Recap for new readers:
I wrote a long (~60k words) Motte post and am releasing it serially, one chapter per week. This is chapter three. Chapter one can be found here.
This chapter is, as they say, the part where the tyre finally contacts the road. Or at least it gets us into position. After this it's off to the races!
0103 - Colour Blue
Humans do eventually arise on Tidus, of course, but we're not quite there yet. Before we can get to them we're missing one last very important (and incredibly fascinating) piece of the puzzle. This is a longer chapter and might seem to ramble a bit but I promise the payoff is worth it.
Much is made of the physical aspects of evolution. Fish 'develop' fins and gills; snakes 'lose' their ancestral legs. The nose of whale-ancestors slowly 'moves' from the front of the face up to the top of the head and becomes a blowhole. This is understandable. It's easy to see such things in the fossil record and easy to imagine how the process works. Excellent for teaching the basic idea of evolution to children.
But comparatively little is popularly understood about the evolution of the mind; of consciousness, of instinct. And, especially, of phenomenology. Phenomenology is the study of what a being experiences. How the things around it occur to it. Debating the finer points of how complex eyeballs developed is popular in some circles. Far more interesting to me, though, is the development of the internal capacity to perceive vision, not to mention the experience of consciousness itself. Phenomenology.
Consider your own perception of the world. You have eyes, which are genetically-coded to grow a certain way and very like the eyes of most other humans, and other animals related to us. You also have nerves which transmit the information from your eyes to your brain. And finally, you have the brain itself, which interprets the data from the nerves and 'paints' a picture in what we'll call your consciousness. If any of those things goes wrong, so does your ability to see. And they all must evolve somewhat in parallel with each other or else each is severely functionally limited.
A baby deer is born not just physically able to walk, but mentally prepared to as well. Getting up and moving feels right to it. It already knows how. A baby bird needs time to get ready to fly, but that knowledge is mostly already within it and only needs to be activated once its fledgling body has caught up. At some point jumping out of the nest will feel right to it. However, it's certainly born already knowing how to eat and beg for food from its parents.
This is related to something called, in evolutionary science, the Edwards Process. In short, it posits that the same kinds of pathways in our brains which form when we learn new things can also be 'coded for' during development, such that creatures with different genetic code are born knowing different things and to different degrees. First a creature mutates the genetic code to instinctively kinda-sorta do the thing, whatever the thing is. It then has an advantage in figuring the thing out, which means it's more apt to reproduce, and its children have the opportunity to mutate further advancements upon the instinct.
We may speak of a creature’s phenomenology the way we speak of its mind or its consciousness. Each creature experiences phenomena, and the way those phenomena occur to it depends upon not just its sense organs but also (at least) upon the array of sense-making equipment in the neural network. That is, two creatures with fairly similar eyes but different ancestries might look upon the same object, and their eyes may pass identical information through the optic nerves to the brain, but the consciousness within the brain may experience, that is, see, two fairly different results. It all depends upon what was adaptive in their ancestral environments; how their minds are genetically built to make sense of those inputs.
Consider two small islands in Tidus' ocean. They lie very near each other, close to the equator, and are both pretty warm. But they’re situated such that one gets a nearly-constant cooling breeze while the other mostly bakes in the sun. Both are densely jungled and get enough rainfall that their foliage is more or less equivalent for our purposes.
There are no people here but what these islands do have is lizards. These are exothermic. When it’s cool, they’re somewhat sluggish. When it’s warm they can move pretty freely. One of their favourite things to do is bask on rocks warmed by the sun such that they’re a bit more limbered up to go about their business.
In the future, when human naturalists come upon these islands they'll initially notice that the ones on the warm island look a little different than the ones on the cool island. The differences are fairly minor and perhaps only really apparent under close examination. But when some of each are scooped up as samples another difference rapidly becomes salient: The ones from the warm island are substantially more aggressive, being prone to biting their handlers and each other, while the ones from the cool island are rather more docile and make great pets. This holds true even when they’re kept in the exact same environment and at the exact same temperature. What has happened here?
