Origins of Life, Finals of Death

Human evolution as a main course.

I've been thinking about big topics lately. Those from the times of the “Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”: questions about Time, Space, the Universe, and Everything in general. I’m afraid this has to do with age. I seem to have come to years when progressive dementia takes me back to childhood. Or at least to adolescence. At that time, I was also dealing with big questions and, if I remember correctly, I had already come up with certain answers that I later forgot, or at least was ashamed of. Why was I ashamed of them? Because a person in his mature years just can't think about the universe, life and similar things. A person in his mature years has to master more demanding, specialized topics. Let’s say: how does beef ripen to get ripe beef? Or: which waterproof coating is suitable for ceramics and which for natural stone? Or: when is the best time to put fish eggs in streams to make it optimal for fishing? Or: why is citric acid better than regular lemon juice to prevent oxidation of sliced apples? These are the questions that separate professionals from amateurs! Anyone with 5 minutes of free time can deal with the problem of life! Growing a blue-orange tulip, or piloting a helicopter, however, requires inappropriately more skills. Unfortunately, I realized this too late. And now - what is done, is done. But before I would fall into severe depression due to this realization of my own inferiority, I was saved by national television. Luckily, it's not just me who's become childish: they've also started to wonder about big topics on television; big topics like life and abortion.

***

TV show on such an emotional topic – life and abortion - provoked violent reactions. This was to be expected, but it was probably also planned. Sometimes, however, demagogy also raises interesting questions; especially when it's poorly done. This post is thus a mental response to ill-considered demagogy. Throughout the TV show, for example, they kept wondering at what point the life begins. Is it at the conception, or when the brain develops in the embryo or when the child is born or when it becomes aware of itself? Some medical doctors in the show have noted - inaccurately in my opinion - that life starts when two germ cells join. It actually starts, or has started, much earlier. So much earlier that for human notions of time we can safely say that life is eternal. Namely, each individual life of each living specimen.

Life - not only human but also animal or plant life - goes back to the first unicellular organism, or even to bacteria and archaea, if these are the ancestors of unicellular organisms. Every living human - if we have to focus on this singular species - is therefore the result or descendant of a continuous series of sexual reproductions or fertilizations (indisputably also a large number of "immaculate conceptions" or parthenogenesis) of various organisms - jellyfish, worms, fish, frogs, dinosaurs and finally a relatively small number of people. This series dates back to the history of 600 million years ago when the first invertebrates evolved, or even a billion years before that to even simpler life forms. Because, if it weren't so, if this set of reproductions were interrupted in a single generation of this immense number of generations, if one of these partners were missing, then a certain specimen - for example, you, dear reader - would not exist. You don't believe it? Would you be alive if your father died before he fertilized your mother? No! Would you be alive if your grandmother had no children? Not either. By mathematical deduction, we conclude that if we cross out a single partner from any generation, however distant, all the genealogical connections in the tree that leads to you would fall like dominoes. So if cockroach A hadn’t met and fertilized cockroach B 400 million years ago, you wouldn’t be here either. Due to the fatal non-meeting of two cockroaches, you could say goodbye to your apartment, car, smartphone, yoga sessions, morning coffees with friends, moaning about the corruption of our politicians and everything in general, including thinking about the beginning of life.

Figure 1: genealogical tree of my Ego.

But how many specimens in history have participated in the creation of ourselves? A family tree is a binary tree: each individual in any generation is a child of two parents from the previous generation. Generations here are counted in the direction of the past. Assuming sexual reproduction in each generation, 2n individuals participated in the n-th generation. Generation 0 are we, ie. one person (20= 1 ). The first generation are mom and dad, ie. 21 = 2. The second generation are grandparents; they are (usually) 4: 22 = 4. In the n-th generation we have 2n parents, or ancestors. If I am the "Ego" in Figure 1, m21 is the male number 1 in generation 2 - this is my grandfather - more precisely, my mother's father. He is the child of my great-grandmother f32 and my great-grandfather m32, ie the second parents of generation 3. In pre-capitalist times, people admired genelogical trees. Those who were patient enough managed to trace their origins back to 6 generations, which meant a maximum of 26 = 64 ancestors in generation 6. They spent most of their lives for only 64 names - and even felt immensely proud of it, as if they themselves had any influence on their origin. What a waste of time! If they only took advantage of part of the considerable contribution which the state paid for their primary education, they would find in a few minutes that, for example, in the 35th generation they had 2↑35 = 34359738368 or just over 34 billion ancestors and that there is therefore little sense in researching the genealogical tree. Thank God we experienced capitalism and realized that time is money and we don’t deal with such nonsense anymore!

Sure, you wonder, what 34 billion? There have never been so many people in the world! So this theory can not apply! I graciously allow that you are partially right. The trick is that not all of these 34 billion ancestors are different. In fact, very many were the same. In other words, we are all a product of an incest, ie. descendants of mating between close relatives, sisters and brothers. Take, for example, generation 3. There are 8 relatives. There may be 8 different ones, but there may be only 2, one man and one woman who had 4 children (generation 2), i.e. your grandparents who were all siblings. This is, of course, an extreme example, unlikely and intended only for illustration. In fact, however, this has necessarily happened in generations that are far enough apart that incest is not so clearly evident. The Oedipus complex is therefore not imaginary. Euripides was apparently very well aware that the theory of the binary generation tree could not stand, and he wrote his emotional drama on this basis. So mating between relatives is what reduces the aforementioned theoretical number of ancestors.

