Vanity of vanities and nothing new under the Sun, but change happens in the universe and in the minds of all creatures great and small. Change happens slowly by evolutionary environmental interplay by the process of mutation and speciation. Change happens quickly in the same terms by the process of natural selection.
Natural selection’s outcomes are not all covered within the province of behavior and what Richard Dawkins refers to as the extended phenotype. Natural selection does occur at the genetic environmental level.
Consider The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Those poor organisms didn’t stand a chance. The deleterious impact of a gamma-ray-rich environment on the long evolution of flowers and humans literally and figuratively serves as an object lesson.
We may think ourselves cleverer than we are or not clever at all, but if we are honest in our thinking, we must accept that this kind of comparative sizing of our capabilities is a waste of energy. We cannot outwit events we cannot foresee.
“Fitness” in evolutionary terms is highly contextual and transient.
Something is lacking in Dunbar’s Number. Consider how many names of famous persons living and dead we know and feel somehow closer to them than anonymous strangers. Humans seem to have in their imaginations the capacity to live in larger communities than the number of texting and email friends.
It is less about the size of our craniums and more about what we can and do hold in our minds.
Comparing ourselves to others is both a function of our biology as has evolved and also mostly a waste of energy. This is just as true among those we consider our peers and famous persons living and dead we revere or revile.
Standing on the shoulders of giants suggests there are no original ideas. We are only building on previous innovations and accidents. Shakespeare did not invent what he put into blank verse. He grabbed things out of the parlance of his time and juxtaposed these common phrasings in the context of his plays.
It makes no sense, if we think about it, for anyone to express things wholly unconnected to anything previously expressed. It would find no audience, except in a minority of contemporaries who also share that something off track.
Figures who garner a following do so by appealing to something already in their followers. Similarly, by other discernible agents of change, things that found no audience in their own time can gain popularity later, as others figure them out in the deeper context of where they came from and fit into things that came before.
Van Gogh’s paintings and Dickinson’s verses, Galileo’s science and Pierre Boule’s atheism, and wasn’t Marlowe (Christopher, not Phillip) both an atheist and gay (homosexual, not happy)?
These things I share as evidence of loose associations, almost an unquiet mind, but not quite.
KLK – September 20, 2025
I Dwell In Possibility 