Pardon Me While I Gush

Once upon a time, you were a single celled organism. That cell then divided once, then its two resulting cells divided again, then your four cells became eight, and on and on. Once your original egg had divided a bit, things began to take shape. The ball that your cells had formed (blastula) began to neurulate, creating a divot, then a dent, then a dome, then a socket, then a fish bowl, until it closed off again, leaving a sphere of cells inside another sphere. That outer sphere would eventually become your skin and nervous system and that inner sphere would eventually become your organs, with the space between becoming your skeleton. The amazing part of this entire process is the fact that each individual cell has no awareness of its role in the grand ballet it is a part of. Each cell is simply following conditional rules dictated to it by the chemical compound of its DNA protein sequences.

Every time I think about this, it blows my mind again and again. The fact that all of this contributes to the fact that I have a mind to blow is even too much to consider. I wiggle my fingers in front of my face and imagine the tiny cells that make up my skin, my muscles, my blood; they're no more aware of each other than they are of their role as part of me, but they work together in such a complex fashion. Even the nerve cells that tell your brain where a sensation is coming from are dumb, even though they appear to be highly advanced. The fashion in which they signal to your brain about a sensation is based on a chemical signature that is completely unique to its original placement along the nerve network. If you were to move your flesh from your back to your chest before your nervous system grew in, there would be no market for back scratchers. Scientists once did this to a frog (they swapped a patch of a tadpole's flesh from belly and back, then let it grow to full size) and when they tickled its belly, it would scratch its back.

Each one of your body's cells has a lineage that can (theoretically in large life forms, certainly in much smaller ones) be traced back to those original 4 or 8 cells of your morula. The incredible story here is in how those basic cells, without any guiding hand, divided and divided until there emerged specific-purpose cells that would make up your marrow, your blood, your liver, your nerves or your brain. The simple answer is that it is all just chemical reactions that prompt asymmetrical cell division, gradually shaping a cell into its destined purpose. A more detailed answer would be found in the differences of the proteins within the two halves of a cell that splits unevenly. One half will, on account of its different chemical makeup, go on to form a different type of cell than its sister. The DNA within all of our cells provides chemical "instructions" for all of this, ensuring that eventually, you will develop to the point where you can read my blog. (Congrats!)

All of this is done without any guidance from outside. Each cell has its own instruction manual, copied from the original cell, that it uses to determine its own individual actions. Somehow, it all comes together and we have this world, this incredible world, as a result. Even after writing all of that, I'm mouthing, "Wow..." Order from chaos from order from chaos.

We see a lot of examples of hordes of entities working with only their individual awareness in nature. Starling birds are an obvious example. They flock in thousands, performing amazing shows for onlookers, diving and weaving at great speeds. There are no choreographers or leaders within the flock, each bird only follows its own instincts to dance with the rest, avoiding others by inches. Not only is this principle of behavior quite astounding, it is an example of how a macro view of nature reveals characteristics of its behavior on a micro level.



I want to dedicate this post to my sister, Mikie (the sane one). She knows why.

Life is fucking beautiful.