Simply this: on the warmer island, aggression works a bit better as a life strategy than it does on the cooler island, perhaps because it’s just that much easier to move around. Therefore, the average evolved instinctual personalities are different for the lizards on each. How near will one tolerate a competitor’s encroachment before running him off? How committed should one be to the battle? How long to pursue violence before deciding one’s point is made? Subdue the competitor? Wound him? Kill him? Many considerations go into this and they are roughly the same for both populations of lizards. But the one thing that differs is the relative energy cost of such actions, and this means that one population has hit a stable equilibrium of greater aggression, and the other, lesser.
When I say that an equilibrium has been reached, what I mean is this. On one island there is an, on average, optimum level of genetically-coded irritability/aggression. Lizards which conform most closely to this level are more fit and out-reproduce those which tend away from it, either up or down. On the other island, that optimum level is different. So each population tends to hew to its island’s respective optimal level. If the climate changes a bit, the ideal level changes, and so the population shifts on average toward the new optimum. Each newly-created lizard can be thought of as a bid: “Let’s tune this one a little bit this way or that and see if it works better.” Mostly it does not, because different is generally worse.
All of this is coded for in the genes. If some of each population of lizard were introduced to a new island without competitors but for each other, they’d continue behaving the way their ancestral environment programmed them to behave. Over many generations, it would work out better for one set than the other and pretty soon one or the other strategy would have mostly vanished. Possibly, interbreeding will result in a strategy which lies between the two, but it’s just as likely that the optimal equilibrium on the new island is even more or less aggression than on either of the original islands, in which case the genetic contribution of the less-fit group will be very small if not necessarily nil.
Now, the details here aren’t super-important and if the next few paragraphs make your eyes glaze over feel free to skip down a little; it may be easier to grasp this concept through the list of examples I'm including afterward. If so look for the bullet points.
But something we should really get around to distinguishing is the difference between genes and alleles. Barring freak and usually-fatal mutations, pretty much every member of a species will have the same genes, but different variants of those genes. Variants are called alleles (uh LEELS). Genes consist of strings of genetic code such as …CCTGTGGA… Each letter can read either A, C, G, or T, which represent the four building blocks of DNA. Most members of any species are likely to have the same variations of most genes. But in any individual, a letter in a given spot may be different due to mutation (usually in an ancestor).
The typical go-to example in humans, on the gene known as the 'beta-globin gene', is responsible for the condition known as sickle-cell anæmia. One section of this gene typically reads …GAG… whereas in some individuals it has mutated to read …GTG…, a single-letter mutation. In this case, if the human carries one mutated copy of this gene but the other copy is normal, he is granted substantial resistance to malaria, which is a really big win in tropical places swarming with mosquitos. A man with one normal and one mutated copy may reproduce very successfully there.
But if he inherits two such mutated copies from his parents, he ends up with sickle-cell anæmia, which can cause pain, propensity to infection, strokes, stunted growth, vision problems, leg ulcers, and other health problems. We can see how a population which incorporates this adaptation is making a sort of deal with the devil. Perhaps a bit like double or nothing. Some of their children won't stand a chance and are basically sacrifices, but the rest will be amazingly fit for that environment, and so win out over other men. Which will a given child be? It depends upon which variants (alleles) he inherits of that one gene.
In the case of propensity to aggression, rather than there being one specific allele that makes the difference, which one population has and the other doesn’t, aggression is a complex, polygenic trait. Basically no gene does only one thing and they all interact with each other in massively complex ways. A typical single-gene variant (allele) might, for example, make the tail 2% shorter, make the lizard 7% more aggressive, minutely impact its ability to process certain nutrients, give it a slight aversion to the smell of the ocean, etc. Another allele (on a different gene) might make the scales slightly glossier and more blue, instill a minor fear of heights, a preference for rounded basking-rocks over flat ones, make certain bugs taste a little better, and shift its perception of light (colour) a tad, and so on — But then when both are present, they interact with each other in unforeseen ways, amplifying or canceling out each other’s effects basically at random and also leading to whole new effects which neither causes in isolation. A third allele (also on a different gene) might be by itself almost purely advantageous, but in the presence of the first two results in a universally-fatal heart defect. And so on. There are thousands of genes, and effectively countless variations upon them.
