Can you see the Leafhopper?
I was driving down Santa Barbara in the Cape when I realized I needed fuel. I have a tendency to squeeze every last drop of distance from my fuel tank these days, a practice that sometimes gets me in trouble. This night, however I had enough money and time to fill up long before trouble was encountered.
Driving up to the pump I grimaced at price and then slid the car into park opened the door and approached the pump. Selecting the cheapest grade I removed the nozzle from its holding and placed it in the neck of the car’s fuel tank. Pumping fuel allows me time to think and muse about the day's or week's exploits and at times an opportunity to ponder even deeper thoughts.
This evening I spied a leafhopper on the fuel pump’s display. It was nothing special really, just a simple green leafhopper about a ¼ of an inch long. This particular leafhopper sent me deep into a mental journey that left me standing there pondering the reality of life.
My initial thought was, “Gee, that little guy is identical to the leafhoppers I have seen up north”. This thought made me wonder how widespread this species was distributed. I have seen many of these creatures in my travels. I have seen them throughout the Midwest and as far north as Canada and now a seemingly identical species on the southern tip of Florida, simply amazing.
Then, as I pondered this idea I envisioned the countryside peppered with tiny little capsules of DNA that had the instructions for the construction of this little creature scattered in a genetic carpet from here to the frozen climes in Canada. Then it occurred to me that it was just not the leafhopper genes but a virtual blanket of DNA, RNA and other genetic material literally draping the landscape from edge to edge. Genetic material containing instructions for every living organism on or in the earth, the soil literally roiling with life, the air pulsing with genetic material, the water a veritable soup of DNA.
Then, while I was exploring this living carpet of genetic material in my mind’s eye, I had a revelation that all at once gelled much of what I had been reading of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” and the “Selfish Gene”.
We are not true life, that is, we are not the soul of life but rather it is the genetic material itself that is the heart and soul of life. It is the DNA itself that is the true core and source of life indeed true life, more ancient than man or any other phenotype currently expressed.
We are only a vessel containing yet more of the DNA, an expression of that living organism’s attempt to survive and continue existing, a fruiting body as it were. And what is more we humans, dogs, birds, amoeba, lizards bacteria… are not unrelated entities but all “fruits” of that organism, of the living organism found in the reality of the living carpet of Genetic material, inexorably bound together by that same material…
Clearly this organism will continue expressing itself in any form possible in any given environment long after Man has ceased being a viable expression in this environment.
These thoughts illuminate clearly that we are not the measure of anything much less a permanent phenotypical expression
It then dawned on me how incredibly arrogant it is of me to place so much value on my own life and existence. How incredibly narrow minded it is for man to think himself the measure of life, when in reality we are only the crusty edge of a much larger reality, a temporary expression of what was and is possible in this environment, a footprint of a greater and far more enduring entity. Furthermore it is painfully obvious that life itself will continue to modify and alter every genetic expression to fit the possible options in the environment for eons to come.
The age-old story of the life of a fly is so very applicable to mankind...
A fly, expending its life force in a mere 24 hours, is born into a fly's conscious understanding of its environment during a torrential rainstorm. It continues to rain sheets for 24 hours until the fly, having eaten, reproduced and nearing its last breath is queried as to what the environment is like on earth, to which the fly replies, It rains and pours water from the skies incessantly every day, all day long, with no end in sight.
Unlike the misconceptions of the rain soaked fly, that little leafhopper showed me, very vividly, that it most certainly is sunny here on earth much of the time.
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