834
A majority of animals, including mammals, are herbivorous. Over the course of
the latter’s 320 million years of synapsid (amniote clade) development, since the
late Carboniferous period, they have exhibited a largely peaceful coexistence, both
at the individual and group size. Certainly of a critical mass to excite the earlier
debated word, hope, hopa, Old English, hoop, Dutch, hoffen, German, espoir,
French, nadezhda, Russian, nambikkai, Tamil, elpida, Greek, Spe, Latin, and so
on. An utterance that connotes trust, active planning, anticipation, actual learned
strategies: all are the engineering puzzles solved by paramecia and some mammals. But is learning enough? Especially when the internalization is simply repeating a pattern that is experientially a mammoth psychological and morphological
cul-de-sac? While cilia expend energy at the top of their efficiency potential, given
the relational size of each individual ciliated hair, human mentation is highly counter-efficient, churning at a low energy threshold, relative to the mass of other neurons in the brain.
Such that hope, a mere word encapsulated in a transformative genomics context,
is as vague a clamor in the heart as the word landscape within the broader stretch of
ecological despoliation, great dying and great living.
96.5 Contemplating the End
Free to call the absence of pain the only real gift, all organisms remain committed
to lifelines and timelines. In a sense, we all gaze upon “Ötzi,” the 5100+-year-old
Tyrolean man from Hauslabjoch, his 45 years of life in the Alps, and all the comorbidities leading to his fatal loss of blood, but one sample out of quadrillions.
The faithful and bewildered gathered at St. Peters throughout the day of
December 31, 999 AD, probably convinced that the monumental Apocalypse was
to befall them at midnight. After all, from Norway to the Principality of Lombard,
the previous week had unleashed every conceivable iteration of the Revelation of St.
John; deaths and monsters; epidemics and frightening cold; fungal infestations of
rye; hungry packs of wolves throughout Navarre; unprecedented sandstorms across
the territories of the North African Umayyad Caliphate. Vesuvius was again belching, and in Ireland some 7000 troops were killed as a contest over leadership was
fought out at Glenmama, County Wicklow. It was left to the bibliophile scientist,
Gerbertus Aureliacensis (de Aurillac), otherwise known as Pope Sylvester II, to
calm the greatly agitated masses down below his holy perch at the Vatican,
which he did.
The new millennium foretold of catastrophe, an ecofatalism tapping maniacally into the unconscious dread of our collective demise with a radically forlorn set of prerequisites our moribund pedigree has been cultivating for a period
long before the life of Gerbertus Aureliacensis. When this pattern of intentional
species sabotage began might well be pinpointed to approximately 6 million
years ago, the first insistent evidence of human carnivory likely commencing
96 The Phylogenetic Conundrum
A majority of animals, including mammals, are herbivorous. Over the course of
the latter’s 320 million years of synapsid (amniote clade) development, since the
late Carboniferous period, they have exhibited a largely peaceful coexistence, both
at the individual and group size. Certainly of a critical mass to excite the earlier
debated word, hope, hopa, Old English, hoop, Dutch, hoffen, German, espoir,
French, nadezhda, Russian, nambikkai, Tamil, elpida, Greek, Spe, Latin, and so
on. An utterance that connotes trust, active planning, anticipation, actual learned
strategies: all are the engineering puzzles solved by paramecia and some mammals. But is learning enough? Especially when the internalization is simply repeating a pattern that is experientially a mammoth psychological and morphological
cul-de-sac? While cilia expend energy at the top of their efficiency potential, given
the relational size of each individual ciliated hair, human mentation is highly counter-efficient, churning at a low energy threshold, relative to the mass of other neurons in the brain.
Such that hope, a mere word encapsulated in a transformative genomics context,
is as vague a clamor in the heart as the word landscape within the broader stretch of
ecological despoliation, great dying and great living.
96.5 Contemplating the End
Free to call the absence of pain the only real gift, all organisms remain committed
to lifelines and timelines. In a sense, we all gaze upon “Ötzi,” the 5100+-year-old
Tyrolean man from Hauslabjoch, his 45 years of life in the Alps, and all the comorbidities leading to his fatal loss of blood, but one sample out of quadrillions.
The faithful and bewildered gathered at St. Peters throughout the day of
December 31, 999 AD, probably convinced that the monumental Apocalypse was
to befall them at midnight. After all, from Norway to the Principality of Lombard,
the previous week had unleashed every conceivable iteration of the Revelation of St.
John; deaths and monsters; epidemics and frightening cold; fungal infestations of
rye; hungry packs of wolves throughout Navarre; unprecedented sandstorms across
the territories of the North African Umayyad Caliphate. Vesuvius was again belching, and in Ireland some 7000 troops were killed as a contest over leadership was
fought out at Glenmama, County Wicklow. It was left to the bibliophile scientist,
Gerbertus Aureliacensis (de Aurillac), otherwise known as Pope Sylvester II, to
calm the greatly agitated masses down below his holy perch at the Vatican,
which he did.
The new millennium foretold of catastrophe, an ecofatalism tapping maniacally into the unconscious dread of our collective demise with a radically forlorn set of prerequisites our moribund pedigree has been cultivating for a period
long before the life of Gerbertus Aureliacensis. When this pattern of intentional
species sabotage began might well be pinpointed to approximately 6 million
years ago, the first insistent evidence of human carnivory likely commencing
96 The Phylogenetic Conundrum