In the Book of Genesis the first human being is brought forth from the dirt of the earth. This story speaks to our material commonality with the entire world. The atoms that make up our body originate in the dirt of the earth itself. Plants have drawn them up from the soil to form their own bodies. By eating those plants, animals reconfigure these same atoms into yet another shape. Each of the countless atoms that make up our body has its own history. They once made up the bodies of Buddha and Jesus, as well as millions of Stone Age hunters, prehistoric birds, fish and ferns. When we die they all return to the soil to await a new life - dust you are and to dust you will return.
Atoms are bound into molecules, which are layered into more complex arrangements, which are organized into living cells. Each cell arises or is born from a previous cell, by mitosis or by meiosis. Cells themselves are organized and reorganized in layers and layers of layers comprising creatures. Structure hidden within structure.
Life is a sequence of structures, each nested upon a previous one, so that creatures emerge from drafts of previous species, which themselves emerged from previous drafts. Every living cell, every being is embedded in the previous form. Modern animals incorporate the plans of ancient animals, which incorporate the plans of primeval animals. Traits and potential traits flow through creating a living transmission. Every being is part of this transmission, which leads back to the very origins of life. Staring back through our own chain of grandfathers and grandmothers, we find a few thousand generations of human ancestors, then our ancestors look like monkeys, then moles, then worms, bacteria, and eventually comet dust. It has taken all this creation to sculpt us, and we are not yet complete.
When we have children, they pass through our bodies. We are the vessel for their seed, a capacity imbedded in us by a prior vessel in which we were seeds. While still in her mother's womb, a female embryo has in her own womb all of her ovum, the seeds of her own children.
But still embryos must labor stage by stage. Every human starts out as a single cell. Next we become a small clot of cells, next something akin to a tadpole, we look somewhat like a fish, a frog, a mammal, and final a human infant is born. Observing this progress, the early biologist Earnst Heackel declared, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." That is the embryonic development of every being (ontogeny) follows the same path as the evolutionary development of the entire species (phylogeny). If a human is created "in the image of God." Perhaps this Divine image is not a fixed form, but an ongoing evolutionary transmission that connects each individual with all living beings.
Footnote: The writings of Erasmus Darwin (Charles' Grandfather) poetically suggest the Recapitulation Theory around one hundred years before Heackel's famous quotation.
Atoms are bound into molecules, which are layered into more complex arrangements, which are organized into living cells. Each cell arises or is born from a previous cell, by mitosis or by meiosis. Cells themselves are organized and reorganized in layers and layers of layers comprising creatures. Structure hidden within structure.
When we have children, they pass through our bodies. We are the vessel for their seed, a capacity imbedded in us by a prior vessel in which we were seeds. While still in her mother's womb, a female embryo has in her own womb all of her ovum, the seeds of her own children.
But still embryos must labor stage by stage. Every human starts out as a single cell. Next we become a small clot of cells, next something akin to a tadpole, we look somewhat like a fish, a frog, a mammal, and final a human infant is born. Observing this progress, the early biologist Earnst Heackel declared, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." That is the embryonic development of every being (ontogeny) follows the same path as the evolutionary development of the entire species (phylogeny). If a human is created "in the image of God." Perhaps this Divine image is not a fixed form, but an ongoing evolutionary transmission that connects each individual with all living beings.
Footnote: The writings of Erasmus Darwin (Charles' Grandfather) poetically suggest the Recapitulation Theory around one hundred years before Heackel's famous quotation.
