Gone but not forgotten

I posted the following on my facebook page and it has generated quite a bit of discussion:

Recent deaths have brought out the usual remarks, "He will never be forgotten." When I think that some of these people were practically forgotten in their waning years, I wonder why people say these things. To all intents and purposes you... forgot about him while he was alive and you were busy living your life, what makes you think you won't forget him now that he is gone?

Learning lessons

During this absence I have been very busy conceptually. I have learned a number of hard and frustrating lessons, all of which are related to the anomaly of this species and system we call the human race. We have become so accustomed to our current condition that we have begun to believe that it is normative. All our lessons have been learned from nature yet we refuse to apply the most important lesson that nature has taught us, which is that every system exists to maintain its own existence.

There are many reasons for this. The first is that scientific research, which is the main engine of human development is not designed to benefit the human species. Science, by its very design, is meant to benefit individuals or groups of individuals.

This is not easily seen because science, more directly the statistical probabilities that underly scientific research, invokes the distribution of populations. We always assume the population in our research. But that is only a major factor in our analysis of the data. When it comes to application our thoughts go to the individual. This is why we employ the negative term "outlier."

What is an outlier? How can any human being be an outlier in a distribution of human beings? It only means that he does not fit the characteristics of a particular group of humans. So we find that the fragmentation of humanity is built into the tool on which we depend to forge our development.

. . . In between . . .

It's amazing how animals spoken into existence and man created from dust have so much genetic material in common. Even more amazing that animals spoken into existence return to dust the same as man who was created from dust.

From the benign to the malignant

Adam's perception of the Woman as being inferior to him because of something she had done was the basis for Cain feeling so inferior that the only way he could guarantee his survival was to kill his brother. This is not a sufficient explanation because it is obvious that for a while they co-existed peacefully, pursuing different vocations. Why didn't Adam kill Eve if his view of her resulted in one son killing the next. That will be the subject of my next post.

My Gift

Adam's reaction when asked about the fruit is interesting. At first he called the woman, "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." The meaning of that statement is found in the commentary that follows, "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh." Adam realized that the Woman was one flesh with him. She did not have an independent identity. But he was reacting out of fear when he called her "the woman you gave me." This is significant. She had gone from being me to being mine.

As bone of his bone she was equal to him, but he now viewed her only as a gift. It does not matter how much a gift is admired and appreciated, it is never equal to the recipient. A gift can be abandoned, discarded, mistreated, destroyed, in addition to being cherished and appreciated. It simply is not equal to the recipient. Why the change? Not because she had changed. She was the same woman. Adam viewed her differently because of something she had done. And in that moment the seeds of human misery were planted, because inequality is the root of all human violence, in the same way that inequality in pressures are the root of all violent storms.

From the Beginning

The evidence shows that humans did not always view each other as enemies. So, the question we need to ask is "How did humans turn from brotherhood to animosity?" I found one ancient document that gives some insight into this issue. Unfortunately, it happens to be a source of irritation between humans. That source is the book of Genesis in the Hebrew and Christian Christians.

In Genesis 2 the Creator puts the first man, Adam, to sleep extracts a rib from his chest cavity and makes a woman out of the rib that He removed. When the woman is presented to Adam he declares (v. 23):
[quote]"This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man."[/quote]

That was a sign of identity, unity and brotherhood. But a few verses later, after "the Fall," Adam no longer thinks of her as being a part of him. Instead, when asked why he had eaten of the tree he had been told not to partake of he says, [quote]"The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it."[/quote]

This was quite a change. In the next chapter the story is repeated with different circumstances. In chapter four Adam and Eve produce two sons. Cain grows up to be a farmer who works the soil, and Abel becomes a shepherd. By the time the story ends one brother is dead (8)[quote]Now Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let's go out to the field." [d] And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.[/quote]

Somewhere in those two stories we should be able to determine what it is that changed humans from brothers into enemies and indicate how we can get back to where we were.

Understanding Global DNA

When we get past the double helix of the DNA molecule and the sequencing of the human genome, we are left to conclude that DNA is just information. Without that information the cells would not know what to do and nothing would happen in the body. There would be no life.

Global DNA is also information. In non-human species this information is a fixed quantity. This is why they all operate on instinct. Their behavior is genetically determined and they have the same responses to external stimuli regardless of whether they were here ten thousand years ago or live on earth today. Non-human species don't know everything but they know everything they need to know.

Humans are very different. When they arrived on this planet they did not know anything. This is strange because one would expect that if every species that appeared before humans knew everything they needed to know to ensure their survival that humans should also have the same level of information. Someone appears to have switched the script when humans arrived. But that ignorance is also the basis of what we call intelligence. Intelligence is actually managed ignorance.

In the place of full knowledge we came equipped with curiosity and creativity. This curiosity allowed us to learn from the non-human species around us, and to use what we learned from them to create new knowledge. We have done a great job of learning from these species. Each time we learned something our knowledge base increased and that only made more information available to us. In every instance we improved on what we learned from our environment, except one. Self-destructive behavior is the one thing that humans did not learn from the other species around. Before humans arrived the animals knew not to deplete their food stock or to overgraze their grazing grounds. Violence in nature was always inter-species rather than intra-species. It is logical that when humans arrived on earth they also lived together in peace among each other. Without that they would not have survived those early years of their existence.

How then did we abandon the information that told us that as members of the same species we are brothers and develop a new set of information that caused us to look on each other as potential enemies? This is the question for the ages. If we can address it adequately we may be close to understanding the anomaly the human race has become. We are in search of information.