MAYBE WE ALL EVOLVED FROM THE SAME SPECKS OF DIRT
Could you be descended from a rock? Rather than, say, an ape? Or, to put it another way: first the rock, then the ape. (No scissors/paper here.)
Personally, I’m drawn to rock molecules as forebears.
Bear with me on this. It’s not my idea; it came from an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine that came from a new book titled Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. Just the same way as perhaps we came from microbes in rocks before we came from apes — no offense to Mr. Darwin. Or to the Creator by whatever name.
For the record, I understand absolutely none of this. I began a less than stellar college career long ago with a D- in Human Biology, after which I switched my major to Art. A form of educational evolution, you could say. I will probably, as this story progresses, be typing a lot of questions into the search bar like, “What’s the difference between a microbe and a molecule?” Still trying to wrap my head around that one.
But how can you not love the idea that Planet Earth — our Mother Earth which itself came from somewhere, but that’s another story — germinated her little bits of dirt into creatures that beccame you and me?
Photo by Nikola Jovanovic on Unsplash
Further, if we all evolved from little specks of dirt in rocks, doesn’t that more easily make us all pretty close kin, give or take a minor detail or two?
Consider this: “At some point not long after our planet’s genesis,” writes the distinguished scientist/journalist Ferris Jabr, who inspired this essay and whose web photo looks like he’s about 18, “in some warm, wet pocket with the right chemistry and an adequate flow of free energy . . . bits of Earth rearranged themselves into the first self-replicating entities, which eventually evolved into cells.” (Jabr rhymes with neighbor; you might want to remember the name.)
Fast forward a few eons. “Species best able to cope with changes in their particular habitat leave behind the most descendants, whereas those that fail to adapt die out.” Voila. Early pre-humanoids are beginning to pop up.
Annother few billion years, Oxygen and the ozone layer ooze out and, Hello blue skies!
“As I studied the interdependence of Earth and life,” Jabr writes, “I continually returned to an ancient and controversial idea: that Earth itself is alive.” This is, as many of us are dimly aware, the Gaia Hypothesis. Sort of a ‘We’re all in this Life together’ thing: dirt, creatures, skies, planet. (This article is not to be quoted for anything scientifically verifiable.)
Despite being clearly out of my depths, I cannot get over a compelling fascination with this idea: Mother Earth begets a clump of dirt which, after an eon or two or three or four begets you and me. Life is good, brothers and sisters.
Recently, walking up Webster Street in San Francisco I drew near a car that had just parked. The driver, a tall Black man with an air of distinction and broad smile, walked toward me a few steps ahead of a gray-haired Black woman I presumed to be his wife. We three paused in greeting, it being a sunshiny day with a jazz festival underway a block west on Fillmore Street.
“You remind me of my mother,” he said. No preamble, no irony, just a pleasant remark that might well have been, “Hello, how’s it going?”
“I think,” I replied as I quickly recovered, “that I’m the generic mother. I hope yours was a good one.”
“The best,” he said. “She was very beautiful.”
Well, if that won’t make your day I don’t know what will. We three kept walking in our different directions. Hopefully, their day was as festive as mine was from then on.
Which brings me back to Mr. Jabr’s book. Since it seems a little heavy for my right-brained self I am ordering the audio version (9 hours, 27 minutes.) This way I can listen in small snippets while walking in the sunshine, reflecting on the probability that my bypasser friend’s beautiful bronze skin is only a microbe or two away from my own wrinkly white.
Right, Mother Earth?
