Of the chains and webs of life

As I quietly watched, the reptile gaped, still as a rock. It seemed to be doing nothing. Nobody could guess what the creature was plotting. I watched its breathing. I watched its skin. Its eyes- they were fixed on one thing (-never mind on what). It sat there as though it were not alive, but for its quiet breathing.
Each of those features, those characteristics that make it what it is- a Hemidactylus frenatus, unique, yet common, were so fascinating. Each of those features would have taken thousands of years of evolution. This guy sure owes a lot to his ancestors. And, yes, he will do his best for his progeny.
All of a sudden, the lizard appeared so beautiful!(and sure...i freaked at that thought).
I imagine some van der Waal's forces between its feet and the wall's surface...amazing! I find it so hard to believe...can you imagine no vaccuum, no fluids, no adhesives...but that same attraction that I studied in Electrostatics!!! I feel humbled by your great powers, Mr Geck.
For once, I wondered if it was real. Should I touch it to know? Ah, no! In a fraction of a second, a sticky thing stuck out and grasped a poor fly and – smack your lips, dinner’s ready! For how many generations has this tradition been carried? How many master flycatchers has it produced? The tradition continues. Every generation of the creature struggles, that’s how survival happens. Each of those characteristics is a signature of its ancestors. If everything was given to it through heredity what then, is the lizard’s own? Maybe, it does make a contribution, a tiny something though; it does form a link from one generation to another.
Every animal eats something, something alive. I don’t think there has been a single lizard which contemplated the act of fly-catching from the ethical point of view. The rule of the game is- be selfish, as selfish as possible, for that’s the only key to survival. You are even allowed sometimes, to eat one of your own kind!
The story of big brained Homo sapiens came only later. But today there are people that take to veganism, there are also, let’s not forget, people that flaunt their shahtoosh shawls and people that love the fragrance of musk. We do all sorts of ridiculous things, not just to survive…but because we have begun to think in all sorts of ridiculous ways. But should we, unlike the lizard contemplate our actions… atleast because we are capable of doing so?
Well to other species, survival is the name of the game. The lizard, for example, would do anything to save itself. Atleast, no lizard would ever feel suicidal. Perhaps, we are the only species that dares to think of suicide…maybe our growing numbers have taken the consideration of the survival of our species out of our darn heads! But a lizard, fortunately for it, is incapable of contemplating suicide. Thanks to that determination passed on from one generation to another, evolution works. But this determination, where did it come from? From ancestors. There was a chain of species (events or processes) before the lizard became the lizard. It was a chain in time. As of today, one end of the chain is the beautiful creature before me. The lizard might, at best, know its grandfathers or grandmothers. But what about the other end of the chain? You could say a bunch of cells from which all life sprang, but then, these cells had a history. These cells might have come from some compounds (lets pretend we don’t distinguish between life and non-life).
So the other end maybe a bunch of compounds. But these too, came out of some atoms that decided to join hands. So is our ‘other end’ a bunch of atoms? But, well… these atoms too must have had a history; they must have come from some primordial soup at the beginning of the world. And…(uh… the darn chain!) the history of this soup ends at the opacity of the big bang.( Had we some knowledge of what happened before, this would have been a nice big book!)
The lizard blinked- the poor thing didn’t know that the other end lay at t=0 s. All these chains ran as one till the times of those single cell creatures. It must have been around this time that the chains diverged. Since then, this divergence has only been increasing with time. Many(most?) might have ended abruptly in time. But those that exist have a lot of stories to tell. That explains the extraordinary diversity of these various species.
The act of fly-catching has never been seen by the lizard as an act of harming nature. For nature, as it views is not something separate from it. Whatever it does, is done with only one ultimate goal- survival. It is a part of nature. Every act of it is simply a tiny bit of a huge drama- a tiny little step in the mind boggling complexity of a beautiful mechanism called nature.
Nature, we could say, is just this natural mechanism, that, in a way flows with those chains and in yet another way makes them flow.
