SMALLNESS
Today I began reading A TANGLED TREE: A RADICAL NEW HISTORY OF LIFE by David Quammen. Which took me completely away from Swannanoa. David Quammen writes clearly and simply about the history of evolution and how recent science has turned conventional thinking about evolution upside down. He makes the subject as clear as he can, but unfortunately the subject is so complicated that most of the time I have only a vague idea of what he is talking about. I am 3/5ths of the way through a 500 page book which is a good introduction to the history of evolution. What the pioneers in the study of evolution are trying to do is to discover the qualities of the very first creature from whom all life on earth has evolved. The odd thing is that all of the major discoveries have happened in the understanding of evolution have happened in the last 150 years, and the most important discoveries have not only happened in my lifetime but have happened since I retired 15 years ago.
Since I am a product of evolution, of the slow process of mutation that has led from that original form of life, my understanding of who I am would seem to be to know where I came from, how I evolved, how my DNA impels me through my passage on earth. But unfortunately the book is mainly concerned with bacteria, and doesn‘t answer the question of why I am impelled through life as I am by something in my DNA, my genetic makeup. I am still stuck with having to puzzle this out for myself.
But a couple of things whop me over the head in the book. One is the assertion that a good deal of evolution might have happened not through chance mutation and the survival of the fittest, some of it may have happened through the transfer of genes from one form of life to another which can lead to much more rapid change than the slow process of chance mutation. But the other thing which touches me even more strongly is the dawning awareness of the huge number of processes that are going on in every cell of my body, the importance of the infinitesimally small but intensely important processes of life that is going on within and around me that I am unaware of. The three billion pairs of markers on my helix DNA in every cell of my body which is transforming the understanding of evolution seems mindboggling to me. The fact that there are three times as many cells of bacteria on and in me than there are cells of my body floors me (I may have go my numbers wrong but don‘t know how to check them in an ebook). The fact that one celled bacteria and tinier viruses can enter my body and without malice alter my body and destroy me is frightening.
I feel like such a huge and clumsy lug, clumping along without any sense of what is happening within me or around me or of who I really am. How can I make any judgments at all if I have no sense of what is going on?
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 