The Narrative Image

My January 16, 2007 blog entry, Invasion of the Alien Pods ( http://thenarrativeimage.blogspot.com/2007/01/invasion-of-alien-pods.html ), turns out to have been incomplete and its sensationalistic title essentially misleading. A comment from alert blog reader Cynthia astutely points out the incomplete part. She said, “And let us remember our dear animal companions who share the planet with us. Very helpful in assisting our root-bound cohorts with propagation.” Upon reflection, I realized also that the seed pods can’t possibly be ‘alien’. While it is fun to make metaphors about foreign invaders and the logistics of warfare as applied to vegetables, it is probably more informative to remember that plants share the same genetic code the rest of us do and that somewhere down the line, evidence implies, we all come from the same replicator. We are a big interconnected family, dependent on each other for our very lives. The interrelationships between species are so complex that it leads many...

The way I understand it, we are all descendants of an original replicator. Our D.N.A. convincingly shows that almost all life is related. If we trace our ancestry through the evolutionary bush, it goes something like: Initial mystery replicator – bacteria – sponges – worms – things with backbones – fish – mammals – beavers – primates – monkeys – hominids. The inference here is that humans are simply animals, yet a resounding majority of humans prefer to think that humans must be much more than just animals and cite as evidence special human features like opposable thumbs, the ability to brew beer, self-consciousness, oral and written language skills, culture, and eternal souls. Nobel laureate Francis Crick, in his book the Astonishing Hypothesis almost apologetically tries to explain that, “… “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and the...