This sort of polygenic interaction is almost impossible to keep track of. Computers help a lot, since even with genetic sequencing no one could possibly track the myriad interactions with pen and paper, but the thing is that the horrific engine doesn’t need to keep track of them. Each individual is loaded up with a fresh set of variables, shoved into the world, and what works, works, and is more likely to occur again (reproduce). What doesn’t, is less likely to occur again.
The important takeaway from the lizards is that if we control the two environments such that the only change is a small difference in average temperature specifically leading to different optima for trait aggression, we don’t get otherwise-identical lizards which merely happen to be more or less aggressive. They also behave differently along other axes, and look different, and — this is the important part — experience the world differently. Sense data occurs to them differently. They feel differently about things. (That may seem a big leap so more on it in a moment). And you know this about them at a glance if they look different, since many genes which code for behaviour or anything else also code for physical appearance. In other words, you couldn't genetically edit an embryo to change its adult appearance without also changing its behavioural proclivities. Likewise, you couldn't change the behavioural proclivities without changing the way it ends up looking, even if only a little. This is a major part of why children take after their parents not just in looks but in personality, even if raised by someone else. Appearance and behaviour are downstream of many of the same genes.
Of course, in most cases environments vary much more than a slight difference in temperature. There are different nutrients in the soil, and patterns of rainfall, and amount of daily sunlight, and seasonal weather variation, and other organisms present, so on and on and on. This means that one species which branches out into two different environments is likely to end up looking different, acting differently, and thinking differently in each.
I want to give several more examples of this extremely important principle. As usual I beg your forbearance; there is a point here and also I just find this unbelievably fascinating so excuse me if I seem to be clobbering you over the head with it. Suppose:
- A species of grasshopper lives in a forest with many fresh and dry leaves about. Some of these grasshoppers match the green leaves better while some match the tan leaves better. Grasshoppers aren't smart enough to understand the concept of camouflage. Instead, the alleles which cause the green grasshoppers to be green also end up bundled with alleles which cause them to prefer to hang out in green places. And vice versa for the tan grasshoppers. Green, or tan, environments simply feel right to them as appropriate. And those who deviate from this scheme are more likely to get eaten.
- One population of beetles branches out into three different environments. In their ancestral environment they would lay eggs and wander off to whatever is next in life. In the first new environment, this is still the best thing to do and little adaptation is required. But in the second, some of them develop a raft of preferences which leads them to stick around, drive off potential predators, and maybe groom the eggs to clear them of certain locally-occurring fungus spores. And despite the enormous amount of investment this requires, it turns out to be more advantageous than just walking away. The third branch ends up in such an impoverished environment that those which end up with the trait of dying while laying eggs — normally not great, I'd agree — end up providing, via their carcasses, the nutrients that will allow their freshly-hatched young to succeed. In fact this is so useful here that even the ones that don’t die by accident, but come to prefer hanging out in a torpor while waiting for their young to hatch and eat them alive, end up on top. They feel best doing this, you understand. It feels right to them. They like it, and I shouldn’t be surprised that they also evolve to flood with something like endorphins when the time comes such that it’s even more pleasant.
