change, we find that certain traits are immutable in defining a group of living things. New adaptations shared by a single group with one common ancestor, who also has that trait are called synapomorphies. The entire group is called a clade. These are the only technical words I will use in this entire lesson. However, "clade" and "synapomorphy" are terms to describe and connect living things. You and I think of living things in clades (a related group with a common ancestor) without even realizing it. All birds have feathers, all mammals have fur, all eukaryotes (plants, animals and fungi) have a nucleus in their living cells. We use these traits as a way to define living things, and compare them to show how they are related.
There is a shared trait which defines the largest clade of all--life on earth. It is because of this trait, this synapomorphy, that we know that all living things are in the same tree; from bacteria to whales.
DNA. You here so much about it, enough to make you sick, I am sure.
All living things store the blueprints on this molecule. They are all even in the same language. It is because of this, we conclude that all living things must be related. 3.7 billion years life originated and diversified, and all living things are descendants of that significant event. New and original forms have come and gone--but some have remained. Those that remained did so because they were best adapted to their changing environment, and lived to pass on their genes, DNA, to their progeny. Survival of the fittest dictates that only those capable of creating the next generation actually will. It is because of this, we can look at DNA as history lesson starting from a single cell billions of years ago.
This is why we know what we know: Nothing alive today in a natural habitat is alive except by the self preservation and subsequent reproduction of their ancestors. You and I are alive today because the chain reaction which led to us, starting 3.7 billion years ago, survived amid the chaos of an ever changing universe. If any link in the chain was broken--a cell died instead of lived, a mutation never arose, a fish ate the first amphibian before it got to land, you would not exist.
Now to our question of Dinosaurs--Are they really just a topic to make Hollywood blockbusters and amazon.com bestsellers? No. Fossils of wonderfully adapted organisms like dinosaurs give credence to evolution in the face of any skeptic. Life on earth has been, and always will be, about a struggle for survival. Nature does not select for beauty, for strength, for size or for voracity. As amazing as these dinosaurs were, they are defined by adaptations which failed when the environment changed drastically. The dinosaurs, and likewise any extinct organism, went extinct for reasons they cannot control. The fluidity of the environment allows populations to flourish, and populations to disappear.
Nature always had the final say on who lived and who died, and that story is told in our DNA."
It is preachy. It is what I believe. It is horrifying. I wish this world-view on no child. I hate that feeling I get--call it existential anxiety if you wish. I get this feeling of being a link at the end of an infinitely long chain sprouting from the void. Any single kink in that chain can be broken, and I will be but a fragment in an abyss. Worse, though, the great biological chain of being which has led to my insignificant existence--what if it was broken in the past?
Where most men find humility, curiosity and wonder, I often find nausea. In comparison to the diversity of life in the rain forest, coral reefs and deep sea sulfur vents I feel humanity dry, drab and boring. Human culture is as important as the pattern of lipid molecules on the surface of a yeast cell, and less aesthetically pleasing. I deride my co-existence with my own species.
I spend all day waiting to get the hell away from people. I spend all day grumbling to myself that I hate humanity. And yet... when I come to an empty apartment, my herd instinct tricks me--I begin to feel lonely. I feel like I'm missing out on something. Is that a product of my biology? How much of me is a product of my evolution, my genes, my environment? Everything, right? I certainly feel like an individual faced with hard choices. However, when I look outside myself like I look at others, I find that I am quite predicable. I know what I do before I'm going to do it. I know, not because I live inside this body, but because this organism is obnoxiously simple to model.
"It's unfair!" comes to mind. What is fair,then? Would it be fair to live in a universe of design and goals? The lovely thing about a universe with destiny is you have something to follow or defy. In a meaningless universe, decay permeates every ideology and idealism. At one time in my life, the dreams and desires I had seemed like a clear paved road to self actualization. Now, I can only help but notice where the plants are colonizing the cracks, and water damage has eroded away the foundations.
