Life

I went to a park this afternoon with the family for our little kid's first picnic beside the lake. Other than the unpleasant smell, stench really, of the algae growth at the edge of the water, it was very enjoyable. The weather was wonderful, the breeze was not too strong and not too weak, the whole outing was one of those little pleasures that life provides from time to time.

Right before we left the park to go for some food and drinks, I leaned on the park bench, looking at the maple trees towering above me. The black maple tree across from the park bench looked especially majestic, with the Sun on some of its leaves, swaying slightly from side to side, it was simply beautiful.

For some reason I don't really understand, I started thinking about what I read in one of the books on the history of life, the whole notion that very far in the past, some single-cell organisms, for whatever reason, decided to join forces to become a multi-cellular organism. Of course, before that event, single-cell creatures already had parasites, and other foreign materials living symbiotically within the cell. But the almagamation of organisms to become a unified organism is just plain incredible.

When I was looking at the tree, I was really puzzled by how that event could have taken place with all these obviously unconscious organisms. Still, knowing enough about evolution and its mechanism, I know that if the circumstances were right, sooner or later, an evolutionary path would be taken.

The scale of time for something that improbable happening is obviously vast. The thinking of scale of time brought me back to a Stephen Jay Gould's essay I read this morning. The essay struck a chord in me, as it was about the scale of time for evolution, the fact that we must be very careful to make decision that seems to be good for our lifetime, but that might be bad for us, taken as a species, in the long term.