Sensually Explicit, yet Blind – Evolution

we have 5 pretty mild senses.

black bears smell 2100 times better than us. they know when a female is in heat, what is for dinner at the bearenstain house, and what goodies you are hiding in your tent from miles away.

rafinesque’s big-eared bat can literally see with its ears because of echolocation. the sounds translate into a radar in its head, which is probably no different than a picture-flip-book made of its surroundings.

marijuana makes you feel the music.

snakes taste smell by flicking their tongues into the air. they grab odor molecules and have an organ that is highly sensitive to chemicals, all they need is a sample of the air.

our eyes are actually pretty good compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. we see because our eyes are sensitive to a certain type of light, so we call it visible light. the specific wavelength of visible light excites certain electrons in rods and cones in our eyes, which stimulate our brain into seeing… basically.

radio waves, gamma rays, infrared and ultraviolet are all light, but with different wavelengths. we know they exist because we are pretty smart; we have built machines and detectors that can measure, create, and utilize different types of light (i use light and electromagnetic radiations interchangeably). cell phones, radios, mri machines all operate using different light waves.

we know these different types of light exist, but we dont see, hear, smell, taste, or feel them (maybe we feel them, but not enough to distinguish).

our biology has Evolved to recognize and take advantage of environmental features and our physical surroundings. the purpose is to give our bodies a better chance to proliferate of our genes. we dont understand the scope of time the same way an ant does not understand the size of the world. that is not a clean analogy, but i think it holds in some important ways. the ant has no need to know how big the world is, and so it doesnt.

Time and Probability are two other properties that we pretend to understand.

our brains have been designed to understand time in relation to a human lifetime. considering our lifespan, there really would be no point in analyzing more than a few decades. by no means can we understand billions of years, and for that matter even a few thousand.

recorded human history has only been around for the flap of a hummingbird wing, and i doubt someone would claim to understand all of written history. statistically speaking, it is impossible for a single human being to read it all.

being able to place our bodies in context with the existence of the universe is of no importance to our survival. so we dont.

i think probability is more interesting.

probability, like everything else, can be put into a gradient.

what is the chance that the sun rises tomorrow? pretty high, we will put that on the left of our scale.

most people who are lucky enough to have played risk, monopoly, or some board game have rolled double sixes (1/36). this is still very much on the left hand side of our probability spectrum.

what about being dealt a perfect hand in bridge? 2,235,197,406,895,366,368,301,559,999 to 1, that is 27 zeros.
(a perfect hand being all 4 players are dealt A-K of the same suit)

now where on the probability scale would that be?

the interesting thing about probability is that if you can think up a scenario, you can probably calculate its likelihood.

take a solid marble statue. can you imagine it waving at you? our understanding of molecules is a lot of probability, “where is the electron most likely to be found.” if every single molecule in the statues arm was to be found moving in a particular direction, and then back again… it would appear like the statue waved at you.

what is the probability that every single molecule in the specific area moves one particular way and then reverse? if you wrote zeros for as long as the universe has existed (~15 billion years), you still would not have enough zeros.

it is for all intents and purposes, Impossible. however, it still fits far on the right end of our probability spectrum.

now couple our lack of comprehension of time with this probability gradient. many things that people would have disregarded as unlikely, might actually be a lot more likely to have happened.

We “see” a lot of things, but we are missing much more.

Most of this comes from Richard Dawkins. Two of his books in particular: “The Blind Watchmaker” and
“The Selfish Gene.” These books will give you a good grasp of the subject.