Photograph by Michael Nichols
Chimps, genetically humans' closest relatives, live in family units and often use tools.
National Geographic
Chimps, genetically humans' closest relatives, live in family units and often use tools.
National Geographic
 Peter Singer Philosopher and Bioethicist "The neurotic is having trouble with the balance of cultural illusion and natural reality; the possible horrible truth about himself and the world is seeping into his consciousness. The average man is at least secure that the cultural game is the truth, the unshakable, durable truth. " "Man is a frightened animal who must lie in order to live." "Societies are standardized systems of death denial." -Ernest Becker "The analysis of disgust and shame...shows us that human beings typically have a problematic relationship to their mortality and animality, and that this problematic relationship causes not just inner tension, but also aggression toward others. If ideals of respect and reciprocity are to have a chance of prevailing, they must contend against the forces of narcissism and misanthropy that these emotions so frequently involve." -Hiding from Humanity by Martha Nussbaum Myth is useful to man but truth is uncomfortable. "A continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity-is so much the rule and law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have risen among them. The are deeply immersed in illusions...What does man actually know about himself?...even concerning his own body-in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers!" -Friedrich Nietzsche "The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. " E. O. Wilson "In humans, the trajectory that took us from bacteria to fish to reptiles to mammals including primates has left an indelible mark. Our archaic brains, which served us so well during our evolutionary past, now threaten our very existence. While our smart-brains have given us modern technology and science and the privilege of understanding not only ourselves but our universe, our primal brains are stuck in the stone-age." -Dr. Andy Thompson Life does not work against death. Life works with death. Death is built within the system of life. From stars to bacteria this life is death in motion. Primates were not created as immortal but have evolved through natural life and death processes over billions of years.  There was no pre-death biology. Death is built into the system of life in the Universe. The Biblical account claims there was a fall from immortal to mortal. Life is mortal. The reality of the human condition is right there to face for anyone who will take a stroll into your local hospital. These bodies were never immortal. They are part of the Universe which itself is dying on a much larger scale. "There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be." Douglas Adams "I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky." Carl Sagan Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter pleasurable, intoxicating, even with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe. Alain de Botton The history of life can be great theater. . . . The development of the gas-and liquid-filled chamber in the shell liberated the nautiloids from the sea bottom and set in motion an evolutionary history that is still unfolding today. -- Peter Ward  Paleontologist Peter Ward studies mass extinctions -- periods of Earth's history during which thousands of species died off in a short time. One animal of particular interest to Ward is Nautilus. The ancestors of Nautilus were molluscs that developed the ability to regulate the mixture of water and gas in their shells, increase their buoyancy and rise off the sea floor. Millions of years ago, these large nautiloids dominated the oceans. Today, only a few species of its descendants remain. After extensive study of nautiloid fossils, Ward craved seeing a living Nautilus in its natural habitat off the coast of New Caledonia. Unfortunately, these animals spend most of their time on the sea floor, over 1000 feet below the surface, much deeper than a human in SCUBA gear can safely dive. However each night, the creatures rise to the surface to feed and then before morning return to the bottom to avoid being eaten by faster moving animals like fish. Ward traveled to New Caledonia, and dove at night in dangerous waters in order to observe this ancient species of mollusc in its natural habitat -- a species that has survived nearly unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.  Sponges, members of the phylum Porifera, are considered the oldest living animal phylum. The name Porifera means "pore bearer" in Latin. Sponges are the only animals that if broken down to the level of their cells can miraculously reassemble and resurrect themselves. These seemingly inanimate creatures are also fantastic pumps, filtering tons of water to harvest just a few ounces of microscopic food. How do we know sponges were our ancestors? It turns out that all organisms in their genes carry clues to their evolutionary history -- a unique set of acquired genetic changes passed on through countless generations. This fact allowed Mitch Sogin to compare and contrast specific sets of genetic differences between sponges, flies, fish, frogs, humans and other organisms. He discovered that sponges, indeed, were the start of the animal kingdom and laid the foundation for all animals to follow.  Just as Galileo discovered that the Earth is not the center of a human centered Universe, Darwin's tree showed that Humans are not the center nor the end of the Animal Kingdom. “We talk about the ‘march from monad to man’ (old-style language again) as though evolution followed continuous pathways to progress along unbroken lineages. Nothing could be further from reality. I do not deny that, through time, the most ‘advanced’ organism has tended to increase in complexity. But the sequence [allocated in most texts] from jellyfish to trilobite to nautiloid to armored fish to dinosaur to monkey to human is no lineage at all, but a chronological set of termini on unrelated evolutionary trunks. Moreover life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense — only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.” Stephen Jay Gould  "H. sapiens is but a tiny, late-arising twig on life's enormously arborescent bush — a small bud that would almost surely not appear a second time if we could replant the bush from seed and let it grow again.” “History includes too much chaos, or extremely sensitive dependence on minute and unmeasurable differences in initial conditions, leading to massively divergent outcomes based on tiny and unknowable disparities in starting points. And history includes too much contingency, or shaping of present results by long chains of unpredictable antecedent states, rather than immediate determination by timeless laws of nature. Homo sapiens did not appear on the earth, just a geologic second ago, because evolutionary theory predicts such an outcome based on themes of progress and increasing neural complexity. Humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.” Stephen Jay Gould    Humans are not the only primates that can enjoy a warm bath. “Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. The first that we associate with Copernicus, Newton, and Galileo that taught us that we weren't living on the central body of a limited universe. And that Darwin's was the second that taught us that we were not separately created in the image of a benevolent deity, but were part of a history of genealogical connectivity of all living things. Now, in an odd sense, we know how contentious the first revolution was; we know the story of Galileo. But the way I like to put it, I don't think that revolution was as important as Darwin's, because it's about real estate. The Darwinian revolution is about essence; it's deeper. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question. " Stephen Jay Gould  "The importance of the Scientific Revolution for philosophy is beyond question. Modern philosophy the work of both rationalists and empiricists would have been impossible without great advances in physics. Analogously, therefore, we could anticipate that the Darwinian Revolution will have important implications for philosophy. Indeed, I would go further and say that we might expect Darwin's work to have even greater implications for philosophy than those of physics. The theory of evolution through natural selection impinges so directly on our own species. It is not just that we are on a speck of dust whirling around in the void but that we ourselves are no more than transformed apes. If such a realization is not to affect our views of epistemology and ethics, I do not know what is. As I said in the Preface, I find it inconceivable that it is irrelevant to the foundations of philosophy whether we are the end result of a slow natural evolutionary process, or made miraculously in Gods own image on a Friday, some 6,000 years ago. " Dr. Michael Ruse  "It appears that during those ages when animals were torturing each other with ferocious horns and agonizing stings, Omnipotence was quietly waiting for the ultimate emergence of man, with his still more widely diffused cruelty. Why the Creator should have preferred to reach his goal by a process, instead of going straight to it, these modem theologians do not tell us. Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins." Philosopher Bertrand Russell | 
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ArchivesJune 2013 "Our lives begin to end the day we are silent about things that matter"
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