But where is the origin of the tendency to survive which seems to be present in all creatures alive? There is also this other question- is the magnitude of this tendency to survive present equally in all creatures? (If yes, then how does one explain the fact that there were more misses than hits… more losers than survivors?). But really what is this tendency to survive…is it a tendency or something else? We know that this lizard must be alive because it did not cause its own end. But does it mean that it survived because it did something so that it caused its own survival? In other words…is it alive because of its own actions? Could it have deliberately acted otherwise?
If there really is such a thing as a tendency to survive, is its magnitude at all directly proportional to the probability of survival? Maybe yes, maybe no. Well, if you were a close cousin of this lizard-a dinosaur, you would know that any magnitude of this tendency to survive wouldn’t have helped when a fire ball from heaven is racing towards you! So maybe your probability of survival is related directly to another factor- the degree of favourability of the environment for your survival. In other words, you are alive today not only because you have this instinct to survive, but also because the outer world has been good to you.
You are- because the outer/inner world allows/wants you to be. What happens in the ‘outer world’ are often accidents or disasters, for example, the meteorites that threaten up to this day were accidents that happened to our world during planet formation. But there could also be a pleasant surprises! Imagine a day when suddenly everywhere there is quicksand… most animals would die…but if luckily, some mutation happened and you happened to be born with wings and were happy scavenging on drowning creatures!!!
Getting back to our old question, where on the chain does the origin of the tendency to survive lie? We know that all the creatures that survive today have this tendency, because if their tendency was otherwise, they wouldn’t have survived. But is it necessary for survival? I mean…can they go on with neither of the tendencies?
It is important to know this because it is natural to want to survive to all forms of life and forms the core of evolution (well, atleast so I understand!)
The answer to the question maybe atoms, we know from laws of bonding that atoms that become appropriate compounds are relatively more stable than free atoms. Molecules could be stable only by further bonding and formation of more complex compounds. So there is advantage in bonding and that’s why it happens. But what about before atoms? Every stage in the chain led to the next naturally for reasons of stability (longevity or survival, you may call). The same yearning for stability must have led the point of 0 dimensions and infinite density to expand to yield the universe as we see it today. Is the universe the way it is, because if it were otherwise it wouldn’t have existed? But if something simply cant be otherwise…its being the way it is doesn’t seem to have any specific cause. How pointless! Well maybe the answers to our questions, simply, lie at the ‘other end’.
As I saw the lizard, it moved a little. There were two tiny balls, a bigger black one and a smaller white one. Such marvelous organization the genius mechanism (nature) had devised for it!
It ate a mosquito and gave out the black and white stuff. Between the ‘this goes in-that comes out’ business, there is something retained that forms the lizard. The flies that the lizard’s mother ate formed the lizard and the flies that the lizard eats sustain it. Are lizards made of flies? Then I am made of plants and the tigers are made of deer (and I was thinking that there was skin and hair between the outer world and the inner worlds!).
What goes in becomes what it went into, apart from becoming what went out and that which went out, went all through the arrow marks in the complicated food web and probably got in again! So webs are, after all, just as nasty as chains, you know neither beginning nor end.
Quietly, the lizard moved close to another lizard, maybe he said ‘hi’ or maybe he didn’t. I wonder how they communicated (or if they did at all!). Ahem… I think I’d just leave them alone!
It’s been made into an automatic process- simply by injecting instincts into them. We don’t know when our body runs out of fuel, that’s why we have hunger. All that creatures have is the tendency to survive- individually as well as, as a species- and that takes care of everything. They are a mere chunk of instincts. Maybe, we humans tend to probe into things in nature and the nature of things only because of an instinct. Then again… what is left if we took away these instincts?
Why they wish to survive is not known to them (not known to us either).
Where the chains end is not known. What end did they emerge to reach? What’s the purpose of all life and all evolution? Intriguing question, but will we ever know the answer?
But then, what purpose would knowing answers serve?
Huh...after all I’m as clueless as the lizard!
Wait a minute-did the doting father just look at me with a did-you-just-say-something expression? Naah…I must be imagining way too much!!!
So many vague ideas and such pathetic understanding of evolution, big bang and everything in between...I regret both. But I must say, whether we understand them or not, every creature is beautiful...and reptilophobics must just experience it to know!