Scribblings in their native form
Recently found on two sheets of paper, my handwriting, provenance and impetus unclear:
I am sometimes staggered by the literally boundless (O.K., seemingly boundless) natural diversity which evolution, driven by natural selection under environmental pressures, has brought to this single, finite Earth.
That dances of molecules could, propelled by basic physics, somehow happen into replicable protocelluar life; that that life could manage to collaborate and specialize, and then engender the specialization of the organisms these cells comprise. Algae to trees; bacteria to blue whales.
But they did!
It just took time.
That it took time — or, phrased better, that such wondrous diversity could develop through so much trial and error (how many failures per success? And look at the successes, all those phyla and species) — this ocean of improbability is a true measure of the tub of deep time.
But change happens fast in shallower ponds of time, too. Horses to cars to planes to spacecraft in the span of six decades, less than one human lifetime. The realms of knowledge we have mapped in such detail. The pen I write with was born of a dozen specialties: chemistry, metallurgy, polymer science, physics, literacy, product design, psychology, and so on.
I think about all that basically never.
But it’s one more example — everything around me in this bedroom, except Oscar [dog] applies — of how far humans have developed in the wink of an eye, relatively speaking. And so nature did the same to create us. It just took a bit longer.
