forms of life

October 17 2008

Every evening I am interested to watch some shows on nature or on science, which sometimes blend into one. I had tried to instill the sense of wonder and a need to search for novelty in my kids, by asking them to watch science shows for kids when they were really young.

Watching nature shows is like seeing the life through a camera lens. The life as we perceive is very narrow in focus, some times not extending beyond our childhood perception of what life is supposed to be. Then I look at the life in different forms, in different environments, in different period in history and evolution of organism. It is overwhelming to see the diversities and possibilities. In most of the time human beings were not there, not to speak of me which has a very short existence.

What I see is a very simple goal of the life forms, feed and breed and propagation of the species by producing offspring in huge number, hoping that some will survive to propagate the species. So, they eat and eat and sometime breed. The life of vast majority of people is not very different from those except that most human cover themselves, decorate themselves and kill their own kind. Others usually don’t do that.

The increase in the size of the neocortex might have helped us to think more extensively. At the same time when we think of discordance between the human societies it is appalling. More than 50% of the human beings have no access to sanitation, while some of them are thinking of colonizing the Mars or thinking of building of computers which will surpass the capacity of the human brain. A lot of human qualities such as greed, hatred etc for its own kind developed in parallel with the development of the need for a divine being or a search for a meaning of existence after all.

Then there is the evolution of aesthetic values.