A Lil' End-of-Year Squirrel Porn
Martha and I just watched a couple squirrels humping right outside our kitchen window. It was my first time witnessing the act of squirrel copulation, and I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, their coitus was interruptus by the fact that they were enjoying each other while the female clung upside down to a tree branch. The weight of the male began dragging her down (and I will ask you to please refrain from making your very funny “men dragging women down” jokes!), and so, eventually, she shook him off and escaped to a higher branch.
They did not resume their affair.
I don’t write much about sex. What’s to say? My own relationship with sex has changed over the decades. I assume that’s normal. The body has its own tempos, which slow over time. When I was a young and randy lad in my early 20’s, most of my attention was devoted to finding comely lasses to shag. Now, I am older, not nearly so horny, and glad for it.
But why should that be? From an evolutionary point of view, it makes perfect sense. From a biological point of view, though, I’m curious about the internal mechanisms that tell the human body that no more fucks need be given.
Yes, I understand that the body regulates testosterone and estrogen. As we age, those levels decrease, which dampens our libidos. What I’m asking is both somewhat deeper and somewhat stupider than that. My interest lies in the composition of the body itself.
If you haven’t spent any time looking at cells since high school biology, I recommend it. I had no idea how complex these little fuckers are. Each cell is something like a factory charged with making more factories. Except I doubt any human-made factory can compete with what our bodies do all on their own.
I spent some time a couple of weeks ago learning about cellular structure because I don’t understand the first thing about biological organization. How is it that cells form? How is it that they “know” what to do? How is it that different cells have different purposes, but each cell begins as a copy of the cell that came before? How did DNA evolve from RNA? How did RNA show up? How do those little machines within each factory, known as organelles, fulfill their own purposes if they do not contain DNA of their own (except mitochondria and chloroplasts)?
The human body contains something 35 trillion cells. Each cell contains hundreds of trillions of molecules, most of which are water. When scientists say that people are “mostly water,” that’s what they mean. We’re basically soup. Except we’re not even a good, hearty soup. We’re a thin gruel. We’re water and a few scraggly vegetables in the form of our hormones and some thin cuts of meat in the form of proteins. That’s pretty much all we are, plus some nucleic acids, fats, and carbohydrates. And somehow, this little soup made the entire Fast and Furious series.
How?
I know there are mechanical answers to these questions, but the mechanical processes aren’t nearly as interesting to me as the underlying questions. I can accept that all of these things are the products of evolution - there’s incredible evidence testifying to the accuracy of the evolutionary model to describe life’s diversity and complexity – and when we start thinking about the way evolution works through natural selection, it gives us some sense of the vast, brain-scrambling timescales required for successive waves of complex life to evolve, mature, and go extinct.
What seems to have no answer yet, though, is how electrified soup should ever be anything more than soup. For Christmas Eve supper, my son and I made some homemade French onion soup. We had leftovers. Yesterday, I reheated a bowl of the stuff. When I took it out of the microwave, it did not appear to have gained consciousness. So why would biological soup behave any differently?
As I’m sure you’re aware, the theory holds that Earth’s early chemical composition of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen could form organic molecules when activated by an energy source: lightning, perhaps, or volcanoes. In 1953, two scientists named Miller and Urey demonstrated that organic molecules could form in exactly this way. These organic molecules, known as amino acids (the only thing I remember from high school biology is that amino acids are “the building blocks of life,” a phrase I did not, and still do not fully, understand). These amino acids form nucleotides, which create DNA and RNA.
Each cell of our body contains 3 billion base pairs of DNA, which acts as our body’s “operating system.” Actually, I wasn’t sure if that was a good analogy to use so I looked into it a little further and found this essay from a software developer named Giancarlo Sanchez, which dives deeper into the analogy than I am capable, and from which I stole the above Bill Gates quote. Definitely worth a read. And yet none of that explains how we become conscious beings.
None of it gives us any clearer sense of why you or I should emerge from those processes. I don’t mean the physical you or I. I mean the essential person – or the illusion of the essential person, perhaps – that exists within and without the biological systems themselves. Is there such a person? Or such a squirrel? Or is the entire enterprise of life nothing more than a few dumb chemicals having a laugh?
I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows. The answer is somewhere, but I don’t know if we’ll find it encoded it in our DNA. What I do know is that life begets life for reasons that also remain somewhat foggy to me (yes, I know that evolutionary theory dictates that the life which has survived to now did so because it out-competed the life that did not, which would necessitate that it had some “desire” to perpetuate itself). Life as we know it seems to want to be. Unless it requires hanging off a tree branch, upside down, waiting for your furry partner to finish while you contemplate falling to your death, all the while having two humans staring at you from a kitchen window.
What a life.
“And somehow, this little soup made the entire Fast and Furious series.”
I cackled.
An enjoyable diversionary read. Thanks.