Questionable Evolution
You’ve seen this one right? This image has been emailed, printed out, passed around, and snickered at for at least a few years now. I’m not sure who the original artist is. Whether you’ve seen it before or not, take a good look at it now. Ignore the gender. Man or woman, it doesn’t matter. After the initial chuckle, there’s something more to this. It resonates with us. Given its staying power and recurrence, it resonates with many of us.
Why? Maybe it resonates with a part of us that knows there just might be a grain of truth to it. Who is that man on the far right? Has he really evolved? Is extreme technology really the ideal “path” for humanity?
Perhaps more importantly, who is the man in the middle? The man standing perfectly erect. This might be man connected with both his creativity as a human to create technology (his spear), and yet still grounded to the spirit of his physical being. Confident in both. Looking ahead not to his future, but perceiving his present moment in a type of clarity that we have forgotten. The man in the middle whose reality exists in balance with the map of the natural world, instead of at odds with the virtual map of mind and technology — the man on the right ultimately at odds with himself.
The Wisdom of Action Heroes
Whether portrayed in a movie, book, or play, the character of an action hero (man or woman) is unmistakably fascinating.
“Thought as a System”
You’ve heard the phrase "the human condition". "Thought as a System" might be considered a diagnosis of that "condition", a look at the root of that condition — thought.
The Promise of Ideas
A celebration of creativity framed as a new year’s resolution? Encouragement for our internal procrastinator? I found this gem in an unlikely place — a 2006 resolution list on zefrank.com.
I promise not to keep ideas in my head, unfulfilled and full of promise - not to let these vague outlines of future actions give me false confidence and security in the abstract. Instead I will execute them quickly and faithfully so that I am again on the brink of the unknown, hoping that these ideas were not the last that would ever come to me from God knows where.
Well put, Zefrank.
Where DNA Ends
You are your DNA – that’s the modern portrayal. Doctors would like to change a few bits of your DNA before you are born and remove a tendency to a certain disease. Sociology explores the day when we’re fully reduced to DNA – when it might be used as the ultimate form of discrimination. Analyze a person’s DNA, for example, and instantly know if they have the traits that make them desirable for a certain job. The human is reduced to a collection of data points that can be analyzed and manipulated.
But what if DNA is only a starting point? Like the psychology of our childhood is a starting point for the adult mind, what if DNA is only a starting point for the biology of our flesh? The emerging field of “epigenetics” explores exactly that possibility:
“At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea – that genes have a ‘memory’. That the lives of your grandparents – the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw – can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself. And that what you do in your lifetime could in turn affect your grandchildren.” — The Ghost in Your Genes
“… even the things they saw …” The implications of this are profound, and the referenced article stops just short of taking the next logical step: even the things we think and believe may affect our genetics.
In the face of science, this puts the world back on our shoulders — exactly where it should be. We are not passive recipients of our environment, heredity, or childhood psychology. We are active creators and designers of our existence, right down to our DNA. It’s refreshing to see that science is catching back up.
