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 | "Threads in the Tapestry" | |
| The theory of evolution outlined by Darwin is probably the most profound illumination of our basic nature that has ever been put forward. Neo-Darwinism, the result of melding the works of Mendel's spiritual heirs, the biogeneticists, with Darwin's discoveries has opened doorways onto a landscape of wonder. An obstacle on the road to self-awareness is the fact that the demands of the intellectual mind are frequently in direct conflict with our biological directives. Some understanding of the genetic imperatives that are the causes of major internal conflict is essential to rapid progress. The billions of years of evolution, of which we are the end result, has not been a period of steady, upwards progress. Massive geo-physical changes have several times come close to wiping out all life on earth. Creatures that had known millions of years of stable environment suddenly, by evolutionary time-scales, found themselves faced with the challenge of making incredible behavioural changes in order to adapt to external changes - or disappear for ever from the pages of history. Complex changes required newer, more complicated, adaptations. At each of these stages, a larger, more complex, brain developed to organise the fresh patterns that became necessary for survival. However, our genes are very conservative and the previous brains did not just wither away. To a large extent, they continued to act as though nothing had changed. |
| This repeated process has resulted in humanity being the creature with several brains; all of them having influence on our behaviour; but only one of which is able to communicate with the commonly shared reality of the external world. It is this neo-cortical left brain, seat of the intellect, that we use to navigate our path through life. Sounds simple enough, and would be if it were not for the fact that each earlier brain has a mind if its own. The mind is an attribute of the brain, and primitive brains - those that came into being during earlier stages of our evolution - have primitive minds. Each brain attempts to act out the gene-directed programs that were survival explicit at the time they evolved, but nowadays, often lead to unsuitable and self-defeating behaviour. Evolution has spent a great deal of time in teaching us that change is threatening. The history of life on this planet has been one of adapt or perish. For millennia after millennia, the survival of any species was down to luck. They were lucky as individuals if circumstances didn't kill them before they had a chance to replicate themselves. By breeding, they passed on a new mixture of their genes to the next generation. Every time that an organism replicates itself, its offspring is a new combination of reshuffled genes. From each of its parents, it inherits half of its genes, and these are combined in such a manner as to make each offspring unique. Different. The alteration of the position of a single gene in the DNA chain can produce far-reaching consequences. The gene carries the blueprint for the body; it is not the material of the body itself. It can be compared with the full blueprint for the building of a boat. Although the complete blueprint exists in each gene, the separate parts of the total construction are handled by different sections. Some build engine rooms, others construct portholes, etc. |
| Any deviation from the original blueprint in the building of any part of the vessel, will not affect those original blueprints. The effect will be passed on in any blueprints that are then copied from the vessel with the changed specifications. All mutations are post-partum. By that, I mean that if something such as radiation or a toxic poison was to damage those parts of me that reproduce my genes, then that, in itself, would not harm me. Any damage would make itself known in my offspring. The degree of difference brought about by a minor mutation, and the extent of its consequences have, in the majority of cases, depended on the environment that prevailed during the life-time of such off-spring. Subtle changes in the overall pattern are not, in themselves, sufficient to be advantageous to their offspring. However, in the very long passages of time, the accumulated effects of each deviation from the basic pattern of their ancestors were sufficient to have brought about incredible consequences. Either the change was anti-survival, the gene pattern had drifted the wrong way; and members of that branch of the species, in some instances the whole species, became extinct, a loser in the DNA stakes; or the evolutionary changes proved to be beneficial. Maybe a slightly better eyesight or increased ability to digest rough forage; whatever it was that caused them to survive to that current period in time. There was, of course, a slight disadvantage in that the competition had also improved. They too, were still around. Every day a struggle. |
| Accepting that all of the above is true and valid; one may ask what this has to do with changing oneself? Imprinted on our genes are useful survival traits. We are a walking encyclopaedia of survival blueprints. They have proved of immense benefit in a striving for life that has being going on for almost 4,000 million years. Now it's our turn. Don't think that we are godlike, in that the rules don't apply to us. Why on earth should nature make an exception in our case? Fortunately, included in the goodie bag of survival traits that brought us this far, is the ability to reason. So let's be reasonable. It seems much better than screaming that we can't go on another day. We are not caught between the extremes of either having to make it up as we go along on an ever speeding spiral or, of repeating each day, again and again. We now have another whole history of information available to us. Not only do we have the vast library of knowledge imprinted in our genes, we now have as great a library of intellectual understanding; imprinted on our brains. Sort of puts you in the position of being the first water buffalo to think that maybe we should stop stampeding. Soon. Let's be in no doubt about it, we have got this far just by following the most ancient dictum of the genes; compete, survive and replicate. Nevertheless, the times have changed like never before, and if we are to become successful, by whatever criteria we deem as success, we need to define our aims and become aware of our personal assets and handicaps. If the planet itself is to survive without devolving to the point where it will not sustain life, we must learn to re-channel our own evolutionary direction. We are currently stacking the odds against own personal survival and there are too many of us to leave it to random chance. |
| Last summer I returned to walk along a coastline that I had explored as a youth. Superficially, very little had changed. Not surprising considering that I had been gone for only 45 years; the merest blink of time in geological terms. Another few metres of the chalk cliffs had collapsed onto the beach at one section and the salt flats had extended their range at another. The greatest change was in the way that the mud-banks had taken on a more solid texture, being raised half a metre above the tide-line by the tough, saltwater grasses, whose roots bound them in place. When I had last visited this shore, the grasses were barely visible, but now they formed firm banks that stretched seaward for half a kilometre. I wondered if I was seeing an early form of a future intelligent life that would one day rule this planet as we now do. Not too fantastic a notion; at an earlier stage of our development we were considerably less advanced than these grasses. Sitting on the shore, I emptied a small pile of sand from my shoe into my hand. I held a history of the planet in miniature. Have you looked at an old gravestone and wondered how it was that the sun and rains of only a hundred years could weather away the words that someone had engraved into its granite with steel tools? The grains that I held were the remnants of continents. This fine sand was once part of mountain chains, of great rocks; of the land that the first humans walked. It would have known the tread of the great reptiles and the burrows of the first mammals. How many ice ages, I wondered? How many floods, and how many countless lightning strikes? For these small particles, all time had been a period of devolution that had reduced to them to this. For us the story runs the other way. Our genes have been around for almost the same length of time. We had once been even smaller than grains of sand. Very simple, one-celled organisms that have evolved into the incredibly complex beings that we are today. Every cell in your body has been part of that evolution. It has taken us a long, long, long time. The sand had accumulated experiences. We have evolved into beings that can bring understanding to experience. The cells of your body started their journey when the planet was unimaginably different. We are here because our DNA happened to do the right thing at the right time. But not by conscious choice. We act as we do, because of the actions of the many parts of which we are made. At no point in our progress did any of our genes make a conscious decision to evolve in a certain direction. Our path has always been followed at random. |