In the first chapter of Richard Dawkins' "The Ancestor's Tale," he talks about the unwisdom of hindsight, the mistake that we can make by looking backwards at the evolution of species.
Dawkins is one of my favorite evolutionary scientists, partly because he's a good writer, but mostly because he makes it easy for me, a highschool student hanging around a 3.0 gpa (and a humanities person), to understand.
To paraphrase what Dawkins writes, when we look backwards it's easy to make the mistake that we are the final step, that we are the ultimate and the finale.
Dawkins wants, above all else, to make clear that we, the human species homo sapiens sapiens, are not the final step in the evolution of species. As we find out every day, we aren't the ultimate answer to everything (life's more fun not living in Pleasantville anyway).
When I write about the individual evolution (how the course of events throughout our lives impacts who we are) it's easy to spend most of my time looking backwards. The past offers the most concrete examples, because I can point to things that happened to me or people I know or things I've read and say "Hey, that is the cause of this, which caused this" and then explain the inevitable domino effect that leads up to the Now.
It is important to remember, though, that everything that has happened to us is not definite, is not final. Who we are is not the final answer. A species, like an individual, evolves for a long time, constantly changing through the generations until it dies. We live like that moment to moment.
The unwisdom of hindsight is something that is important, because it's not something that we can allow ourselves to get tied up in. It's really easy to trip over things, and it's much easier and when we spend our time looking backwards. Reflection is good, it's healthy. It helps us to glean the significance of some moments. Like anything, though, it's best in small quantities, because there are times when we need to look forward, so that we can plan ahead, and there are times we need to look at our own feet, so we don't trip.
Sometimes, we can learn as much from looking forward as we can from looking back.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Changes
Every once and a while I’ll go off into the realm of explaining something like chance to try and get a point across or to illustrate something (like Predestination or Social Energy), but I want people to understand that isn’t the be all and the end all.
I’m really trying to write about the Individual Evolution, Darwin’s principles of change applied to us as individuals living our lives every day.
Each person (in fact, I would go so far as to say every living thing) goes through changes over the course of its natural life. All Darwin was saying was that species change over time, that was his original idea and I don’t think that anyone can find a scientific basis for disputing it (at least without being mocked in the scientific community).
All I’m trying to say is that people aren’t static, they change over the course of their lives (I don’t think there’s any dispute there), both physically and their mental capacities. When I was starting out, the Individual Evolution was just that idea, and I was trying to explore that idea and exactly what it told us about who we, as people, are and where we are going. I thought that might be helpful.
What I came to, and what I am continuing to find more and more true each day, is that we, as people, are defined every moment of our lives. There is a Buddhist philosophy that “I was not the same person I was a year ago” and all that I have done is shrunken the time intervals. After all, while the change from who I was then to who I am now may be gradual, my dynamics are constantly changing, and so I am not the exact same person I was a moment ago. Even in the amount of time it has taken me to type the last letter and the period in this sentence, I will be becoming a different person.
Most of my dynamics as a person will remain the same, but this is just Darwin’s natural selection in my life as an individual. My whole being won’t completely change in an instant. It’s pretty rare that a person is redefined in a heartbeat.
Think of time like a river. A river doesn’t cut a canyon in a moment, it starts as a stream, but over time it completely changes the landscape, it completely redefines the space around it. Think of that slowly forming canyon like a habit or a personality trait. Something, some event, can habit that changes the flow of that water and changes that habit or trait. (monotony strengthens these habits and traits) That is our mutation, if monotony sinks back in afterwards we will become more and more rooted in that person that we became, and as time passes the stream flows deeper and becomes much harder to move.
We are that landscape, with our characteristics constantly deepening, occasionally being shifted by cataclysm. Every moment that the river flows over us our personality traits become a little bit more defined and we change, whether it’s for the better I don’t think we can ever really know. There are certainly positives and negatives to every situation.
In any circumstance, we become who we are over time, constantly moving towards who we will be when we die.
I’m really trying to write about the Individual Evolution, Darwin’s principles of change applied to us as individuals living our lives every day.
Each person (in fact, I would go so far as to say every living thing) goes through changes over the course of its natural life. All Darwin was saying was that species change over time, that was his original idea and I don’t think that anyone can find a scientific basis for disputing it (at least without being mocked in the scientific community).
All I’m trying to say is that people aren’t static, they change over the course of their lives (I don’t think there’s any dispute there), both physically and their mental capacities. When I was starting out, the Individual Evolution was just that idea, and I was trying to explore that idea and exactly what it told us about who we, as people, are and where we are going. I thought that might be helpful.
What I came to, and what I am continuing to find more and more true each day, is that we, as people, are defined every moment of our lives. There is a Buddhist philosophy that “I was not the same person I was a year ago” and all that I have done is shrunken the time intervals. After all, while the change from who I was then to who I am now may be gradual, my dynamics are constantly changing, and so I am not the exact same person I was a moment ago. Even in the amount of time it has taken me to type the last letter and the period in this sentence, I will be becoming a different person.
Most of my dynamics as a person will remain the same, but this is just Darwin’s natural selection in my life as an individual. My whole being won’t completely change in an instant. It’s pretty rare that a person is redefined in a heartbeat.
Think of time like a river. A river doesn’t cut a canyon in a moment, it starts as a stream, but over time it completely changes the landscape, it completely redefines the space around it. Think of that slowly forming canyon like a habit or a personality trait. Something, some event, can habit that changes the flow of that water and changes that habit or trait. (monotony strengthens these habits and traits) That is our mutation, if monotony sinks back in afterwards we will become more and more rooted in that person that we became, and as time passes the stream flows deeper and becomes much harder to move.
We are that landscape, with our characteristics constantly deepening, occasionally being shifted by cataclysm. Every moment that the river flows over us our personality traits become a little bit more defined and we change, whether it’s for the better I don’t think we can ever really know. There are certainly positives and negatives to every situation.
In any circumstance, we become who we are over time, constantly moving towards who we will be when we die.
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