DimaKompot: переводы

→Why do we go to war? There are many answers, but part of this book concerns one of them: because war is an inevitable property of humankind, an inheritance from our distant ancestors, and as such it’s part of the interconnectedness of the biosphere throughout its long history. In other words, war is part of the symbiotic heritage of all life. Therefore we must look to coexisting populations and their interactions, historical as well as recent, human as well as other species’, if we ever want a serious answer to the question above. Behaviors akin to warfare are found in species across the entire spectrum of the animal kingdom, so it’s no surprise that humans exhibit them too. Despite the ubiquity (and tacit inevitability) of population wars, a closer examination of some distantly related species reveals that there is as much interdependence in the biosphere as there is violence. The present is full of assimilations from populations of the past, and when we recognize some of these, it becomes apparent that there is hope for a less violent future for humankind. Hence the inevitability of population wars doesn’t mean that our future has to be violently catastrophic. In order to achieve such aresult, however, humans have to come to terms with some basic facts of population biology, and we need to see a shift in consciousness away from some of our most deeply rooted prejudices and bad habits that have come from the rapid expansion of our species.

→Today, as more facts of history and biology have come to light, it’s much harder to draw a distinction between ourselves and those we consider “others.” This has created an intellectual crisis on many levels. How, for instance, do we make sense of the data that show humans are healthier when they have symbiotic bacteria living all over and inside them? This implies that our “selves” are actually shared communities of different species. What do we make of the data that show nearly half of our genome is from viruses? We carry around in each of our cells a habitat that allows viral replication as a necessary mechanism in the perpetuation of our own species. Another portion of the human genome is from Neanderthals, long-dead ancestors who could rightly claim us all as carrying on a portion of their genetic heritage. How can we reconcile this growing list of facts that testify to the ubiquity of symbiosis with the old narratives of competition and the “struggle for existence”? I think humans—particularly those who consider themselves paragons of an intellectually advanced, modern society—are having a hard time with it. Rapidly accumulating biological data are causing a dissonance of sorts between old narratives, based on ignorance, that run deep in the collective consciousness of all societies, and the new implications coming from recent studies. Scientists in general do a great job of collecting empirical data, but generally fall short in explaining the implications of their findings. Because of this, ironically, the delusions of modern Western society grow stronger in the face of increased knowledge. This is particularly evident in the narrative of war.

→Living things have something profound in common: They are all members of populations. In the past these groups were easy to tell apart. We humans considered some of them evil, some friendly, some wild and untamed, and some put here simply to serve our own selfish needs. It was easy to do so because we were ignorant. We didn’t have DNA tests to determine relatedness. We didn’t have electron microscopes to view microbes living inside us. We didn’t have radioactive isotopes to calibrate the time lines of migrations. And before about 1859, we didn’t have a narrative that linked all organisms as related by descent from a common ancestor.

→To Allison