Seances! You have to have the right kind of table though, it’s very important
And mom - mom saved her hair.
We built shrines for her on every wall.
Well, she died.
(Ophelia, Sir John Everett Millais, 1852)
All organisms evolve as complex and interconnected wholes, not as loose alliances of separate parts, each independently optimized by natural selection. Any adaptive change must also generate, in addition, a set of spandrels, or nonadaptive byproducts. These spandrels may later be “co-opted” for a secondary use. But we would make an egregious logical error if we argued that these secondary uses explain the existence of a spandrel… .
If any organ is, prima facie, replete with spandrels, the human brain must be our finest candidate … Many, if not most, universal behaviors are probably spandrels, often co-opted later in human history for important secondary functions… .
The human brain must be bursting with spandrels that are essential to human nature and vital to our self-understanding but that arose as nonadaptations, and are therefore outside the compass of evolutionary psychology, or any other ultra-Darwinian theory. The brain did not enlarge by natural selection so that we would be able to read or write.
” Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism,” 1997 (http://bit.ly/gjewD)
from the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo
Go ahead, tell me how real you are! How rational, how practical, how full of weight and gravitas. No: you navigate through a sea of bubbles every minute of every day. When some break you think, oh, now we’re really getting somewhere. But it’s only the bubbles obeying the laws of bubble-land, combining and becoming more intractable, strengthening their connections and maximizing their angles. You think you’ve corralled the virtual into your technology; you keep it safely segregated in your laptop, your phone, your pocket. Right. Tell me your multiple identities don’t insist on their own voices. Tell me your social networks aren’t overwhelming you with mathematics and jealousy. Tell me you can turn it off and walk away any time you want. Go ahead, tell me.
Let me put this in a way you will understand. L, I say, to you: L. OL.
a balletic suspension midway in which we can feel free of time.
