Lamenting the fall from grace
In the story of the fall, Adam and Eve are forced out of the Garden of Eden because they eat of the tree of knowledge. One can’t help but concede that the event describes the invention of agriculture. It is the rejection of a nomadic hunter’s lifestyle for a more sedentary and civilized one. The fruit of knowledge is but the product of likely a woman who discovered that the seeds and roots she gathered could be planted and grown anew. This discovery would weigh heavily on the hearts of men. Agriculture would lead to specialization. Once everyone hunted, now, some are farmers, others carpenters, artisans, soldiers, and kings. Cities would rise. Eventually industry would grow to dwarf its parent agriculture.
There is a profound sense that humanity has come far from its humble beginnings. Yet, as we dwell in the towers and citadels of Eve’s blunder, one undeniably feels a sense of loss. One wonders why it is that we should engage living so much out of the reach of nature’s embrace. Humanity has become unnatural and seems out of step with the order of things as they ought to be. Like a child who looses its mother, one feels a desperate need to return to the source, to return to the garden of innocence.
Fallacy - it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be - the weak civilized man
To concede that humanity should return to the garden may be premature to say the least. In contrast to our romantic sensibilities, the noble savage knew great hardship. Anyone who has been camping knows this first hand. There are things like poison ivy, hot days and cold nights, chiggers, ticks, and mosquitoes, and in the wilder places, man-eating beasts. These things tend to dislodge any “lets get back to nature” notions of modern idealists. Faced with these and possibly starvation, the civilized quickly retreat to their cities of unnatural comfort. We seem to lack the ability to live as nature intended even when we might aspire to do so. It is in sharp pretension that the realistic wish to return to nature.
Desire to reconcile nature and humanity
Yet, the desire to return persists. Perhaps this is due, in part, to the fact that people are a product of nature. It is likely that there is an inherent affinity for those things that are natural. It is a predisposition hard-wired into our psyche on a genetic level. Edward O. Wilson called it biophilia.
The desire to reconcile humanity and nature may also be promoted by a fundamental need to attach a sense of purpose to one’s life. As one recognizes oneself a product of nature there is the suspicion that, if one finds a place in the natural scheme, a tangible sense of meaning could arise in one’s life. This spiritual lift would be based on science rather than traditional faith. This would reinforce its credibility and transparency.
The human purpose
In honest disposition, there can be no purpose prescribed humankind other than that we ordain ourselves. The calling we achieve comes from within rather than about. To believe more than this, in divine providence and resolute faith, is likely a lie to one’s own spirit. While we should never dismiss such notions, their proof and validity remain elusive.
It is possible to conceive the act of living as art whose search and style achieve a poet’s means. In this, the means become ends in themselves and the aesthetic defeats the fractured efforts of common existence. Furthermore, Aristotle wrote of aesthetics and believed that art imitates things as they ought to be and completes what nature fails to finish. That the human act might succeed where biology fails rests solely on the extragenetic potential of the mind.
Human culture, itself, requires compromises from nature that tend to destabilize her and set her out of balance. To compensate for the aberrant dynamics that humanity insists, a strategy could be developed to help shore up the system. This could lead to feedback potential that might serve human interests. It could also give people a sense of purpose as indigenous elements of nature.
The purpose of humankind:
- So that nature can come to know itself
- To protect the biosystem
- To expand the biosystem
So that nature can come to know itself: The Evolution of Consciousness
At the time these words were written, scientists believe the universe began fifteen billion years ago with a large explosion called “the Big Bang.” Uniformity of cosmic microwave background radiation suggests an even distribution of matter throughout the universe about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. The universe remained smooth and featureless for millions of years afterwards. There was no light for no stars existed at this time. It wasn’t until 100 million years after the Big Bang that hydrogen gas began to cool enough to settle into disks, forming the centers of protogalaxies. The denser regions of gas within these galaxies contracted into star-forming clumps. Stars would begin to shine. For the first time, since the Big Bang, there was light. These stars were hundreds of times more massive than our sun. Ultraviolet radiation, from them, ionized surrounding neutral hydrogen gas. Yet, they had short lives. After only a few million years, these immense fusion factories ended as supernova, or, if more massive, ended as black holes. Gravitational attraction pulled the protogalaxies toward one another. Collisions between these would catalyze the formation of more stars. Likewise, black holes possibly merged with one another to form super massive black holes at the centers of the protogalaxies. Cosmic evolution had begun.
About 4.5 billion years ago, the shockwave from a nearby supernova compressed and likely seeded, with heavier elements, the hydrogen cloud that would become our solar system. At first, solid particles formed where the cloud was densest. Gravity would force these toward one another. As particles began to be drawn to the center, the hydrogen cloud began to spin faster and faster. This acceleration flattened it into a disk. Most particles drifted to the cloud’s center to form the future sun. The rest coalesced into clumps of mater called planetesimals. These, in turn, would accrete into one another to form larger clumps which later would become the planets. After about a million years, the sun collapsed under its own gravity. Its center would become so hot that nuclear fusion would begin, and the first sunshine would light the still growing planets.
