“My grandson is taking a class as a sophomore, can't remember the name of it, in it he learned that we are all stardust..All living things are now considered to be formed from the core that forms a star!” This report comes from my early playmate, a Catholic girl who passed on her catechism lessons to me. We worried about babies in limbo.
This is my current understanding of a genesis story that begins with a star. There must have been something before that, but it is inconceivable to the human mind. Some think it started with a whimper or wrinkle but guys like the idea that it began with a bang. (As big as possible.)
The simplest elements, hookups of atoms, formed in that moment and continued to form. When they had gotten to the stage of dust, they swirled and made patterns out of the code of proton/neutron/electron that responded to things like gravity and electricity while creating it. Some of this stuff became the furnaces of atomic fusion that we call stars and some of it became planets gyring round the stars and some of it made moons around the planets.
Volcanoes, storms of atmosphere, formation of water and seas, all was drama until things settled down enough for microscopic things to happen in the mud and clay: bubbles that became one-celled animals through the coding node of the nucleus, a double helix. These had the ability to respond to the environment by going towards food and going away from danger, like bigger meaner one-celled animals who considered them food. The environment was not inert but kept on doing its own thing.
The one-cells divided between those who stayed in one place and those who were active, moving. The stay-in-place ones turned green when their nuclei began to code for “eating” sunlight. The move-around ones developed red blood as a way of carrying oxygen while they ate plants. And other animals. Some nuclei shucked their cells so then they were viruses and invaded other cells, corrupting the DNA codes in those nuclei. Or sometimes it was the RNA, which was the template for DNA.
All this interaction and opportunism — as often partnerships as predation — complexified codes of all kinds and gave rise to many kinds of emergence and redaction, all pushing for space and seeping into the business of each other. This mostly happened in water, and then it got onto the land and into the air, which gave life of every kind new opportunities to mutate and exploit. Of course, much also was snuffed or abandoned.
But all the creatures enclosed in skins soon were colonized by teeny parasites in their guts, under their skins, in the follicles of their eyelashes. Some made contributions and some under-mined the creature’s system.
The tree of evolution has now been abandoned in favor of a wheel of life pattern, because there is no steady and inevitable progression to complexity, elegance, and some fine goal. The code reverses, jumps, merges, rearranges parts. Things go along seemingly haphazardly until one day there are backbones and amphibians (egg-layers who don’t care about their babies) and creatures with wings and songs who lay eggs but care deeply about their babies.
Many kinds of apes develop into different kinds of hominins, many Adams and many Eves, and many fossils that are not quite like each other because of the differences in the environment which settle into ecologies. There are a lot of bugs and the wild codes of viruses persist and adapt to whatever cells there are, carrying code infection whereever they go. One thing emerges from another until one day what emerges is a “virtual” code, only in the minds the mammals, and then it evolves into a “culture”, a new kind of nuclear code that hallucinates the environment inside the brain, makes a map of sensory information: where the food is, what the signs of predators are. The apes learn to sing and make nests but never do learn to fly until much later when they have machines and parasails. Maybe at the early point they begin to watch birds and WANT to fly. Desire is being born.
One kind of hominin becomes dominant and maybe kills all the other kinds out of competition and jealousy, or maybe they just die out for no overwhelming reason, maybe they are just rough drafts. Maybe the viruses eat them. By this time behavior is a major factor and any creature that doesn’t take care of the babies long enough for them to reach maturity and seed the next generation just can’t persist.
In broad areas there will be disasters of earthquake, volcano, drought, hurricane, that wipe out great numbers of hominins. Those that are not killed, esp. the ones who have learned how to survive in extremes (far north, deep tropics and bare deserts) by making and doing compensatory things, watch and learn even more about how to prepare, survive, and even help others. Now there is compassion and justice. Compassion lives in baby protecting parts — arms and heart; justice lives in the pre-frontal cortex.
So now modern humans are reptiles wrapped in mammals wrapped in apes wrapped in hominins of various potentials who were subsumed over millennia. The eastern coast of Eurasia, which we call China, was one place modern life suddenly bloomed: agriculture, villages, money, weapons, domestic animals. The western coast of Eurasia, esp. the internal womb-like sea we call the Mediterranean, was another center: the same sequence. Coasts allow ships, sea-faring brings cultural options. There is always food where there is water.
When the last glaciers withdrew from Eurasia (which is NOT two continents), the humans followed the melt-line north, but the vast inner spaces of the continents were herd-grazing spaces. Herding was a human option, but a different path of development, more like the hunting-gathering origins of humans. This is true of North America as well.
The Mediterranean forms of culture, esp the Roman/Hebraic form of empire, marched up the western coasts and valleys of what we call “Europe” and created what we call the Western World or the Developed World or the First World, though in Canada that suggests the early peoples of that continent who have developed in another slightly different way.
The key to Western Civilization was a monotheistic insistence coming out of the three Abrahamic descendants: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Big Cheese Brothers who have never stopped trying to replace the Tribal Chieftain with their own selves. Until we give up that pattern, which many of us have, we will be locked in combat one way or another.
This story is “scientific” which is another Roman/Hebraic tradition which steps aside from the tribe in search of the universal, not necessarily human. This method depends on evidence (and more is always appearing) and on the humility of knowing that it all might be wrong, which has always been a sub-theme of human thought everywhere, usually in response to the suffering of others.
Only humans know they will die. Only some humans look forward to it. Then they will go back to being stardust.
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