- Two branches of a species of albatross. These spend most of their lives alone, surfing the wind on the waves, ranging incredible distances across the open seas. But each year, at mating season, they meet up in the place that feels right to them for reproduction. A quick aside — consider this. No one has taught them what to do. The light of the sun, the smell of the wind, the phase of the moon, nutrients in the seasonal diet, fluxes in the planet’s magnetic field, who knows what else? These things trigger a response in the bird and it feels that the time is right to travel thousands of kilometers in a direction which also feels right to it. And that's genetic. Isn't that amazing? Anyway let’s say these split into northern-hemisphere and southern-hemisphere populations. In the south, every year, the albatrosses meet up and the males engage in courtship competition, each to impress his female for the year. Then they split up again and pick a new mate next time, if they can. But in the northern hemisphere, they experience feelings of love and loyalty, and when mating season comes around they steadfastly wait for their spouse to return and meet them. They will wait as long as needed. If the mate never shows up, perhaps some will, after some years, take a new mate. Some will not. Whether they do is coded for in the genes.
- Then again, some doves will ‘mate for life’ except be very open to adultery when the incentives are right. Also genetic. These behaviours will be selected for depending upon environmental optima. Adultery feels good to them, or not, or they’re conflicted to the precise degree that has been optimal, or close enough to it.
- Two divergent species of falcons end up in different environments with different prey. One of them evolves a hunting style where they see their prey (other birds) and just fly directly at it, overtaking it with speed and endurance. The falcon’s musculature, its skeletal structure, its feathers, and even its claws are all honed toward perfection of this style, snatching the prey right out of the air. And, of course, hunting that way feels right to it. The other species specializes in a style where it first flies up to a great altitude, from which it observes all living things below, then dives stupendously quickly down to strike the prey with enormous force at high speeds with its balled-up claws, a hammer from the heavens. The prey often dies on impact, its bones shattering, and the falcon circles down to feed on the prey where it lies broken upon the earth. The rising, the consideration of opportunity, the decision to strike at the right time — these all feel right to these falcons.
- Arboreal rodents, squirrels, live in a warm forest with plenty of food year-round. They squabble with each other for territory, mate access, and the usual, but have no need to store food. Then some of them range up into a colder, less-hospitable clime. Many do not survive, but some develop an instinct to gather food overtime and store it up for the winter. It just feels right to them. This sort of energy expenditure would be maladaptive in the ancestral environment, but the first type of squirrel couldn’t survive the cold winters if he found himself here. On the flip side, take those workaholic squirrels and put them back in the first environment and they’ll keep storing up food all day regardless of whether it makes any sense or not, until the horrific engine curbs this behaviour over generations. Or, who knows? Maybe they take so much food and store it up that their warm-weather cousins are unable to find enough and are swiftly replaced.
- Baby sea turtles hatch from their leathery eggs beneath the sand. It can take them days to dig their way to the surface, but when they get there, they wait for nightfall before emerging. The temperature of warm sand, or the sight of a blue sky, fills them with feelings of foreboding, an urge to be still and wait. Even in the egg they tremble at the ancestral memory of the hungry gull. When darkness falls they ignore the night sky and instead specifically make their way toward the reflections of the moon and the stars on the ocean. Of course some of each generation might be 'different', and get it backwards and feel the urge to move away from the ocean, or even expend effort trying to get up to the sky; these are unlikely to reproduce.
- For the first time a monkey is born with eyes that can see the colour red and a brain that knows how to display it. This is very useful for assessing the ripeness of fruit at a distance and pretty soon these traits are fixed among the entire population — none are left but his descendants.
- A species of fish ends up separated into two different environments. In one it's advantageous to be alone most of the time so as to have less competition for prey. These fish feel best on their own and become stressed when there are too many more around. In the other environment predators make it necessary to pack together closely in schools for protection. These ones become extraordinarily nervous when they're not in a crowd.
- A species of snake which loves to eat little frogs does very well for itself until a new kind of frog shows up. This one is bright yellow. Some of the snakes eat it and do not reproduce. Others have a basically-random aversion to that colour, and very soon the entire population shares this trait, plus the distinguishing physical markers that came with it.
