Back to the 4 Billion Year Old Basics
People are falling sick, with some dying, lives are turning upside down, communities are getting ripped apart, and economies are facing collapse — Thank SARS-COV-2 for its help. So what do we do, other than panic (or in some cases, watch, as our net-worth skyrockets)?
Let’s all get magical DNA/RNA vision googles where everything in the world gets blacked out, except for DNA/RNA, when they are worn (like solar-eclipse viewing glasses). How different would everything look, compared to last year?
Not too much. Everywhere we look, we still see DNA/RNA. And of all those DNA/RNA molecules, only a minuscule bit belong to Human Beings. We’d probably make out an unfamiliar looking piece of RNA (sars-cov-2) making the rounds quite a bit, some of its copies entering large clumps of DNA/RNA (belonging to individual Human Beings), implanting themselves inside some of the DNA over there, rapidly multiplying, and emerging back out, leaving the host DNA/RNA to either fade into blackness (another Covid19 fatality) or thrive again (Covid19 recovery).
But, is any of this truly remarkable? In the DNA/RNA world, this is just business as usual, as it has been for almost 4,000,000,000 years now. This past 1/2 year is just typical. So, all the politics of race, religion, tribe, the politics behind mask-wearing and covid19 downplaying, and all the resulting economic collapse and human suffering wouldn’t even register, for someone peering through these glasses over the entire 4 billion years.
Point being, we aren’t that different from the virus that has driven our way of life over the last 6 months. Almost everything we have ever been, and will ever be, results from those clumps of DNA/RNA that we are (barely different from the virus). Everything we take so seriously, or lightly, as individuals (in our lives) and as societies (in our cultures) are results of just a brief period in the history of these Nucleic Acids. Forget about theories that Natural Selection justifies the inefficiencies we have going about in our societies because only the “superior genes come out on top”, even a couple billion years of natural selection has still meant that we are little more than clumps of genes, just as are our virus relatives, vying for the same resources, willing to destroy each other in that effort.
Knowing this, do we still have the audacity to pretend to know which Human genes should come out on top (via our broken societal structures)? Is it too much to ask, then, that we be more mindful about how we distribute resources among ourselves to give everyone a level playing field, to push for universal education and access to basic needs? Is it all that hard to use and treat our resources with respect (prevent overconsumption and environmental degradation)? Everyone can try to be greedy in the short term, and try to keep as much for oneself as is possible, at the cost of others around, and live a thriving life for about hundred years, or comfortably sustain one’s descendants for a few generations , or one’s broader community for a couple thousand years, or even one’s entire species for 200,000 years. But only a fool would not acknowledge that even 200,000 years is still NOTHING in the grand scheme of things. When everything could be shaken up in a moments notice, on a long enough timeline, not working to differentiate oneself from the 4 billion years of life’s history is recipe for being just another tiny chapter, in a long book, within the library of life’s past, present and future.
