Meta: Color Change

I didn’t realize how tired I was of white text on black until now. I might tweak things around a bit, but I think I’ll be sticking with black text from now on.

Hairlessness

Awhile back I wrote an essay on the loss of hair in human evolution. There are a few plausible reasons as to why humans became naked, but there is no strong evidence to prefer any of the ideas.

I wonder, though, what the impact on modern collective thought would have been if humans had not lost their hair. The theory of evolution repulsed many people because they did not want to draw a connection between humanity and animals–after all, humans were a status above the animals. Yet eventually sufficient evidence accumulated to suggest that humans indeed were closely related to the other great apes on the planet. Among the great apes, though, we physically stand out because of our nakedness. If we had retained our full coat of hair, would our perception of relationship to the animal world have been greater? Might this have been enough to avoid the idea of human-animal separation to begin with?

Perhaps not–but then again, hairlessness was specifically noted when Adam was becoming fully human:

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ He said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’ He said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ (Genesis 3:8-11)

The Surreal Life

We explore the world and learn information through our senses; this, along with our brain’s processing of this information, forms the basis for how we perceive the world. Living in the world day after day, we learn to accept certain processes, occurrences, and events as commonplace. Through this repetition, we learn what is real in the world.

Exploration of the dreamworld and other altered states of consciousness provide a unique perspective on this perception of reality, though. This is not to say that the world is unreal, but rather that our perception of the world is strictly limited by our sensory input devices. The dreamworld is just as real to our minds as waking life, since dreams contain the same type of visual, auditory, and tactile sensations to our minds.

Dream experiences are generally considered “less real” than waking experiences, perhaps because in waking life others can corroborate and share our experiences, thus confirming the reality. Yet it is difficult to argue for universal perception among all human beings in the so-called real world: altered states of consciousness (meditation or chemical use, for instance) affect sensory input; the lack of a sensory device (blindness, deafness) drastically changes perceived reality; and individual experiences (personal history, environment) contribute to a wide range of sensory interpretation. There is certainly a difference between the dream world and the waking world–but the exploration of individual perception makes shared waking life all the more surreal.

Diversity

The evolutionary mechanism is not a linear process of ever-increasing increasing complexity (as is unfortunately still sometimes depicted in textbooks with this classic linear human evolutionary sequence) but instead produces a tree of increasing genetic diversity.

Speciation occurred because genetic diversity is beneficial for survival. Environmental shift can cause the extinction of any single population; if there are two different populations, though, there is a greater chance that one of them will survive. The diversity of species is a device for protecting the continuity of life on Earth. Certain species may not be able to withstand catastrophic flooding, meteorite impact, or climate change as well as others, but throughout Earth’s history there has always been some species capable of continuing the community of life. Complexity is a product of this genetic diversification, but greater complexity does not have any more inherent “goodness” to it.

Diversity is the fundamental good.

Deadly Sins: Lust

Greed and gluttony seem to share similar qualities with each other. This weekend Erin Dawood pointed out to me that lust also falls into this broader category.

We can define lust in a general sense as “the unrestricted pursuit of sexual desire”. The sin of lust, then, follows the same pattern as greed and gluttony: excessive or unrestricted action is itself the base sin, whether this be the storage of goods (greed), the consumption of goods (gluttony) or sexual desire (lust).

It seems reasonable to me that all seven of the deadly sins could follow a similar pattern. Greed and gluttony are more similar to each other than to lust, since they deal with the acquisition of goods, so we can describe the seven sins with a tree structure. As I think through the remaining three sins (wrath, sloth, and envy) I’ll build up the tree until we have a complete relation of the seven sins–and we can see which of the sins takes its place at the root of the tree.

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Pride   Lust    Greed    Gluttony