“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, February 4, 2011

Evolution as Hyperobject

This just in from the proofs I'm reading for an essay on the mesh:

Evolution strikes another great nail into the coffin of common sense. It is worth pausing briefly to let this stunning conclusion sink in. We cannot see, touch, or smell evolution. It evades our perception—it takes place on spatiotemporal scales far in excess of one, or even a million, human lifetimes, and it involves processes such as DNA replication that are too small to be seen with the naked eye. Of course we might see small changes in the ears of any kittens our cat bore. But would the slightly smaller ears count as a significant variation? “Significant” in this case means that the trait is passed on—so in effect, significance is always in the future, always to come. DNA agrees with Hegel that for something to happen, it must happen at least twice...

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