by Bill Lauritzen
On a planet with a rocky crust, in the boondocks of the Milky Way Galaxy, we took advantage of the sun’s energy and began to make copies of ourselves. Eventually, over billions of years, we changed. We assembled, first, as complex molecules, and later as a wide variety of complex adaptive systems—including what today we call primates.
At first, we gestured with our arms, hands, eyes, and bodies, at times wildly, while making sounds of various lengths and tones. We cautiously examined the various fire-mountains, and we fearfully felt the ground shaking. We came to believe that some kind of very powerful Entity lived beneath us. On some evenings, in the distance, we could see liquid fire winding down the side of the Mountain; and sometimes the Mountain heaved out flying rocks-of-fire and huge clouds of smoke, as the sky assaulted the mountain with bolts of lightning. Some of us, the braver ones, would move guardedly towards the Mountain and try to steal the fire and its heat. Thanks to fat-rich marrow from the bones of large animals we scavenged, our brains gradually evolved larger. We continued to gesture, but now we could make sounds that were quiet, nuanced and subtle, or loud, clear, and commanding. We became talking apes—capable of large scale cooperation, imaginative thinking, and able to manipulate our environment with opposable thumbs and tools. This is the story of how we came to craft narratives and equations to explain the natural world around us, and how we still strive to see past them.
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