Environment becoming us

Recently, I read an article in The Guardian by George Monbiot about some of the implications of Darwinism, for example that according to the theory of evolution, life has no purpose, and how this may be disconcerting for many people. This is not what I want to talk about, however. Instead, a couple of the passages, which are in fact a reiteration of a common theme among evolutionary theorists and many a layman as well, struck me as a bit curious. The passages were these:

Darwinian evolution tells us that we are incipient compost: assemblages of complex molecules that - for no greater purpose than to secure sources of energy against competing claims - have developed the ability to speculate. After a few score years, the molecules disaggregate and return whence they came. Period.

As a gardener and ecologist, I find this oddly comforting. I like the idea of literal reincarnation: that the molecules of which I am composed will, once I have rotted, be incorporated into other organisms. Bits of me will be pushing through the growing tips of trees, will creep over them as caterpillars, will hunt those caterpillars as birds. When I die, I'd like to be buried in a fashion which ensures that no part of me is wasted. Then I can claim to have been of some use after all.

While I understand that this is meant to describe how one can find solace in a purely materialistic world, I'm struck by the fact that essentially all the versions of the above passage always go in the same direction: first, you have "me" or "you" - the human being, who then dies and is re-used by various other organisms. In this manner, the human being begets other life forms, and is, in a certain sense, a basis for them.

But for some reason, you never hear the opposite: that before you, there have been life forms roaming around and then dying, and parts of them have reassembled to form you. Every human being is composed of atoms and molecules that were previously parts of other life forms, including other humans. Why is this part never emphasized?

For one thing, there is of course the matter that this is not particularly comforting. Yet there may be something else as well, for if you claim that other organisms come from you, you can remain as the basis, as the foundation for further life. The exalted position of human beings remains: you may not live forever yourself, but you now beget new life! But to admit that you yourself are composed of parts of other beings, you are no longer a foundation, and you form a starting point for new life in a much more mundane and irrelevant fashion, since the bits that made you previously made, with no reservations whatsoever, other life forms, and will go on creating yet more life, with you not being a foundation or base, but just a random, accidental moment in the unstoppable stream of life.

To use the rhetoric of “my molecules are incorporated into other organisms” is to retain the important role and position of humans in nature’s scheme. To admit that the molecules of other organisms were incorporated into you, and next will be incorporated into something else, is once again to dethrone human beings from a position of importance. The claim that "Bits of me will be pushing through the growing tips of trees, will creep over them as caterpillars, will hunt those caterpillars as birds" is rhetoric with a purpose of retaining a position of importance and relevance for human beings in the universe. For it's not really bits of "you" or mr. Monbiot crawling around as catepillars. It would be equally accurate to say that roaming catepillars perhaps now form a part of me and you and mr. Monbiot and perhaps in a sense wrote his article!

Finally, it should be noted that there is an error in the passages quoted. It has been estimated that all the atoms composing an individual human being are completely replaced during an approximately seven year period. You don't have to die for your molecules to be passed on. Seven years from this moment on, not a single atom that comprises you at this moment will be part of you then. This means that not only are we constantly in the process of becoming catepillars or birds or trees, but that bits of catepillars and birds and trees are constantly in the process of becoming us! And as far as our environment is concerned, it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference, if a particular molecule is part of me, you or mr. Monbiot. The fact of the matter is: we do not become new organisms who then inhabit the environment. Instead, the environment becomes us.

Travels in metaphors of time

I wrote this article for the first issue of EKA Ajakiri, a magazine of the Estonian Academy of Arts, due to be published in September. I originally wrote it in Estonian, and this english translation is not mine, so beware of the various mistakes and poor syntax. I have no time at this moment to fix it myself.


Time has doubtless been one of the most bizarre and obscure phenomena for human beings throughout history. This strange notion cannot be seen or touched yet it is everywhere and its course is unchangeable.

But people are ingenious creatures and never sit idle when they face a puzzle. If they plunge into complicated situations they tend to use a pragmatic trick — they attempt to explain the incomprehensible with the help of things that are familiar, understandable and close to them. This was done for instance in the 17th and 18th century when the nature and behaviour of animals was explained by means of the laws of mechanics, and also after the 1960s when the functioning of the human brain was compared to a large and complex digital computer. Although both views are already abandoned, this kind of approach has not disappeared.

This method for explaining things is not characteristic only for the different branches of science — it has also become rooted in the human language and is, to a great extent, universal because it is directly caused by the way the human brain functions. Actually, we explain something with the help of some other thing — usually a physical experience — every day, with almost all our sentences. In order to understand abstract or complicated things we turn to some familiar domain and use its terms and expressions.

Perhaps this argument sounds a little bit strange, so it should be explained in greater detail. For instance, we cannot deny that our most important sense is probably sight. Unlike many other mammals, people are not mostly guided by smell sensations but by seeing. And as this sense is so important to us, we employ a number of metaphors in language that are related to seeing, even when we talk about things that have nothing to do with it. We say for example that “I am hazy about this” or that everything has to be seen in the “light of reason” and even that “it was made clear to me” — something is “clear” when everything can be seen well, for example when the sky or weather is clear or when the water in the sea is so clear that you can see the bottom.

