This morning, I am amazed how little I have been paying attention to my own biology. Even as an educated biologist, I’ve been able to avert my eyes from my own biological nature. I’ve paid scant attention to that long, drawn-out process that has, over millions of years, resulted in an organism that has been shaped by its surroundings, and is capable of being aware in a manner not shared by any of my visible world.
I am only now beginning to notice how humans have used their high intelligence to break away from harmony with the world in which we have developed. Intelligence has allowed me and my fellow humans to construct cities, machines and societies beyond anything my basic biology had ever achieved. But not without a biological cost. The trajectory of intellectual achievement has become detached from its biological foundation. If I’ve been paying attention to my biology, the results certainly don’t show it.
I know that every breath I take relies on my harmony with the plants of the earth. My survival depends on a level of oxygen in the air determined by the activity of plants and a world-wide system that is in balance with that level of oxygen. Together with the rest of my biological world, I produce an amount of Carbon dioxide that has been relatively steady for many thousands of years.
Now, within the last hundred years, I have joined my fellow humans in changing that balance. My biological world is cascading toward great changes caused by our decision to put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The whole biological world is being required to change, to adjust. Some will manage, some will not. I think human survival is something of a question mark.
Another human innovation that is changing my biology is the food I have become accustomed to eat. A little over fifty years ago, my fellow humans figured out how to make food that was convenient for the many and profitable for the few. The value added changed from the farmers who grew the food to the industrialists who manufactured the food. My biology took another hit. A body and internal biome that had evolved to one kind of food was asked to adjust, inside of decades, to food it did not recognize as food. Preservatives meant to combat biology and improve shelf-life became an arsenal of assault on the biology inside of me. All manner of ailments have resulted, diabetes, obesity, autism, allergies etc.
Intelligence has given me the power and ability to add to my basic biology. Now I have to figure out how to get back in harmony with that same biology.