Photographer: Thirteen-year-old Zai Fuchigami
My friend Sandra who lives near Berkeley sent me this photo through email. She received it last week from a thirteen-year-old boy who she met on a beach in Hawaii with his parents. His name is Zai Fuchigami. His father is Japanese. His mother is Japanese/Pakistani and born in Hong Kong. The Fuchigami family was taking a year to travel, live, and learn when they met Sandra. Zai loves lizards and bugs and snapped this photo of a particular stick bug, resting on a particular tree, on a little island in southern Japan, where he and his family now live. The world continues to shrink as the web of unifying connections continues to grow.
This bug has somehow become a stick, an extraordinary adaptation of a species to its environment. Except, according to Darwin’s theory of evolution when combined with genetic theory, this is not an adaption at all, at least not one that has anything to do with this bug’s connection to its environment. This story goes something like this. Genetic characteristics are not altered by the environment of the parent. Thus, the stick bug did not become shockingly similar to a stick because its ancestors for countless millennia walked on sticks. Rather, this similarity is explained by random genetic mutations coupled with natural selection, that is, the offspring of the improved genetically mutated bugs were more successful and thus more abundant than the genetically non-mutated bugs. In other words, luck started certain bugs down a beneficial mutation path. These bugs had greater survival success and eventually became stick bugs. From a strictly genetic point of view, the similarity between bug and stick was the result of coincidence.
There were rival stories. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck theorized that living organisms could direct their own evolution. His theory was dealt a deathblow by Mendelian genetics when the accepted belief become that genetic characteristics (DNA) are strictly inherited and completely independent of environment.
So we are left to believe that the awe-inspiring similarity between the stick bug and a stick is happenstance. Really? Of course, one can feel the Theologian nodding his or her head and saying, “Yes my child, there could only be a Divine cause of something so spectacular.” And yet, I wonder about the fascination with cause and the need for one to dominate. The competition between causes is an old story, one that has led to much havoc. Yes, the lens of causality is a powerful way to ‘see’ the world and creates some very stories, regardless of which side of the science/religion debate one falls. Notice, however, that both explanations minimize or even eliminate the importance of the stick bug’s actual life, and by analogy, of our life. I suspect that the fascination with cause within human consciousness is a symptom of a formless mind trying to gain traction and sense of control over experience. (See my previous blog, The Fall into Formlessness, dated October 5th, 2014.)
What if there are other stories? What if the stick bug is an outlier? What if its ancestors were outliers of unity? In this story, the ancestral bugs unified with its surroundings, perhaps by walking on, sleeping on, or even eating sticks. Somehow, over time, they changed genetic shape through unification and became stick bugs. I like this story. It gives me hope.
This does not mean that Darwin or Mendel or the Theologians are wrong. But what about outliers? What about species or even individual expressions of that species that do not conform to the set patterns of genetics? Whose life experiences matter and are not the product of direct divine intervention? If I do not believe in outliers, I miss the dumbfounding beauty of this stick bug. I miss the feeling that the realization of unity might transform us. I miss the story of interconnected unity brought by technology that sent me this picture.
I choose this last story to live simultaneously with that of Darwin and Mendel and the Theologian. I embrace them all, but for different purposes. I allow for all stories, even more fun ones…maybe the stick became a bug, not the other way around. And maybe pots and pans talk to each other and always will.