The Tenacity of Life

After spending a weekend in an Oxford field, not washing, then a week in a plush Edinburgh flat, washing, I'd got used to the highs and lows of festival life. Then, at 1430 of a Friday, I boarded a train from Edinburgh to London Euston, set for Bournemouth later that day. Arriving at 2330 meant that that day provided me with an awful lot of practise at sitting.

I sat all the way from Edinburgh, through Carlilse, Preston, waiting at Wolverhampton for about half an hour, down through Birmingham and Coventry before finally emerging, bleary eyed and with a numb arse, at London Euston. Once, I moved seats, from aisle to window. This excitement happened just south of Preston, and I remember it well as a momentous part of the fairly grey and drizzly journey.

I also shared the journey with a large blob of a man for quite a while. Pleased to have taken the window seat at this point, so his girth could fall into the aisle, instead of being wedged between me and the window, forcing his unnecessary width to steal away inches of my already small seat.

After I finally reached Bournemouth (my London-Bournemouth train was equally boring, so I'll not bother describing its narrative) I returned home to find my peace lily looking rather worse for wear. It was to be expected, as it hadn't been watered in about 5 weeks.

Worried, I quickly plunged it into water and hoped it would recover.

Miraculously, by the morning it was already looking better. It had sucked up more water than I thought possible so I doused it again and went out.

I returned again to find it looking perfectly healthy after 24 hours since the grievous neglect had ended.

My mother sure can breed a hardy plant. Years of neglect and occasional watering in our frigid house has forced these plants to adapt or die.

This fairly small act got me thinking of life itself and how brilliantly tenacious it is. The mere fact that it is so strong is a testament to Darwin's incredible realisation that unsettled the foundations of people's viewpoint of the world.

I've had the following messy piece written on my desktop for months, I've been wanting to do something with it but have had no context to shoe horn it into. I'm leaving it mostly unedited as I just wrote it all in one splurge and I like it that way.

What is life?

A collection of cells, clinging together in each other's best interest.

Religion gives us a sense of importance, the idea of a soul attaches importance and a definite segregation from the world around us.

We aren't devoid of the world, we are inexplicably from and part of the universe. We are, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson says, children of the stars. We are constructed of heavy elements manufactured within the guts of stars which exploded and scattered the life-permitting elements across space and time.

We aren't separate from the universe and looking at it. We ARE the universe, and we mooch about doing universe stuff.

We often see life as a magical thing, some innate force that drive us onward. But this is just a result of Darwinian evolution. Our cells drive us on, in search of food and a mate. That's all we need. Our cells don't know what they're doing. We barely know what we're doing. We just give in to desire and follow a meandering path, flitting from place to place. Be it the desire to glut on banoffee pie or be it the desire to suppress other people in search of some higher sense of worth and success, these desires push us.

God, so claims Genesis, breathed life into man. A life giving wind, a breath that cannot be defined or described scientifically.

No he didn't

What I find most incredible is that this magical breath doesn't exist. Well not that it doesn't exist. That's not amazing, that's just truth. I find life itself utterly beautiful. We are alive, simply because it's convenient to be. It means ours cells will sustain, split, reproduce, feed and die. And yet as the cells within our bodies wither and pass back into the ecology of the land, we continue. The building blocks of us change and are replaced like an infinitely filled, youthful bench in an uncompromisingly complex game of water polo. New players sent on every second; ailing players – having fulfilled their role – dumped and replaced.

We are not so special, what we are is a convenient way for cells to go about this process of production and replacement. Their coexistence is mutually beneficial; the cells that make up the heart pump blood around the body, blood comprised of different cells and organisms, aiding respiration of other cells, ones that couldn't exist without the heart and blood cells. Those cells giving the heart and blood cells an advantage by the symbiotic relationship they sustain.

The digestive system is constructed of cells that need blood, oxygen and energy, so it is useful for them to be contained within a cosmopolitan ape. So they are. The bacteria within our guts are not using us a vessel to get from A to B, they are an integral cog in our bodies. They aid digestion and help us live, just as we let them live their natural lives by proving a warm, moist cavern with a continual conveyor belt of nutrients.

As soon as food passes our lips it becomes simply one more group of cells in an ocean of others. We glide pompously around as if we are special, but we are slaves to our cells, to their needs. Whatever it is that makes us special, intelligent and pompous is not external. It is the lives of these cells, the processes that happen without us knowing.

Life is something so inexplicably linked to prehistoric coalitions of single celled organisms that we forget about it. We unconsciously fulfil urges of our bodies, consuming nutrients that are needed, ignoring unwanted morsels.

It is this mutual relationship of cells that allowed my peace lily to survive. The cells shutting down certain areas of the plant to maintain central processes vital to prolonging life. Almost hibernating, waiting for me to come back and finally give it some attention.

A Little Understanding Of Neuroscience Is All I Ask

My more regular readers – and by that I of course mean 'my father', as I personally signed you up to my email alerts, so I can only guarantee your visitation – will know that I all too often have arguments with people regarding spirituality, religion, the existence of souls, ghosts, and other kinds of made up mental stuff.

Many people believe that we as humans are embodied by something 'other', something not physical that makes us us. Some people believe it's not just humans that have this mystical inner being, and that animals also have this blessing. Although its uncanny how the animals they think are without-soul aren't personified in Disney films, while the cute, furry, fluffy ones that are do, of course, have souls.

As I wrote previously, scientologists attempt to define this with logic, asserting that if you have your appendix removed, you don't become any less you. They claim your body is merely a tool that you use for survival, equally your mind is a tool used to decipher the world.

The hilariously named 'Thetan' – pronounced like Mike Tyson would say 'Satan' – is the equivalent of a soul, but is somehow different from a soul, but the only differing attributes between the two seem to be the arbitrary label attached...

Anyway, this soul's existence is justified by our consciousness and morals, something supposedly lacking in other animals. Aside from this simply not being true, as many animals exhibit morals and clearly conscious thought (see below), the fantasy of a soul has concrete science against it. And yet the myth perpetuates...

Unfortunately, this evidence is no new discovery. The brain cells that are thought to give us consciousness were first noticed under the microscope of  a little-known Bulgarian neuroscientist in the 1920s.

When Constantin von Economo first saw them, he thought they were signs of disease, but over the past century our understanding of them as improved and it is now thought that these cells – as they are present in similarly intelligent animals (dolphins, elephants, chimps, etc) – are a sign of our heightened intelligence, social bonds and moral consciousness.

Various things have been used to differentiate us from 'the animals' and – as with most incorrect theories – they are all slowly falling down, with one of the few claims remaining to be the 'soul'. Surely a decent understanding of the masterpiece of evolution that is the human brain would open people's eyes to rational thought, but I find myself despairing at the continued ignorance of simple neuroscience.

Please stop being mental and start using the brain that you is so incredibly intricate that we're barely starting to understand it.

That's true