- Two ticks sit in a clump of grass beside a deer path. One of them likes the look of the stalk of grass which goes straight up. The other is drawn irresistibly to the stalk which bends way out over the trail. In its little tick head, through its little tick eyes, that one has the tick equivalent of sunshine and rainbows all over it.
- With last chapter's shellfish we have already covered how certain physical traits can drive mate selection. Perhaps for a while females are very attracted to the male with the largest claw, only, it turns out that they can actually grow too big and this becomes non-viable. So a desire for a certain proportion of claw size to body size develops.
- Some meerkats begin to live in denser and denser colonies. Accumulation of waste, that is fæces and remains of meals, becomes an ever-greater vector for infectious disease. In some of the colonies a trait is developed where the meerkats will instinctively use one area for defecation and avoid it otherwise, or even dig little spots to deposit waste and then bury it.
- Crows on a particularly-isolated island find themselves in a situation with no natural predators. This allows a new life strategy to develop: Babies will take longer and longer to mature, and in exchange end up with much higher levels of adult intelligence. Such a tradeoff had previously been non-viable but it works here, in the absence of predation, and soon these are the smartest birds in the world, able to solve all kinds of complex problems which their mainland cousins would take much longer to work out, presuming they could at all.
- Beavers, raised entirely in captivity without ever having met another beaver, will instinctively drag objects into hallways to block them and so build 'dams', despite never having seen one.
- Birds are born knowing how to build nests, though they do improve with practice.
- Some kinds of spiders know how to make perfect geometrical webs, one step at a time, based entirely upon what feels right in the moment.
- Jumping spiders, which do not build trap-webs, spend their entire lives in solitary isolation except when the time comes to reproduce. Then, the male will approach a female and execute a complex and involved mating dance, making all the right moves at all the right times, all without being taught. If he makes even one mistake she's likely to eat him. (She's going to eat him afterward anyway, but at least he'll have reproduced.) Each carries a copy of the dance in their genes; the one to perform and the other to judge.
This litany could go on and on, and it would be a fun book to write, but it is not this book. So let me wrap up with the very convenient illustrative case of domestic dogs. Tidan humans will eventually get around to breeding them for specific purposes. Yes, training is always important, but what it comes down to is that traits such as obedience, impulse control, complex problem solving, scent-based tracking, retrieving downed birds from ponds but not eating them, general aggression, fixation on one master in particular, desire to stick close to home or go far-ranging, and so on, are primarily rooted in the blood.
The dogs are an especially useful example because they demonstrate how phenomenological traits, once latent in the population, can be selected for over only a few generations, and lost just as quickly if the selection pressure is not kept up. A breed may be very protective of children and hell on intruders, but if an individual backslides genetically and bites a child even once, it must not be allowed to spread that trait back into the gene pool. And, while just about any breed may be trained toward any of these tasks, it is the same couple of closely-related breeds which consistently win all the competitions of agility and intelligence. Others are pretty consistently chosen for racing, or tracking, or, say, hunting bears. Between breeds there are gaps in complex physical and mental traits for which training simply cannot compensate. And no matter how one trains a collie, it will have the urge to herd.
One more note about the dogs. At some point whimsical Tidans will decide to domesticate foxes, too, just because they think it's cool. They'll select for reproduction the foxes which are most tame, obedient, house-trainable, etc., and over the generations several interesting things will happen. The foxes’ ears will become droopy like domestic dogs'. Their coat patterns will change to more-closely resemble those of domestic dogs. They'll wag their tails. And so on. Not only do they behave differently, and does the world occur to them differently, but it's not hard to tell which kind is which at a glance, even without breeding for visual traits in particular. These things go together.
