Approximately seventy-five years ago I learned to tie my shoelaces – a full year before mastering the multiplication tables. Somewhere between those two events, I laid down one new-moon night on the grassy field of an empty baseball stadium near my home. The absence of artificial light allowed the Milky Way to fully claim its title. Without my knowing about galaxies, an awesome wonder overcame me. Over subsequent decades that original mystical moment shrunk after learning that the Milky Way of my youth represented nothing more than a minor elliptical dot amongst multitudinous galaxies rotating thousands upon thousands of light years distant.
Sadly, definitive answers on the origins of dust and space lurk in the mysteries of dark matter. Meanwhile, mankind stands by with far too many questions and damned few answers. Even the most famed astrophysicists worldwide, building upon the theories of earlier learned scientists, continue reformulating theoretical constructs. Massive atomic colliders might give us clues. But how many clues and at what rate? What's next? To my mind, even with all of our impressive advancements, we are no better off than Newton watching an apple fall and thus pondering gravity. Well, we do know more about apples today than earlier centuries, but we still don't know that much about gravity.
Bad enough when astrophysicists chase their tails now and then. Brain researchers using different research machinery present similar conundrums. And philosophers argue as heatedly today as ancient Greeks over what we know and how we know it.
Are we getting close? I'm skeptical. Sometimes I compare our sciences with Mark Twain's experiment. First he put four animals (two predators, two prey) in a secure cage, making sure they were each well fed and watered. He checked on them hours later and they were all alive and relaxed. Next he put four, well fed religious men of mixed faiths in a different pen and discovered the next day they had killed one another. Humorous yes, but also descriptive of current events….
We send missiles, manned and unmanned, into space. For what end? We are already on a space ship. What will we do when we find humanoids infesting a sister planet 200, 300, or a thousand years from now, but their frontiers have been long closed? And if mega advanced cultures exist out there somewhere, how much confidence do we have that we can decipher languages bordering on the metaphysical? If future earthlings do meet a distant planet and it mirrors our biological evolutions, what will we have gained? We'll then have to start from scratch in searching for other life form variations that might replicate in unfathomable processes.
And let's not talk about cloning. We've already seen that a clone of a clone of a clone eventually results in near total idiocy and a reduction of instinctual responses. That's like starting kindergarten with E = MC^2 and eventually winding up with a doctorate in simple arithmetic.
You might say . . . Oh, George, stop! What are you doing with such ramblings? Don't you understand that complex solutions seldom fall comfortably from the frontal lobes of our brain's grey matter? Relax. Don't waste your time. Leave the scientists to investigate the human thinking processes and present certainties across the board. In time, such researchers might then easily explain to one another – and soon thereafter to us re — who we are and what we're about.
Oh, okay…. No need to worry at this point about people knowing much about themselves. I mean, look at us. Look how far we've come in just a few thousand years. Easy to see that everything is simply swell. Hunky dory you might say. (What's that? You want to know why my tongue extends one cheek?) But, you're right. I'll back off from asking any more questions. Besides, I don't have access to any research lab.
In earlier generations, more than one person considered the notion that genius is the norm. I used to think that aphorism had substance. Today I suggest that genius comes in kinds and degrees and that excellence in one major does not always transfer to another. For example, an architectural wizard might be tone deaf with a limited capacity to determine or evaluate all aspects attaching to music — pitch, sharps 'n flats, major 'n minor keys. I've met a few learned people who have earned multiple degrees in more than one discipline, but show incompetence in some ordinary activity like pruning trees. Therefore, let's set genius aside and investigate plain day-to-day behaviors of every single life form.
Now, there's a spectrum, a variable scale built on differentials that establishes the DNA genome as a veritable mishmash.
What a place to stop, having defined myself as an unpredictable mishmash. Except when I look in a mirror and smile, the following thoughts emerge: Damnit, George, you've been drawn, quartered, osterized, and ostracised, but -- still -- you're all right. Yep, you've put enough things together to where your bio-system falls in the plus column in the here and now surrounded by good friends and neighbors. You live comfortably in a cultural and physical milieu offering unlimited bountiful amenities. And even if unable to leap tall buildings in a single bound, you may announce to all maidens out there who find themselves in difficult plights to give you a call to rush to their aid! You and Don Quixote, both on Rozinante. GIDDY-YAP!
