Evolutions by Oren Harman

Author:Oren Harman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

6

Like you, I had been a Ctenophore first, then a Cnidarian, all those hundreds of millions of years ago when the drama unfolded.

But after we parted, the neural highways of my ancestors gave birth to a novelty of momentous proportions. Suddenly there was more than just pure physicality in the world to contemplate.

After more than 13 billion years, obscurely, matter created self.

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I don’t pretend these were anything but beginnings: the feeling of being oneself was still hopelessly amorphous. But then Oxygen levels reached a threshold, courtesy of the workings of photosynthesis. And as they provided the fuel for organisms to grow, including their expensive neural networks, life spans expanded, rendering new kinds of memory important. By now my mollusk progenitor had morphed into a kind of limpet, crawling on the seafloor. And at present it was ready to graduate.

For as the limpet grew, so did the appetites of its neighbors, until the Ediacaran transformed into the Cambrian and creatures concerned with no one were replaced by animals on the hunt. For the first time, mind would evolve in relation to other minds, and there could be no objections or exceptions or stunts.

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