At first, the Earth was nothing more than a cold mass of rubble. But about 3.8 billion years ago, the decay of radioactive elements, impacts from incoming planetisimals, and the pressure of gravity began to heat up the Earth’s interior. Pressure and temperatures reached a point, about 400 to 800 Km below the surface, where iron in the rock began to melt. A spectacular event, called the Iron Catastrophe, had begun. As liquid iron began to fall through the lighter rock, displacing it upward, more heat became generated. This increase in temperature broadened and continuously expanded the zone of melting. Eventually, as this zone neared the planet’s surface, volcanism began venting lava and gases onto the surface. Finally, the original crust of the planet would melt into liquid rock. The Earth was like a ball of lava and organized itself into layers. Heavy elements, like nickel sank to the core and, with iron, solidified under enormous pressure there. Silicates and lighter elements rose to the surface. Convection currents began to cool the earth. A new crust began to form. Water vapor and other gases, previously locked up in the Earths interior, erupted from the surface to form the planets primitive oceans and atmosphere.
The primitive atmosphere of earth had no free oxygen. It was mostly composed of water vapor, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Without an ozone layer, ultraviolet radiation blasted the planet. Rainfall washed sediment minerals into the planet’s oceans while lightning and ultraviolet radiation accelerated the making and breaking of chemical bonds. The result was the formation of amino acids, the stuff of life. Amino acids, on a hot dry surface, like cooling rock, form cell-like spheres when splashed by water. If rain washed these spheres into a tidal pool they would be protected from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Here, even more complex molecules could form. Eventually one would arise with the ability to make copies of itself. Life and its taskmaster, natural selection, began certainly no later than 3.5 billion years ago.
The early living cells are believed to have fed by absorbing organic matter. Then, some began to generate there own food through photosynthesis. Colonies of blue-green algae called stomatolites populated the oceans tide pools by about 3 billion years ago. Oxygen, a by-product of photosynthesis, began building up in the Earth’s substrate. Life began, in effect, to change the character of its planet. By 2.3 billion years ago, oxygen would max out the carrying capacity of the substrate and begin building up in the planet’s atmosphere. Sometime between 2.2 billion and 700 million years ago, multicellular life would evolve. The symbiotic mergence would catalyze a proliferation of life. By 400 million years ago, plants and animals would colonize the land. From 350 to 300 million years ago amphibians and insects ruled the land. This gave way to the age of reptiles at 240 million years ago. The great dinosaurs and the infamous R-complex would rule over the land for almost 200 million years. Then, the KT impact, 65 million years ago, would usher in the age of mammals.
History of the Universe
15 billion years ago - formation of the universe
4.6 billion years ago - supernova
4.5 billion years ago - formation of solar system and Earth
3.8 billion years ago – Iron catastrophe
3.5 billion first cyanobacteria: photosynthetic and methanogens; Earth’s atmosphere: CO2, NH4; most complex organism: stromatolites
2.5 billion years ago - proliferation of cyanobacteria, rise of aerobic photosynthesis, early ice-age
2.2 billion years ago - oxygen begins to accumulate in atmosphere
700 to 800 million years ago - another early ice-age (Snowball Earth) occurred possibly before complex organisms existed, only lasted a couple of million years
700 million years ago - steep decline in stromatolite diversity
530 million years ago - Cambrian explosion - proliferation of marine animals
435 million - ozone layer formed, plants colonize land (Silurian period)
400 million years ago - another early ice-age, animals colonize the land
365 million - amphibians and insects thrive
300 to 270 million years ago - another ice age
250 million years ago - landmasses one, Permian extinction
240 - 63 million years Mesozoic Era - age of reptiles
63 million to present Cenozoic Era - age of mammals
2.5 million years ago - ice age returns - There have been eighteen separate ice advances and retreats. Interglacial warm periods have occurred approximately every 100,000 years
Homo sapiens would arise as early as 500,000 years ago in Southern Africa. They would share the stage of humanity with other species of their genus up to about 40,000 years ago. With their evolution came the natural capacity for abstract thought. All animals, from spiders to zebras, hold some capacity for self-awareness. Undoubtedly, consciousness rests in self-awareness. But human self-awareness combined with the capacity for abstract thought may prove the highest form of consciousness on the planet.
Nature’s history is a story of life continuously reinventing itself. Like the evolution of cooperative eukaryotic systems, the limbic nervous system of amphibians, the ego centered R-complex of the reptiles, and the compassionate mammalian complex, human consciousness my serve as nature’s next evolutionary leap.
Through humanity, nature gains the capacity to see and know itself, to become conscious not just on an organism level but on an abstract planetary level. It can imagine its own potential. Adaptation can be achieved not solely through random mutation but through human actualization. Through our race, nature can appreciate its own beauty and the splendor of the universe within which it lives. It might even develop a disposition for reason and love. By this, a collective consciousness might arise. This happens, not through metaphysics, but through civilization. Human language and communication systems like the internet give nature a chance at attaining collective self-actualization. What people could achieve should they discover this purpose could be extraordinary. Imagine a world united by the human propensity for friendship and love, beauty and goodness... Imagine paradise.
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