***

Here the question arises in how many generations before us such incest is necessary. It depends on the “critical mass” or available population. Let’s say the population is limited to 2 million people (the case of Slovenia). If we wanted to preserve purity or "autochthony" in Slovenia, such ethnic perfection could only last until a certain generation. We quickly guess that this is the generation 21, since 221 =  2097152, or close to two million. If generations alternate every 25 to 30 years (which is the average age of women at childbirth), that means that “indigenousness” ends in a period somewhere between 525 and 630 years ago. The attentive reader will notice a discrepancy in this calculation, since so many years ago there were no two million inhabitants in Slovenia. Mathematicians would say it is a nonlinear problem. Nevertheless, it is only a matter of a couple of generations of difference, so that we can safely assess: autochthony in terms of nationality does not extend beyond year 1500. What was before that was the minestrone of various tribes, feuds, families and castes. The proverbial 1000-year-old dream of the nation's identity, if it ever existed at all, took place partly in foreign minds.

However, I remembered another, let's say "national", case. It is a phenomenon of Easter Island. You know those imposing huge stone heads stuck in the ground all over the island, staring so enigmatically at the sea and triggering mystical feelings in the observer, unanswered questions about the World, the Universe and Everything in general. The civilization of Easter Island collapsed even before the island was discovered by Dutch sailors. It allegedly ended up miserably, with wars and cannibalism. The apocalyptic explanation for this is that the inhabitants perished when they used up all the natural resources, mainly by chopping down the trees needed to transport the megalomanic statues. But, I have a different explanation. What if these monumental figures, and the consequent collapse of civilization, are only the result of imbecility caused by incestuous relationships due to the limited population of this small and isolated island?

Let us briefly mention asexual reproduction. This is rare in the human race. According to known data it is limited to a single case of immaculate conception – and even this becoming a dead end without children - but it is quite common among lower animals. Parthenogenesis simplifies the process of reproduction, as it does not need a partner and the associated complication of behavior, but on the other hand drastically reduces the number of ancestors: in each generation we have only one ancestor. So it's no wonder that sexual reproduction is so favored in nature: the sheer number of ancestors in sexual reproduction ensures the diversity, mutations, and evolution of which we are - the self-proclaimed pinnacle of creation.

***

But, however probable or improbable the number of generations and the number of our ancestors is, we can in no way deny the fact that the continuous series of sexual and asexual generations that defines us goes far beyond in the past than we are able to comprehend. Each of us is thus a product of an inconceivable number of births, technically speaking cell divisions, romanticaly speaking of love relationships, and for the rest of us it means a startling discovery of a monumental personal history that is unequivocally written in the space-time database of the universe.

And so with that realization I experienced, I can say, an enlightenment. How ridiculously simple now seems to me the wisdom radiated by the Dalai Lama, Christ, or Buddha as he sits quietly under a banian tree. Me too am sitting today quietly in a restaurant, drinking coffee and I am no longer bothered by the noise of sound pollution from near and far. Even the brigades of motorized leaf blowers that are running through the streets of Ljubljana these autumn days can no longer bother me. I am now immersed in more important affairs. On the space history player, I press the "fast rewind" button and watch amazing scenes in high HD quality. There, in the Jurassic jungle, under the shade of a tree fern, two velociraptors from the m-th generation jump on their mother, a brontosaurus from the generation m+1. Pure pedophilia, we would say in horror today, but the history of nature knows no morality. I push the button again, the picosecond records of the universe spinn a couple of million years back, and I’m already watching my mother, a viviparous lung-fish, giving birth to tadpoles in the hot tidal belt of the Pleistocene Sea. I count 217 of them. But one catches my eye, hiding from predators among the flooded kelp sacs. I take a closer look and – my god! - through the transparent body, a profile that is incredibly similar to mine is already emerging. No wonder, since this is my father number  245078622. How proud I am of him!

P.S. 

When it comes to the issue of life, let's touch on another topic, which - interestingly - somehow mentally and politically coincides with the issue of abortion. It is a question of a "decent burial". The beginning (life) coincides with the end (death). As far as I am concerned, my dignified burial can keep up with the general style of my life, that is, as minimalist and as unobtrusive as possible. If they cremate me, I think that's pretty decent. And most of all, practical. Of my 70 kg, 69 kg will go into the air, so it will automatically be distributed globally around the planet - which is my purpose or the meaning of a decent burial. Even the pharaohs could not have imagined greater globalization. The remaining kilogram of ashes, instead of being carried it the urn (which, by the way is about the same weight as the ashes and is therefore against the first axiom of minimalists: "the container should be at least 3 times lighter than the contents, otherwise it is unnecessary") by the guardians of moral rights to dignity, can be thrown straight in the trash. There is no need to make a theater out of it and perform a drama of spreading the ashes in rivers or seas, or even - God forbid! - closing one container (i.e. the urn) into another (i.e. into a grave). I have always been against unnecessary duplications. Only so much care must be taken that the ashes are thrown into the correct bin. I think it should be the brown one for biological residues, but just in case, check it with the official authorities beforehand, because it really is not my intention to impose a fine on my posteriors for improper waste disposal.