Another example is the use of metaphors of space to understand the increase or decrease of numbers. We say that “prices go up” or that the “stock exchange fell”. Neither of these things can actually go up somewhere or fall down — prices and the stock exchange index are abstract phenomena. What is even more relevant to our subject is that we understand time also as something spatial or as moving through space. We say for instance that “time flies” or “goes by”, “the time has arrived to take action” or that “the deadline for submitting this article is rapidly approaching”. Once again — time does not fly or arrive — has anybody ever held time in their hands? Neither does a deadline get near someone in some direct, literal way, because a deadline is also an abstract notion and cannot approach anybody.

Thus we use our everyday experiences which we gain by being human beings right here on our planet, in order to understand abstract things. The amount of such metaphors is endless and so we can say that all human languages are to a great extent metaphorical and not literal or word for word.

But not being aware of this circumstance, people usually believe that when they talk about things, they talk about them in an exact and straightforward manner. And one of these time-related fields where there have been mixed up metaphors stemming from bodily experience and literal expressions is time travel. I would assert that in the cases of time travelling as they are usually treated in science fiction and often even in academic writings, the metaphors are used incorrectly. Or rather, that when talking about time travelling, people use metaphors that are not appropriate for describing or understanding this phenomenon.

It all starts with the travelling part. Travelling, or in other words simply all kinds of movement, is something that we all do every day and without this phenomenon human activity is inconceivable. What is even more important is that travelling happens in space. We learn already at high school that the universe consists of four dimensions — three spatial dimensions and one of time. Isn’t it natural to think that if we can move in space we can also do it in time?

Wherever we encounter the subject of time travel, we also meet metaphors related to space and moving in it. For example, let’s look at the idea of travelling back in time. When we say that it is possible to travel in time, then it should mean that all moments of time exist somewhere physically — otherwise our travels would have no destination. There has to be a “place” where all moments of time permanently and physically exist. This in turn implies that somewhere there is an incalculably huge hyper space — time’s space that is full of endless universes, each of which is physically one moment in time, and every object in the universe has stretched itself like spaghetti through this hyper space, in order to mark its chronological course.

Technically speaking, of course, we do not only move in space — we move in space and spend time for it. The question arises that if we travel into the past shouldn’t this movement itself also spend time? Science fiction authors want to persuade us that we move into the past, but at the same time, this movement should also take time, in other words — carry us towards the future. This creates a paradox — if we talk about travelling into the past then this journey should inevitably carry us towards the future instead…

In the everyday sense at least, there cannot be a physically existing past — because the mere idea of it presumes making time “space-like”. Our ideas of time travels are based on the use of unsuitable metaphors. If we disentangle these metaphors, we should assume instead that only the present can exist – an endlessly changing, flowing and dynamic present that moves towards the time arrow that is created by the principle of entropy. The future also cannot “exist” in any other way than merely through the possibilities and potentials of the changing universe. It is impossible to travel back in time because the past where we would like to travel does not exist anywhere physically.

Genetics and the myth of universal human nature

The belief in a universal human nature is widespread, and during the past decades it seems to have gained support from the fields related to genetics and the theory of evolution, most notably from the brave new sciences of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. One of the claims - and in principle, a correct one - is that the human genome is one of the least diverse genomes known, being 99.9% identical between two human beings.

However, this is far from being the whole story, and I tend to believe that the underlying, often implicit belief in a universal human nature - something essential in us all that we inevitably share - has altered the rhetoric in which facts are presented in, in order to support and legitimize this belief. So here's a brief overview full story, and it's much different and more complex implications.

If you take two ordinary human beings and map their respective genomes, you will indeed discover that 99.9% of the two genomes are identical. The remaining 0.1% are the changes, the alterations, the mutations, technically called "single nucleotide polymorphisms", or SNPs - one of the bases for individual variation. But the point is that these mutations can occur anywhere in the genome. If you add a third person, his or her genome will also differ from the other two by 0.1%, but the SNPs are in different places from those of the others. Add more people, and each of them has these mutations in different locations along the genome. In fact, there is nothing in the genome that has to be shared by all humans, nothing that every individual has to have, nothing that makes him or her a human being, the changing of which will change him or her to something else. There is nothing essential in the human genome, nothing that makes us all "humans", nothing that makes us all the same.

Nevertheless, we never really hear it put this way. We hear that 99.9% of the human genome is essentially the same in all of us, justifying the belief that we are all the same, that we all share a universal human nature.

Even the very phrase "the human genome" is misleading. There is no such thing as "the" human genome. There are instead six billion human genomes, one inside every individual human being, all sharing 99.9% and nothing at all at the same time. To quote the biochemist David Cox, "all humans share nothing".

Luckily though, the exasperating reign of the modern synthesis seems to be slowly drawing to its end. More and more criticism is being levelled against its simplistic credo and its banal accomplices, the selfish genes, memes, and the the excesses of sociobiological thinking. I would like to point out a great new book, Evolution In Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb. The Guardian review sums it up nicely.

Of useless blogs

In 1494, Sebastian Brandt, a German humanist and satirist, published his hugely influential and widely read satire, Das Narrnenschiff, The Ship of Fools, Stultifera Navis in Latin, an allegory about a ship laden with fools and steered by fools to the fools' paradise of Narragenia.


The very first fool on his long list is the "Bühernarr" a bibliomaniac, literally a "book fool", who had an especially exalted position aboard the ship, because he had many books that he neither read nor understood.

This blog is by a real-life book-fool, and it represents his lunatic and foolish journey across books, ideas and thoughts which he pretends to have read or thought of, and even more haughtily claims to have understood.

Den Vordantz hat man mir gelan
Dann ich on nutz vil buecher han
Die ich nit lyß und nyt verstan