So, simply by looking at the animal world, we’ve established that proclivity toward, at minimum,
- Hygiene
- Aggression
- Orderliness
- Sexual fidelity
- Impulse control
- Industriousness
- Courtship behaviour
- Parental investment
- General energy levels
- Emotional response to colour
- Population density preferences
- Attraction to certain body proportions in a mate
- Aesthetic preferences for environments in which to hang out
…and many others have deep genetic roots. Yes, a fish might learn that certain prey taste bad and stop eating them before accumulating too much toxin. But the phenomenological fact that they tasted 'bad' in the first place was genetic — some other kind might find the same prey entirely palatable, having also evolved resistance to those toxins. Those ones will probably look different too. And yes, a falcon might demonstrate for its young the finer points of hunting. But it will only work if the young’s innate instincts are close enough to correct, and if the bird is amenable to being taught. Many will deviate; these are less-likely to reproduce, such that perhaps only 25% of each generation of falcons survives its first year and goes on to mate while the rest starve or get eaten. (There’s that horrific engine again. Different is generally worse.)
Now, as we have seen, alleles which affect behaviour also affect appearance and vice versa. But several times now I have mentioned how they furthermore affect the organism’s internal experience. Organisms with different alleles are experiencing different subjective realities. And this is a really, really big deal which deserves the spotlight for a moment, so please bear with me while I grasp at something almost too close to see.
The senses of conscious organisms are not built to accurately, 'literally' portray material reality. Let me unpack that a bit. One quick-and-easy example is that of blind animals. They exist in the same world we do, only, there is an entire domain of it unavailable to their perception. Vision simply isn’t something they need, especially if they live in, say, a cave, and so they don’t have it. A sighted cave fish is a worse cave fish, because it is spending resources on a useless system. So from this we may conclude that animals perceive that which is relevant to their reproductive prospects, and if anything else gets noticed, that’s a fluke and is likely usually screened out by the same sort of process which had you unaware of your tongue until just now.
But even beyond that, there has almost certainly never been any animal which accurately perceives material reality. Say you look around the space you’re in. Do you see the waveform underlying everything, splayed out across eleven-plus dimensions; i.e. what is ‘really’ there? Of course not. You see a rug, a wooden ceiling beam, a door, etc.; and then in only three dimensions. But of course these things are all abstractions, fit for the level at which you interact with the world and make decisions. It is vital that you be able to perceive doors even if one could not chop up a door and put it under a microscope and find ‘door’ there; even if there is, reductively speaking, no such thing as 'door'. One might find wood, but at finer resolutions what one would actually find is organic molecules, and then carbon atoms, and then protons, neutrons, and electrons; all the way down into quarks, and then-
More on this much later. But for now it is enough to consider that what we see — and hear and touch and smell and so on — has about as much to do with the world around us as the taskbar and mouse cursor and rolling green hills on a desktop computer user interface, have to do with finely-wrought silicon and transistors and logic gates and infinitesimal pulses of electricity. Which is to say that, no, they’re not wholly independent of each other, but one could make a user interface look and function in many entirely different ways without changing the underlying hardware much at all. Change one character of the interface’s code and now the taskbar is yellow. Change another and the whole thing breaks and becomes unusable.
So in one sense a seagull may be living on the same planet as a hermit crab, but the worlds they actually inhabit are likely so different that they may as well have nothing to do with each other, even though the two interact. And the difference between the two is, say it with me, genetic.
Even among creatures with identical physical 'equipment', e.g. eyes, the subjective experience of the external world will vary enormously. And, of course, different creatures have different sensory organs in the first place, and many types of eyes can see whole colours that ours cannot. Did you know that flowers and butterfly wings have all kinds of invisible-to-us ultraviolet patterns on them? It’s not our sort of eye which they’re intended to please. And some creatures have entire senses that we don’t at all, as certain eels can feel electrical fields, and likely there are others we do not know about and cannot imagine in the slightest, experiencing whole modes of reality beyond our ken.
This goes for everything. A creature’s phenomenology is genetic, and each genetically-unique creature lives in its own phenomenologically-unique universe. And creatures with gene variants which cause them to perceive differently will also behave differently, and look different.
Getting the picture? Good. Because now I’d like to talk about you.
