I've had much reason to ponder the impossible blood connection between me and my brother. He is purely a creature of duty and obligation, unable to form a concept of personal choice and personal freedom. Meanwhile, I don't even recognize the validity of the concept of duty, experience all obligations as a burden, and am all about being free to choose (which I have never been even once in my life thanks to a precocious childhood in which I drew the attention of the wrong, ruthless people, who never let you go once they get their hooks into you). It often feels like my brother and I are different species, and I have to marvel that we could have the same blood lineage right down to the same parents.
But it's not really surprising. The way a person will be is determined by a vast number of different genes, and how these genes make us what we are is still poorly understood. The specific genes we get depends purely on which one of dozens of the mother's ova is fertilized by which one of the father's quadrillions of sperm. It's trivial to philosophers that nearly the entirety of possible human beings never comes to exist because of the almost unimaginably huge number of egg-sperm combinations that never happen. That has a far greater influence on the way people are than any trivial factor such as heredity--and heredity is trivial because, ultimately, we all have the same, comparatively tiny number of human ancestors, and our lineages over the 200,000 years of our subspecies' existence overlap in a tangle not even Asimov's God-computer could figure out.
There is also the fact that, from what I've read, mammals have 95% of our genes in common with plants. The difference between a carrot and an elephant is genetically minute, but realizationally extreme. And it's in this tiny field of variation that chaos reigns thanks to the factors described in my last paragraph. That chaos is why I consider the utter randomness of blood relations to be evil. All it does is trap incompatible people in difficult relationships and make our lives miserable.
I'm anticipating certain formulaic responses driven by pure social instinct (which is an instinct we inherit from the very first prokaryotes 3.4 billion years ago), but am going to wait to see whether anyone actually makes such responses before addressing them.
But it's not really surprising. The way a person will be is determined by a vast number of different genes, and how these genes make us what we are is still poorly understood. The specific genes we get depends purely on which one of dozens of the mother's ova is fertilized by which one of the father's quadrillions of sperm. It's trivial to philosophers that nearly the entirety of possible human beings never comes to exist because of the almost unimaginably huge number of egg-sperm combinations that never happen. That has a far greater influence on the way people are than any trivial factor such as heredity--and heredity is trivial because, ultimately, we all have the same, comparatively tiny number of human ancestors, and our lineages over the 200,000 years of our subspecies' existence overlap in a tangle not even Asimov's God-computer could figure out.
There is also the fact that, from what I've read, mammals have 95% of our genes in common with plants. The difference between a carrot and an elephant is genetically minute, but realizationally extreme. And it's in this tiny field of variation that chaos reigns thanks to the factors described in my last paragraph. That chaos is why I consider the utter randomness of blood relations to be evil. All it does is trap incompatible people in difficult relationships and make our lives miserable.
I'm anticipating certain formulaic responses driven by pure social instinct (which is an instinct we inherit from the very first prokaryotes 3.4 billion years ago), but am going to wait to see whether anyone actually makes such responses before addressing them.
