Telling the story

How have things come to be? This is one of the most ancient and profound questions that has been asked since the beginning of time. Answers to this question have taken religious, political, and scientific overtones (and probably others as well). Let’s listen and hear what “Mother Culture” has to say about this. (This should be familiar if you’ve read Ishmael.)

How things came to be
About 13.7 billion years ago, the Universe came into existence via the Big Bang. This formed a lot of hydrogen, some helium, and a trace amount of lithium but not much else. Eventually, a non-uniform distribution of these elements resulted in gravitational attraction that eventually formed stars capable of fusing hydrogen into helium (and other heavier elements). When these stars reached the end of their lives, they dispersed heavier elements into space, allowing other stellar and planetary systems to form. In the third stellar generation, the solar system formed around the Sun. As the planets formed and cooled, one of them, Earth, retained liquid water on its surface. Eventually, conditions allowed the synthesis of amino acids, proteins, and other building blocks that led to the emergence of life. For over a billion years this life was simple and mostly single-celled. Over time, this life evolved into multicellular oceanic life. The development of ocean life was followed by the colonization of land by plants and amphibians. Reptiles and mammals came to flourish on the land, with mammals gaining an upper hand with the K-T extinction. Over the millions of years that followed, these mammals evolved, primates developed in the jungle, and eventually humans emerged as grassland-dwelling primate hunters.

This a familiar version of “Mother Culture’s” creation story. Do you see the problem? Look closely, or recite your own favorite version of this story, to see if you can figure out why I’m bringing this up and linking it with some “Mother Culture” (this has nothing to do with scientific accuracy, either).