Decoding a new old genome

The March 7 NY Times featured an article titled “Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story.” Centered around a recent study concerning adaptive traits of human genomes, the results favored the idea that we have not stopped evolving since our agricultural roots some 10 millennia ago. While the mapping of genomes is a regular initiative of modern science, the premise – we’ve stopped evolving, consistently touted by scientists – highlights a continual trend of removing humanity from the rest of nature.

One of the crucial traits of self-knowledge is transience, practically a science of its own: we change, emotional and physical bodies, just as everything surrounding us alters. Science does not have to follow traditional religion in their banishment of humans from this planet, yet such theories coincide with the notion that there is a heaven, we are not there (nor can ever get there), and earth is a temporary home in which we are judged. The non-evolution (or, better put, stopped-evolution) idea is an unfortunate stumble into a self-serving blind alley. Whose self, exactly, its serving is not quite clear.

“Even evolutionary psychologists hold that the work of natural selection in shaping the human mind was complete in the pre-agricultural past more than 10,000 years ago.” How a community, using the very instrument they are frustrating with nonsense, could claim our mind is at a standstill is boggling. One of science’s main research goals over the past century+ has been development in medicine. If our diseases can evolve and adapt, common currency in medical gymnastics, how are we separate from that which ails us? How are we removed from anything we inhabit ? As Alan Watts ingeniously realized, we are not born into this world, but from it. If the world evolves, so must we.

And we do, in literature, music, arts, sciences, philosophy. It is true, the basic fundamentals are encoded within us, have always been instructional and inherent for us to utilize. More than evolving, we are constantly remixing ourselves, but this ingenuity has to go by the name Darwin injected into public consciousness. We are not stagnant creatures, existing helplessly, aimlessly, while the world happens. We can study and research ourselves until blue in the face; it’s like biting your own teeth and not tasting a thing. If we study nature, what’s around us, what we’re inside of, we may get a better grip on awareness of who we are. That is, we simply need to look outside the vacuum of ourselves. Some things you simply can’t decode, even if you believe the story new.