The Evolutionary Reality of the Relational Whole
Think of yourself right now. Think of who you are. Yesterday. A year ago. High school age, further back, elementary age … think of yourself as a toddler, as a baby. What are you? Where do you come from?
Who are you?
At a cellular level, each cell traces back to a cell in an earlier version of you. So, from you as a baby to you as a fetus to a fertilized egg, the union of two different people! Consider the maternal line… the egg is a part of your mother’s body and her mother’s body. And grandmother. Great, great grandmother. Generations. On and on.
Three hundred thousand years of homo sapiens and before that, homo erectus. Less a family tree and more a family bush of homo neanderthaleneis, homo habilis … back we go, back through the evolutionary bush to earlier prehistoric mammals, amphibians, tetrapod creatures, fish, larvae, sea worms, multi-cell, back to single-cell organisms. What in the world? This is crazy.
And all that? Well, it emerged from the oldest rock on earth around 3.8 billion years ago, that came from a meteorite shower, that interacted with water, which had appeared some 4 billion years ago. Further back, another 500 million years, the earth was formed, emerging from the accretion disc orbiting around the sun. Before that, dust, hydrogen, helium, and all of that stemming from something called the cosmic microwave background, back to 13.8 billion years ago… a singularity we reference as the Big Bang.
We’ve skipped a few things, but you get the idea. What … where … who are you?
Good grief. In a very real way, you are the leading age of evolution, 13.8 billion years (at least). You are a part of the relational whole. At one level, you are, of course, a human that has some separation, but it all depends on what scale. At a certain scale, you are the relational whole.
The implications are endless, but here are a couple to point out …
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