YOUR EARLIEST SHARED ANCESTOR WAS A BLOB
People still try to force what I’m talking about into what they already know. Two words deeply confuse them. One is “religion” and the other is “Indians.” These are categories that don’t exist in my line of thought.
To me, religion is a scheme, a belief system, an institution or other denomination, but it is not what I’m talking about. Nor am I talking about spirituality. What I’m after is the deepest, most direct interface with the world and whatever it is that makes us sense the Holy or Sacred — the highly significant that wasn’t made up by some authority or even the group as a whole. But NOT supernatural. Not even conscious except in retrospect.
“Indians” are best described tribe-by-tribe in place by place, sometimes displaced but originally defined by some place where the ecosystem shaped them. Because of change in their worldly lives as well as displacement, tribes need to have a time indicator: before contact, after the Civil War, etc.
But mostly the trouble with both of these is that they have been seized by writers and movie makers who romanticized them, forced them into European categories, and even overwhelmed them by sex. “Indians” themselves use Pan-Indian organizations for political purposes and, indeed, organizations exist that represent all the indigenous people on the planet, particularly those fending off European and American empire building. They include the Australian aborigines, the Hawiians, and the uncontacted Amazonians — if any are left.
Talking about the planet-changing explosion of knowledge has discredited all made-up previous schemes of religion based on from ideas long-ago because they are child-level guesses or Victorian politics or some other unreal interpretation including psychotherapy parent theories.
Anyway the new knowledge is accompanied by the need to reconcile all the local “place-shaped” shaped systems into one inclusive understanding of how things work, as far as we can tell so far. This is dynamic and on-going without the certainty demanded by previous belief systems. In fact, the thing many people just can’t grasp is that there is probably NO reality out there, just the potential for us to compose a working model.
If there were reality, humans are far too limited by our perceptive equipment to understand more than a small span of it. It’s the same problem as thinking any human could understand God. Reality appears to be just as much of a mystery, esp. considering quantum mechanics or non-earth environments where supercold or superhot make everything different and totally uninhabitable. Our reality is limited to places we can survive. Our ability to devise ways to survive in drastic environments gives us the hubris to go into space.
One reality people would sometimes like to get rid of is time itself. But someone has pointed out that if time didn’t exist, neither would people, because living creatures are processes, not unified permanent phenomenon. We are assemblages capable of cooperating together in response to the world that passes through us. This is not some exotic fantasy from a far place but a simple biological fact you can observe as you put things in one end and cope with them coming out the other end with various degrees of success and sensations.
Because that’s what we ARE — processes pushing against the world, putting bits into us and pushing bits out of us. The first little one-celled creature showed it was alive by doing that. One rough draft got the taking-in part, but never dropped anything out. When they got too full, they just died.
The first evolution that we keep trying to repeat in a lab is that of the DNA helix, at first only single, and we seem to have done that to some degree. But I hear little about the first “skin” that separated the creature from its context. It must have been a little lipid (fat) bubble that separated the outside from the inside.
“In the evolution of organs, skin came first. The discovery that even sponges have a proto-skin shows that the separation of insides from outsides in multicellular animals was key to their evolution. … But because sponges lack the genes involved in expelling molecules, it was assumed that this was not a functional organ.” (New Scientist)
When the first one-celled creatures had skins to define them and DNA to control their processes of taking in and putting out, their next advance was awareness of the six directions (four compass point plus up and down) which remain in our ability to sense because we need to travel. Our inner compass might be our oldest “sense.” Those who didn’t have it could not seek food nor avoid being eaten. They were destroyed. The directions persist in formal ceremonies.
The next thing may have been the ability to grab other beings, pull them in, and convert them to uses other than digestion. Mitochondria are key to cell function but there are other organelles that have been pulled in. The nucleus has a second skin to keep them out of the DNA package.
Go here for more information:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9841/
On this site it will be noted that life is about energy, because that’s what drives all these developments. As complete animals our most basic consumption and function is the use and allocation of energy whether from food, sunlight, electrochemistry, or environmental resources like fire. All revolves around oxygen. This is called metabolism.
Self-replication is an attribute of nucleotides and is guided either by splitting the original cell into two, or by meiosis which is the basis of sex because it involves the recombination of single RNA helixes into a double entwining, like two genders. This process can stutter which means there can be glitches in the replication of genes which means that the directions will alter and the resulting creature will be a little different.
We call this mutation. Some mutations are advantages and some are fatal. The ones that persist have “evolved.” Monkeys are not our grandfathers but simply other creatures capable of replication. We share a predecessor called “the earliest shared ancestor.” If you want to be strict about it, the earliest shared ancestor was the first cell to have a skin and a nucleus. This is not a religious idea. Nor is it spiritual. The Earliest Shared Ancestor was in Africa, not America. Keep moving.
