Tao’s 2 Cents

My grandmother created and guards my family tree. It’s not very detailed, mainly names and dates, but it’s still intriguing. I suppose it’s human nature to want know when and where your ancestors lived. It’s integral in fact to answering the ego’s demand to know who it is. All of this in the hope of figuring out why you’re here and what your purpose is. Who, what, where, when and why. Life is really just one big question, but what if we don’t like the answers.

I’m reading a book that I’ll write a review about when I finish. It tracks the evolution of man over the last 5 million years when our ancestors split with the chimpanzees. I began thinking about what those ancestors would have been like, surely very foreign and my instinct would be to disavow them as my ancestors. That’s clearly the instinct that many people give in to when they refuse to believe in evolution.

Still, there seems to be an enormous amount of curiosity about what these people were like that we can all trace our DNA back to. The stumbling block that we seem to have hit is that we stop looking backwards once arrive at beings that looked somewhat like us and behave like us. In fact, the first thing people say about another persons progeny is how much they look or act like the parents.

If we were to move beyond Homo Australopithecus we would recognize that Chimpanzees are really just are cousins about 10 million times removed, but still very much related to us. Gorillas are the same and in fact you very quickly realize that we share a common ancestor with every living thing on the planet. We all came from the same grandfather or non-sexed reproducing protein in this case.

It would clearly be impossible to quit eating broccoli because we’re related, but if we began to see through the illusion of our separateness from every other living thing then perhaps we would begin to see that when we are wasteful and breakdown ecological systems we are in fact hurting life. We are all part of the same tree of life. Pruning here and there to shape the tree can even be beneficial but when we blindly hack off limbs we weaken the whole and if it comes down we’re coming with it.

The point I’m trying to make is that the next time you see a dog, or a frog, or a rutabaga (thats a rutabaga to the left) know that at some point it’s ancestor was your ancestor. All life is connected and if we ignore those connections we do so at our own peril. It may be easier to ignore but the only reason our ancestors survived is because they were able to strike a balance in a constantly changing world. It would be unwise to ignore that lesson.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Extinction, Awareness, Environment, Religion. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.