Data for a new religion

By Dalia Céspedes

HAVANA – They say that religion once meant the act of reuniting (religare). If I haven’t misunderstood Socrates, just as philosophy is love for something you don’t have (wisdom), one reunites that which should not be separate. Why so many centuries of religion have failed to achieve such a goal is another matter, it’s just that as I read La selva interna (The inner jungle) by Cuban biologist and zoologist Alfonso Silva I wondered if the topic of the book, and of all our existence, is the short-circuit which separates two channels of reality:  bios, life, and logos.

I will not translate logos but will invite the reader to do so; it is a challenge before us for several thousand years.

Belief plays a determining role in science, no less determining than the one it can play in religion. It’s not surprising that we see the sentence it is believed printed in the pages of all scientific texts. This one is no exception, and it is not one of its smallest merits to show some of science’s current beliefs regarding our biological condition. For instance, it is believed that

-The length of our nose does not correspond to the need to better sense rose perfume, much less to sustain eyeglasses, but to our ancestors need to capture as much humidity as possible in the torrid conditions of the African plains.

– Our spectacularly enameled teeth are a result of a change of diet, in dire times, which included roots and tubers.

– Human males discovered speech in their attempt to seduce females.

–  Neanderthals sang in phrases but without lyrics.

Who knows if the lack of lyrics decreed their extinction, it is also believed, though, that they were annihilated because they did not practice the social division between wandering male warriors and domestic sedentary females: women and men hunted and fought together. I believe that to vanish from earth in this way is much better than the one that awaits us.

And last, but not least, it is believed that the placenta was invented by “certain reptiles” in order to protect the fetus 300 million years ago.

For such refreshing data, which come to lighten our brains from heavy human exclusiveness, we are gladly forced to welcome Silva’s book, for certain these facts and figures are far more eloquent than stock market and oil prices, Mitt Romney’s votes or Messi’s goals. At least as far as our biological condition, i.e. our life, is concerned.

Some other information acquires a proverbial nature, like saying that the gorilla’s penis is but six centimeters long, but not even the leopard dares to attack him. The gorilla, on the other hand, manages to fulfill his reproductive mission.

A second proverb: “In the race between comprehension and legends understanding must always prevail.”

A race? One couldn’t help remembering Achilles and the turtle, whereby comprehension is the fastest loser or, like the turtle, the slower winner?

But, which race, and where to?

No doubt, the idea of a finality propelling our acts has come to be more polluting of the human mind than an oil spill is for the ocean. The notion, based on a belief as any other, that finality constitutes “the direction” of life is meaningless unless such direction is guided by traffic signs, and policemen.

Not that science and religion have missed an opportunity to veil reality with those obstinate elements signaling towards a blind alley. Could a question be enough to solve those misunderstandings? Is it possible to separate in logos – the same logos applied to biology, or philology – intelligence from imagination?

Each human being reenacts in her conception and growth the transit of millions of animal experiences; without them she would not be what she is nor would she have the potential to eventually become herself, a sovereign creature. That a love for life is not only comprehended in the neo-cortex as a fact that can be easily observed as we watch a baby eating soil, shall he have a poorer understanding of life than the one that a book-eating philosopher has?

I owe these thoughts, or coming beliefs, to the subtle entertaining force of this new “jungle book” whose author carries out, smilingly, an analysis of the mental dimension of animalness – either ours or that of “our cousins”. Then, I wonder, if those other apes are our cousins, who are our aunts and uncles? Is there a parallel origin to ours, a close enough but separate source of our existence? I would call them brethren.

Given the succession of scales, skins, feathers and furs, there is still an inner garment in the beast which requires definition. The author himself acknowledges that “no one has the slightest idea about how a fly thinks, or a snake, or a bat”; in so doing he renders outstanding service to sincerity for as a matter of fact we do not know either why, if we think, we think of dropping two atomic bombs in a row, or we think of asking money in exchange for medical care or education, and instead of protecting life we think of saving the economy, the banks, or the political principles.

According to Silva there is “an inextricable relationship between hunting, group life, good nourishment and the development of intelligence.” In current terms, that would mean that to gather in order to decide harmonically how to attain the objectives of the tribe of the living while profiting from a well balanced diet could trigger that time bomb which intelligence is.

That would mean today that to unite in search of a harmonious definition of the tribe of the living and its needs, and to go for it while profiting from a balanced diet, could trigger that time bomb which intelligence is.

A second Big Bang? That wouldn’t be necessary. Silva tells us that 35,000 years ago, the invention of the needle meant a huge mental leap and the woman, or women who invented it had a cultural importance equal to that of an Aristotle or an Einstein. To look today for the needle of intelligence in the middle of the haystack of intelligence could be a task for women since they are much better then men – not only in verbal and social capacity and the control of sexual impulses, but, precisely in that sort of memory which is used to locate objects.

Male animals spend most of their time organizing that which Silva calls “a dynamic choreography” whose goal seems to be that of alluring female animals. A few days ago a well-known singer and songwriter was shown on Cuban television confessing that “we all started to write songs in order to seduce the girls.” There are, nevertheless, elements much less innocent than love songs which are implied in that “dynamic choreography” which is the testosteronic human society of today.

And one of them is undoubtedly expressed in the obsolete idea that there is no development without competition. May primates use the pages of Silva’s book to clear their minds. They then will realize that nature thrives with an excess of resources which sustains an infinitude of laws and principles. Not only is it with antagonisms that the universe is woven.