When I was younger, I would have these thoughts. I used to simply "give up". I wouldn't go to school, I wouldn't socialize. My adulthood has been marked by an ability to bottle up these emotions and press on anyways. The ability to ignore the true state of my life in respect to the universe has brought me some happiness--at least more than I knew as a youth. However, my life is not authentic anymore. I do things that make me feel good about being an idea--a naturalist, a teacher, a scientist. I feel wholesome and defined, but at the expense of something intangible: potential. As time races forward my potential to become something else is consumed. Only that which fits with my current environment is encouraged, while everything else is selected against. The life of an individual is a crude metaphor for the history all life on earth. This is the source of my anxiety today--I may feel like I am progressing or growing, much like life diversifies during periods of geological stability. However, an extreme environmental setback will send me back to an ancestral state--and all which I have done after that point is negated and lost. I have found fossils, you know. I've dug up old journals, and its like seeing a feathered dinosaurs from 150 million years ago--all that I thought was new and unique to this time in my life is actually only a derivative of something already engineered years ago.
Even this argument and interpretation has been done before. I may feel like I am writing these ideas for the first time, but it is not unique. It is absolutely the most fucking terrifying thing to know that I probably have already written this and do not know it.
I had death anxiety at work today. It was a lull in the day, I was writing about the evolutionary tree of life and the science behind it. The task was for a upper high school target group, and I tried to imagine that which would invigorate and interest a 17 year old version of myself. I figure now is as good as time as any to recapitulate it.
"How do we know about the history of life on Earth? Simply, the reference we use is DNA and the comparative anatomy of living things. However, just looking at the genetic sequence or physical traits of an organism is meaningless without a framework. The architecture of the history of life on earth is built on evolutionary trees.
So why are we at a Dinosaur Museum? (You might be asking yourself). I'll try to answer that question too: For quite some time Dinosaurs were seen by biologists the same way you might. Dinosaurs are a mild curiosity really most useful for attracting families with young children to entertain and dump money at the gift shop. Dinosaurs are for children--right?
It is one thing to find a fossilized cockroach, or a fossilized salamander. These are 'simpler' organisms, by human convention, that have been around for millions of years and live near the base of food chains. However, finding the bones belonging to beasts which dwarf any apex predator we know of today is significant. It turns out that Dinosaurs were large, and some were intelligent and even warm blooded. These complex animals might be better adapted to the environment today--I'd bet on a Deinonychus over a Lion any day. This challenges the fundamental assumptions we made about plants and animals in our everyday world for centuries.
The evolution of life is much more complex than a simple principle moving things towards more complexity, resulting in "the human condition". As we continue to construct the tree of life, everything has been challenged. Species and the environment that surrounds them are not fixed. If you look outside, yes, the forests and wetlands seem relatively stable. However, in evolutionary time, where a million years is but a blink of an eye--mountains, oceans and deserts are in constant upheaval. The very continents we know today have been moved and have collided dozens of times. The Atlantic Ocean didn't even exist when the dinosaurs of Connecticut made footprints preserved under our feet.
Life flows like running water: It never stands still, but we know the path it has taken. Massive changes in response to natural selection are abrupt. New adaptations allowing an organism to spread and diversify makes it appear like entire continents are populated overnight.
Despite this rapid change, we find that certain traits are immutable in defining a group of living things. New adaptations shared by a single group with one common ancestor, who also has that trait are called synapomorphies. The entire group is called a clade. These are the only technical words I will use in this entire lesson. However, "clade" and "synapomorphy" are terms to describe and connect living things. You and I think of living things in clades (a related group with a common ancestor) without even realizing it. All birds have feathers, all mammals have fur, all eukaryotes (plants, animals and fungi) have a nucleus in their living cells. We use these traits as a way to define living things, and compare them to show how they are related.
There is a shared trait which defines the largest clade of all--life on earth. It is because of this trait, this synapomorphy, that we know that all living things are in the same tree; from bacteria to whales.
DNA. You here so much about it, enough to make you sick, I am sure.
All living things store the blueprints on this molecule. They are all even in the same language. It is because of this, we conclude that all living things must be related. 3.7 billion years life originated and diversified, and all living things are descendants of that significant event. New and original forms have come and gone--but some have remained. Those that remained did so because they were best adapted to their changing environment, and lived to pass on their genes, DNA, to their progeny. Survival of the fittest dictates that only those capable of creating the next generation actually will. It is because of this, we can look at DNA as history lesson starting from a single cell billions of years ago.
