“Oooga booga boom boom”, said the young boy.
“Zogg zogg”, replied the wise old man.
Imagine being transported back to an era, way back in the depths of time before the advent of computers, before the invention of the combustion engine, before the miracle of Sunday roasts, before Sundays even. You are living in a cave. People around you are shifty and hairy, rather resembling the rabble that emerges from the pub after closing time. These people are your tribe, your family and yet your main form of communication is through mono-sylabillic grunts and body language. What would you do? How would you cope?
It is a well known theory that much of our behaviour stems from the instincts and survival patterns of primitive man. I’ve tested this by staring into a naked flame for longer than is necessary, and scaring myself senseless by adjusting the flame. You see, back in the good old days when a trusty spear was a man’s best friend and the biggest problem posed from the neighbours was a fatal attack from the Sabre family, we as humans were fairly well adapted to meet the daily demands of life on earth. We were active and healthy, or rather those that stayed alive for long were, and we were intelligent enough to make tools to enable us to catch something for lunch and survive through the night.
Now, however, we are a bit of an evolutionary joke, though creationists won’t see the funny side of this. They’re routing for a joker god who hides dinosaur bones so there’s no point trying to trump him. The fact of the matter is that not only the strong survive. There is no rhyme or reason to our genetic path. We have no heroes who have developed powers for the sake of bored people to watch jumping forwards and backwards in time in a quest to save the cheerleader. There is no bearded old man up there in the clouds who is watching us and thinking quietly to himself, that yes, they’re very naughty but it’ll work out alright in the end. Basically, somewhere on the road trip we got lost as a species and instead of heading back to where we lost our bearings, we camped out, had a picnic and never left! For those of you who do think that evolution runs the show, I’ve got a question for you: just how well are we adapted to our environments? It is clear to see that our nations are getting fatter. It is also apparent that the power to weight ratio of a gorilla is slightly higher than that of your average human. I would also like to point out the practical impossibility of lifting a massively overweight caveman out of his bed using a barney-rubble styled crane so that he could be taken to the local witch-doctor for treatment. With this in regard, I think it’s safe to say that humans have not evolved physically but devolved. Mentally it’s a different story, we hope.
Worldwide communication, graphical user interfaces, plumbing, calculus, cacti, creation stories, these are some of the wonderful things that we can do using our minds. We are now able to converse with people across the seven seas on a regular basis and have the mental capability of forming relationships with people on such a widely ranging spectrum that no one really knows what will happen if you add suchandsuch to your facebook account. The point I’m making is that we have this ability to do amazing things with our minds, some of which we haven’t even figured out yet.
If we look at the purpose of our species we enter a dark and perilous realm of philosophy that is not usually entered unless accompanied by a mind altering substance. But if we look at the purpose of an amoeba we see that it lives and replicates and dies, not necessarily due to any divine plan but because it can. Yes, the evolution of the species may depend on efficiency and energetically favourable transactions but in the long run none of us is going to be around long enough to know who finishes in first place. It can and it does, simple.
No comments:
Post a Comment