Feeling Small

Here's something from Stephen Jay Gould: "Six millions years ago at most, if the molecular clock runs true . . . , we shared our last common ancestor with gorillas and chimps. Presumably, this creature walked primarily on all fours, although it may have moved about on two legs as well, as apes and many monkeys do today. Little more than a million years later, our ancestors were as bipedal as you or I. This, not later enlargement of the brain, was the great punctuation in human evolution" (The Panda's Thumb, 132). Of course, Gould's point has more to do with refocusing on what he considers the more important evolutionary transformation--bipedalism, not brain size. But. for me, again, the sweep of time--so casually waved away with a "six million years" or "a million years later"--is almost too much to comprehend. Actually, it is too much to comprehend. It would be easy to dismiss whatever joys and agonies we experience in life with the larger sense that, in the larger sense, it just doesn't matter. The awful effort of the human to make sense of the senseless. I read an infuriatingly bad history of Chicago and finally was drawn only to the photographs, one in particular of people waiting to enter the Chicago World's Fair of 1893--each with his or her mind and consciousness and every one of them long dead and gone: as gone as any impossibly ancient human ancestor. Surely someone was lying on the African savannah, however many million years ago, and looked up and around and wondered what it was all about. That moment of self-consciousness is the awful miracle of our existence, a bizarre, anomalous instance of something in the incomprehensibly large universe that came together in such a way and asked the simple question, "Why?" Or more ironic is the idea that consciousness was no meaningful adaptation--rather just the unanticipated side effect of brain enlargement, a mutation that helped an otherwise vulnerable species survive. The ability to ask the question "why" doesn't help us improve our chances at reproduction--it just came along. Lucky, huh?