This is why we know what we know: Nothing alive today in a natural habitat is alive except by the self preservation and subsequent reproduction of their ancestors. You and I are alive today because the chain reaction which led to us, starting 3.7 billion years ago, survived amid the chaos of an ever changing universe. If any link in the chain was broken--a cell died instead of lived, a mutation never arose, a fish ate the first amphibian before it got to land, you would not exist.
Now to our question of Dinosaurs--Are they really just a topic to make Hollywood blockbusters and amazon.com bestsellers? No. Fossils of wonderfully adapted organisms like dinosaurs give credence to evolution in the face of any skeptic. Life on earth has been, and always will be, about a struggle for survival. Nature does not select for beauty, for strength, for size or for voracity. As amazing as these dinosaurs were, they are defined by adaptations which failed when the environment changed drastically. The dinosaurs, and likewise any extinct organism, went extinct for reasons they cannot control. The fluidity of the environment allows populations to flourish, and populations to disappear.
Nature always had the final say on who lived and who died, and that story is told in our DNA."
It is preachy. It is what I believe. It is horrifying. I wish this world-view on no child. I hate that feeling I get--call it existential anxiety if you wish. I get this feeling of being a link at the end of an infinitely long chain sprouting from the void. Any single kink in that chain can be broken, and I will be but a fragment in an abyss. Worse, though, the great biological chain of being which has led to my insignificant existence--what if it was broken in the past?
Where most men find humility, curiosity and wonder, I often find nausea. In comparison to the diversity of life in the rain forest, coral reefs and deep sea sulfur vents I feel humanity dry, drab and boring. Human culture is as important as the pattern of lipid molecules on the surface of a yeast cell, and less aesthetically pleasing. I deride my co-existence with my own species.
I spend all day waiting to get the hell away from people. I spend all day grumbling to myself that I hate humanity. And yet... when I come to an empty apartment, my herd instinct tricks me--I begin to feel lonely. I feel like I'm missing out on something. Is that a product of my biology? How much of me is a product of my evolution, my genes, my environment? Everything, right? I certainly feel like an individual faced with hard choices. However, when I look outside myself like I look at others, I find that I am quite predicable. I know what I do before I'm going to do it. I know, not because I live inside this body, but because this organism is obnoxiously simple to model.
"It's unfair!" comes to mind. What is fair,then? Would it be fair to live in a universe of design and goals? The lovely thing about a universe with destiny is you have something to follow or defy. In a meaningless universe, decay permeates every ideology and idealism. At one time in my life, the dreams and desires I had seemed like a clear paved road to self actualization. Now, I can only help but notice where the plants are colonizing the cracks, and water damage has eroded away the foundations.
When I was younger, I would have these thoughts. I used to simply "give up". I wouldn't go to school, I wouldn't socialize. My adulthood has been marked by an ability to bottle up these emotions and press on anyways. The ability to ignore the true state of my life in respect to the universe has brought me some happiness--at least more than I knew as a youth. However, my life is not authentic anymore. I do things that make me feel good about being an idea--a naturalist, a teacher, a scientist. I feel wholesome and defined, but at the expense of something intangible: potential. As time races forward my potential to become something else is consumed. Only that which fits with my current environment is encouraged, while everything else is selected against. The life of an individual is a crude metaphor for the history all life on earth. This is the source of my anxiety today--I may feel like I am progressing or growing, much like life diversifies during periods of geological stability. However, an extreme environmental setback will send me back to an ancestral state--and all which I have done after that point is negated and lost. I have found fossils, you know. I've dug up old journals, and its like seeing a feathered dinosaurs from 150 million years ago--all that I thought was new and unique to this time in my life is actually only a derivative of something already engineered years ago.
Even this argument and interpretation has been done before. I may feel like I am writing these ideas for the first time, but it is not unique. It is absolutely the most fucking terrifying thing to know that I probably have already written this and do not know it.