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On Time
When I went to reconstruct my thoughts on time I came across this quote, looking for my notebook. I like this quote better than what I haven’t written.
“Categories such as time, space, cause and number represent the most general relations which exist between things; surpassing all our other ideas in extension, they dominate all the details of our intellectual life. If humankind did not agree upon these essential ideas at every moment, if they did not have the same conception of time, space, cause, and number, all contact between their minds would be impossible…” Emile Durkheim (Paris 1912)
On Touch
Touch was a way to communicate before spoken language. Touch is a way to communicate with other species (i.e the way we pet a dog). All of our communication though screens is devoid of touch. It thus lacks in something essential and elemental to human communication and connection.
On the difference between a love letter and a letter that is loved
The night before I started my trip I read a piece of writing that I fell in love with. It was letter written to Henry David Thoreau by E.O. Wilson. It was a letter that compressed time and connected history, Wilson to Thoreau and then to Darwin. I had just read Thoreau for the first time and something in his writing touched me that I couldn’t exactly put my finger on that E.O. Wilson in his beautiful letter with his beautiful writing was able to.
When I read Darwin for the first time, two arguments for evolution in Darwin’s Origin of species stood out in my first reading. One was the discussion of homology as an argument for evolution. Specifically that different species have the exact same bone structure. It is not just a dolphin that has the same bones in its pectoral flipper as a human has in its hand but also a sea turtle in its claw as well. The same bones, thus connect mammals to mammals and mammals to reptiles a connection that despite the Platypus is not visible in the existing web of life.
Darwin wrote not just as a scientist but as a philosopher and it was in this context of a philosophical or a legal argument that struck me in its elegance and adventuresomeness of thought and also an unexpected way to understand pressing issues of our time.
Darwin uses language as a way for us to understand evolution. He tells us that language like animals become extinct. He points out that we can see words and phrases in the extinct language in living languages. Latin words in romance language as an example. It’s a beautiful argument logically. But in this argument there was something else at least for me. I’m not sure if Darwin intended this but what this signaled to me when I read it was Darwin connecting the development of language and culture to biology.
So recently when I was introduced to a word for this epigenetic from E.O. Wilson I had already been familiar with it through Darwin. The concept behind it, that as humans we are a part of biology and thus so is our culture and it can’t be disconnected. What happens culturally and behaviorally can also drive mutations or evolution genetically.
An example of this is our gene to absorb lactose, which is only about 5,000 years old and if you think of it not surprising that our ability to ingest the lactose secretions of other animals which led to food security from domesticated animals coincided with the agricultural revolution and the birth of recorded history and our current civilization.
For some reason this led me to ask a ridiculous hypothetical question of what would have happened if refrigeration was invented 5,000 years ago. Specially around the same time that we developed our lactose tolerant genes.
It seemed to me that this would have accomplished the same thing protein wise without our need to milk and slaughter cows. That we would have the technology to get our protein and a food source from the ocean. Again specifically not just peoples living near the sea would have the food security provided by the sea, but rather all humans. Why does this matter? I think a lot about the ocean and what we have done to this source of life. And the thought is that perhaps if we had an ability to refrigerate food from an earlier time a different relationship could have evolved to feed humans without decimating the ocean the way we have done. File under unintended consequences