Evolving full stops

After 4 billion years of Evolution, we humans (along with all current living things) are state of the art in living technology, as crafted by Natural Selection. We inhabit an astonishingly complicated and beautiful state of existence.

Evolution has shuffled the genetic deck of cards and thrown us into the world to inhabit a little patch of existence. This patch is grounded in the structure of our bodies; the specificity of our anatomy determines the area and limit of the patch of existence we inhabit. The specific dimensions of human existence were determined by the genes we were thrown into the world with, which built the structure we are: in such a way that the human patch of existence, although overlapping with our closet relatives the great apes (and sharing commonalities with all life), occupies a unique position in the Evolutionary landscape.

The function of the body is founded, specified and limited by the structure of the body; function cannot go beyond this structure (cannot step off the human patch of existence) but within this confined space function can build upwards and create a skyscraper made out of the many layered actions of the body; all human activity is located and limited within the different rooms of the function skyscraper. As humans continue to evolve the patch of existence will change shape as the structure of the body changes, which shifts the design of the function skyscraper.

Each individual in each generation represents a full stop and a potential new sentence in the story of life. My genetic full stop includes susceptibility to Parkinson’s, which reduces the size of my patch of existence and removes some rooms in my function skyscraper: all because Parkinson’s changes a specific structure of my brain. However, Parkinson’s doesn’t destroy my skyscraper; there are rooms for me to inhabit.