Hey, how ya’ doin’? No, you can’t be busy all the time, thank god. There’s always some down time here at the diner; when all the tables are clean, all the dishes are washed, and no one’s in the joint. Sure, I could find something to do--there’s always something that needs to be done. But there’s something else about being alone in the diner with a cup of coffee. Just sitting by the window watching the world go by. Thinking about it all. You know what I mean?Yeah, I hear ya’, sometimes it can get to be a bit much. Like, just now, before you came in, I was thinking about how, when you really get right down to it, you and I and every other living thing on this planet are just containers for transporting DNA through time.
Ha, ha, yeah, I guess that is kinda’ far out. I think that’s why I feel like talking about it. I think I was starting to scare myself.
Right, I know, but I couldn’t help it. Once I started down that neural pathway I couldn’t stop. Before I knew it, there I was staring the monster right in the face.
Well, maybe, but you have to admit that there’s some truth to it. OK, look-- think about the senses and how they serve your instinct for self-preservation. When you respond instinctively, it’s not really you who’s responding to the input of the senses, it’s your DNA keeping itself going. I mean, you don’t stop and consciously think about pulling your hand out of the fire, it does that by itself. The crazy thing about humans is that we have the will to be stubborn or just plain stupid enough to keep our hand in the fire if we want to. When you look at it this way sheer stupidity and sheer genius have a lot in common. But the senses and the instincts, they’re just there to keep the DNA you’re carrying valid for moving on to the next generation.
Yes, yes, that’s it! but stay with me for a minute here. Think about how it works, how you can be sitting somewhere just minding your business, or maybe walking down the street, or getting on the bus when WHAM! someone you’ve never in your life seen before comes along and rips your heart out. You get dizzy, you can’t think straight, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know where you’re coming from, you can’t even remember your own name. I mean this whole reaction has nothing to do with you, the person that you think yourself to be, your conscious mind . This is your senses doing an end run around you and heading straight to your DNA and pulling the alarm. WHOOP WHOOP candidate for breeding! WHOOP WHOOP breeding match! breeding match! The whole process cuts you-- who you think you are, who you imagine yourself to be-- right out of the picture. You don’t even know what’s going on. Sure, everybody wises up eventually, but it’s usually too late by then. By then it’s a done deal. It’s your DNA planning your future for you. And the thing that really kills me is that it doesn’t even bother getting permission first.
Right, right! That’s the really scary part! We have no idea what if any relationship there is between what we think we are and what our DNA says we are. I’m just hoping that all these generations of civilized living will eventually initiate a sort of feed-back loop with the with the instincts. Something like a peace treaty between us-- who we think we are-- and our DNA.
Well, sure, of course, but don’t you think at some point the nature of civilization begins to imprint itself on the nature of human beings. According to everything I’ve ever learned, all creatures evolve in response to their environment. What makes us any different? And since civilization has been our environment for quite some time now, and doesn’t appear to me to be going anywhere anytime soon, I think that we-- or at least some of us-- must be evolving in response to it or else we’re going to all go extinct as the world changes under our feet, right? I mean, at some point the changes on the environment we’ve effected in and through civilization will have to work their way through all the various levels of our beings and actually imprint themselves on our DNA.
Absolutely, you're totally right. Human civilization is incredibly varied and people are going to adapt and evolve in countless ways, and the end result will in all likelihood be an entire host of adaptations changing human DNA in many different ways. I guess we just have to hope that we all manage to hold on to our humanity.
Don’t you think, then, that the character of the civilization we inhabit will ultimately come to affect the nature of the human beings that inhabit it? In essence, that, right now as we live and breath, the choices we make in our day to day existence will be deposited, like rain that ever so slowly but nonetheless surely makes its way through the various strata of soil to the water table, in subtle but nevertheless real changes in our actual DNA, ultimately determining who among us adapt and survive and who among us perish.
Right, exactly. So next time you plunk a quarter in that jukebox over there, remember that the buttons you push could determine the ultimate fate of your progeny, ha, ha, ha.
So, what did you say you wanted on that hamburger, again?