Oh Carl Sagan, I got my spirituality from you. There is no doubt that our instinctual apparatus has changed little from the hunter-gatherer days of several hundred thousand years ago. Our society has changed enormously from those times, and the greatest problems of survival in the contemporary world can be understood in terms of this conflict - between what we feel we must do because of our primeval instincts and what we know we must do because of our extragenetic learning. If we survive these perilous times, it is clear that even an identification with all of mankind is not the ultimate desirable identification. If we have a profound respect for other human beings as co-equal recipients of this precious patrimony of 4.5 billion years of evolution, why should the identification not apply also to all the other organisms on Earth, which are equally the product of 4.5 billion years of evolution? We care for a small fraction of the organisms on Earth - dogs, cats, and cows, for example - because they are useful or because they flatter us. But spiders and salamanders, salmon and sunflowers are equally our brothers and sisters. I believe that the difficulty we all experience in extending our identification horizons in this way is itself genetic. Ants of one tribe will fight to the death intrusions by ants of another. Human history is filled with monstrous cases of small differences - in skin pigmentation, or abstruse theological speculation, or manner of dress and hair style - being the cause of harassment, enslavement, and murder. A being quite like us, but with a small physiological difference - a third eye, say, or blue hair covering the nose and forehead - somehow evokes feelings of revulsion. Such feelings may have had adaptive value at one time in defending our small tribe against the beasts and neighbors. But in our times, such feelings are obsolete and dangerous. The time has come for a respect, a reverence, not just for all human beings, but for all life forms - as we would have respect for a masterpiece of sculpture or an exquisitely tooled machine. This, of course, does not mean that we should abandon the imperatives for our own survival. Respect for the tetanus bacillus does not extend to volunteering our body as a culture medium. But at the same time we can recall that here is an organism with a biochemistry that tracks back deep into our planets past. The tetanus bacillus is poisoned by molecular oxygen, which we breathe so freely. The tetanus bacillus, but not we, would be at home in the hydrogen-rich, oxygen-free atmosphere of primitive Earth. A reverence for all life is implemented in a few of the religions of the planet Earth - for example, among the Jains of India. And something like this idea is responsible for vegetarianism, at least int he minds of many practitioners of this dietary constraint. But why is it better to kill plants than animals? Human beings can survive only by killing other organisms. But we can make ecological compensation by also growing other organisms; by encouraging the forest; by preventing the wholesale slaughter of organisms such as seals and whales, imagined to have industrial or commercial value; by outlawing gratuitous hunting, and by making the environment of Earth more livable - for all its inhabitants. There may be a time [...] when contact will be made with another intelligence on a planet of some far-distant star, beings with billions of years of quite independent evolution, beings with no prospect of looking very much like us - although they may think very much like us. It is important that we extend our identification horizons, not just down tot he simplest and most humble forms of life on our own planet, but also up to the exotic and advanced forms of life that may inhabit, with us, our vast galaxy of stars. - The Cosmic Connection
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 20:48:59 +0000
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