Yes, you. Do you have any idea how special you are? Though, in a way which also means that you are more tragically alone than you’ve probably ever imagined.
It has long occurred to me as strange that we will talk about things like colour blindness, that is the idea that some other people just literally can't see entire colours that we can, or taste cilantro differently, or struggle to a greater or lesser degree with addiction, and we know this is because they are genetically different from us, yet we do not stop to consider the wider implications of how differently we are all experiencing, well, everything! Only the most obvious, salient differences tend to come up in conversation. But there are so many more!
How should a girl smell? What is more important in a pie — the crust’s flavour or its firmness? What defines the sensation of stepping outdoors on a perfect autumn morning? How messy must a room get before the urge to clean it becomes overwhelming? What sorts of noises are soothing, or irritating? Do you like hugs or hate them? Do you want to be surrounded by others all the time or do you prefer plenty of space to think? What makes art beautiful? How long to go without bathing? Monogamous, or monogamish, or not at all? Raise a child as a single father, or split the instant you get someone pregnant? Keep faith, or shaft the rube dumb enough to trust a stranger? Are the seasons in your heart, or do your genetics expect an eternal summer day? Stock up resources against future contingencies or take life easily, as it comes? Do the bare minimum at work, or push hard and then go home and do the same with an array of frighteningly-demanding hobbies? How easily does learning vocabulary come? Abstract mathematics? Baseball? Etcetera! Etcetera of etceteras!
Reader, when was the last time you found yourself unaccountably repulsed by something others don’t seem to mind? Do you like to look out the window when you drive, or stare straight ahead? Morning person or night owl? What is your favourite piece of music? How does the colour blue make you feel?
Take a look at the world around you. You are the only one who lives here.
And yes, culture and life experiences absolutely do play into this, but that is not where the difference begins, nor even where most of it lies! We will have more to say on this in a few chapters.
Regarding your loneliness, I’d like to suggest that if you want to find the person who lives in the world most like your own — your nearest neighbour, so to speak — you should look to an immediate same-sex relative. But I don’t have to tell you that while you are likely to find much of yourself in your father, he is also, ha, clearly living somewhere else at the same time.
Of course, most people do share much in common. But the less-closely related you are to someone genetically, the stranger his world would seem to you, could you but inhabit it for a moment. You might be able to imagine yourself in his shoes, but you can't imagine what it's like to be him in his shoes, nor he you in yours. And this doesn’t stop with other people, but carries right on through to animals of all sorts, and who knows what else. You will have heard how we share almost all of our DNA with, say, monkeys, but I can assure you that what a female mandrill experiences in the presence of a full-coloured adult male is wildly different than what you or I would, even if the light and sound and airborne organic compounds haven't changed. And by now you should understand that not only is a dog’s nose better than yours, but more fully appreciate than you ever have how differently those same scents occur to a dog. Why, he likes sniffing all sorts of things you’d rather not, and seems to get something very different out of it — ah, but so with your fellow man. And your not-so-fellow man, too.
We'll get to that soon enough.
Next week: Chapter 04: Cloud Forest
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Notes -
What a touching read. Your discussion of evolutionary phenomenology is new to me and absolutely enlightening.
I'll add a couple relevant links:
Ah I liked it better before the edit. Alas.
If nothing else I hope the readers get a sense of the very sincere courtesy which I am attempting to extend.
Anyway thanks. I don't think I'm actually saying anything our forefathers didn't already know; only, they seem to have dropped the ball on actually saying it and people have clearly forgotten.
The question of why this should be is a really good one. Next week's chapter sheds a bit of light, and we get to the next proximal answer in about a month or so, but the true answer doesn't come until... I'm not even sure if it's book two or three, yet.
You had asked before how I managed to come by this perspective without apparently relying upon the same literature with which you're familiar. Perhaps you withdrew the question because you sensed, correctly, that the less I say about myself the better. There's a reason people don't talk about these things, and it's a compelling one.
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