670
Climate change, volcano, meteorite—unclear. But it is called the Great Dying for
an inconceivably literal reason, and the biodiversity rebound, particularly for terrestrial organisms, took several million years. In terms of surviving a week, a month,
a decade, there was little latitude from an individual’s perspective, which is where
we are today. The mind that quantifies and qualifies such turbulence is the same
mind that occasions it. That is more than paradox. Rather, a coincidence of involvements in the chain of being that implicates a singular presence during a catalytic
period of transition marking an intuitive set of possibilities. Which is where existentialism ceases to be the castle of morbidities, transforming into an open-air
symphony.
All of those prospects or fated hopes hinge upon the individual partnerships
within the behavioral and conceptual realms of the human collective. It is perhaps
the most strange and telling burden in the biological annals of culpability and liberation; to be a human fully aware of these galling contingencies, knowing full well
that our future is unlikely, unless.
73.2 Autocatalysis: New Beginnings or Old Endings?
Unless what? Did the origins of “unless” (“on less than,” with its unintended interpolations regarding a negative past as prelude to a potentially negative future) ever
anticipate, through the sluggish cogs of etymology, so elegiac and pivotal a predetermination? A grand destruction known as self-fulfillment? The paralysis of selfawareness and the narcissistic abyss of its manifestations?
Intuitively, this catalytic ending, whether linguistically, culturally, or biologically, also summons the realization that what ends must begin again. Therein lies a
transitional phase, a certain latitude for change. To this Other end of biological
isolationism, a critique suggestive of opposite variables in an equation otherwise
swept over by nihilism, we might predict colors and curvatures against the sky of a
perfect rainbow. Or, conversely, of a “coming storm,” as was the great Luminist
painter, George Inness’ (1825–1894) stunning idée fix.
The dialectic requires the patience of conservation biology, which, as a science
and as a practice, has its protagonists and detractors, for reasons key to understanding the stubborn resistance exhibited throughout the history of science, particularly
natural history, to intrinsic values. Intrinsic—inward, interior, dating back six centuries in Western languages—conveys an attitude about all sentience that makes it
perilous to sort out distinctions. If one microbe has intrinsic merit, all microbes, all
aggregates of life do so. We have thus far endeavored to lean mathematics and probability theory, particularly in the summaries of the mathematical Jain genius, toward
the most inconvenient realization that every number must connote an individual’s
biology/biography.
73 Metaphorical Realities
Climate change, volcano, meteorite—unclear. But it is called the Great Dying for
an inconceivably literal reason, and the biodiversity rebound, particularly for terrestrial organisms, took several million years. In terms of surviving a week, a month,
a decade, there was little latitude from an individual’s perspective, which is where
we are today. The mind that quantifies and qualifies such turbulence is the same
mind that occasions it. That is more than paradox. Rather, a coincidence of involvements in the chain of being that implicates a singular presence during a catalytic
period of transition marking an intuitive set of possibilities. Which is where existentialism ceases to be the castle of morbidities, transforming into an open-air
symphony.
All of those prospects or fated hopes hinge upon the individual partnerships
within the behavioral and conceptual realms of the human collective. It is perhaps
the most strange and telling burden in the biological annals of culpability and liberation; to be a human fully aware of these galling contingencies, knowing full well
that our future is unlikely, unless.
73.2 Autocatalysis: New Beginnings or Old Endings?
Unless what? Did the origins of “unless” (“on less than,” with its unintended interpolations regarding a negative past as prelude to a potentially negative future) ever
anticipate, through the sluggish cogs of etymology, so elegiac and pivotal a predetermination? A grand destruction known as self-fulfillment? The paralysis of selfawareness and the narcissistic abyss of its manifestations?
Intuitively, this catalytic ending, whether linguistically, culturally, or biologically, also summons the realization that what ends must begin again. Therein lies a
transitional phase, a certain latitude for change. To this Other end of biological
isolationism, a critique suggestive of opposite variables in an equation otherwise
swept over by nihilism, we might predict colors and curvatures against the sky of a
perfect rainbow. Or, conversely, of a “coming storm,” as was the great Luminist
painter, George Inness’ (1825–1894) stunning idée fix.
The dialectic requires the patience of conservation biology, which, as a science
and as a practice, has its protagonists and detractors, for reasons key to understanding the stubborn resistance exhibited throughout the history of science, particularly
natural history, to intrinsic values. Intrinsic—inward, interior, dating back six centuries in Western languages—conveys an attitude about all sentience that makes it
perilous to sort out distinctions. If one microbe has intrinsic merit, all microbes, all
aggregates of life do so. We have thus far endeavored to lean mathematics and probability theory, particularly in the summaries of the mathematical Jain genius, toward
the most inconvenient realization that every number must connote an individual’s
biology/biography.
73 Metaphorical Realities