as small as a world and as large as alone

3:21am December 2, 2013

soilrockslove:

The same people who talk about evolution and “human nature” as all competition - “nature red in tooth and claw” “survival of the fittest” etc.  Tend to be the same people who are very proud of their large brains, their strong muscles, and so on…

Each of those people are Eukaryotes - which means they are the kind of Life that has complex cells with many organelles inside them.  The eukaryotic cell was made by a co-operative merging of two smaller organisms - the one with the nucleus and fancy cell wall, and another cell called a mitochondria which knew how to burn things for energy *really well*.  These are the ancestors of every multi-celled organism in existence.

Without the large numbers of genes in the nucleus, you can’t make anything as complicated as a brain.  Without the mitochondria burning things neither the muscles nor the brain would have the energy to work.

They can’t have it both ways.

Cooperation goes down to the root.

(So does competition - the world isn’t simple.)

76 notes