The Philosophy Embedded in Biology
Over the past two years I have grown very fond of biology and often read various biological works. As I read, I increasingly feel that biology can be even more inspiring than philosophy.
According to biologists, life on Earth began with single-celled organisms. Over billions of years of evolution, single-celled life gradually gave rise to the rich diversity of species on Earth today. A rough estimate puts the number of current species on Earth at more than thirty million, with many more still undiscovered. We humans are only one of them; all animals and plants are descended from a common ancestor.
We humans, as multicellular beings, have all kinds of desires. But in the final analysis, all desires arise simply from the pressures of survival and reproduction. Cells need nutrients; without nutrients, our life cannot continue. Yet the nutrients cells actually need are limited. In our present age, the great majority of people do not suffer from undernutrition but from overnutrition. A normal person, for instance, needs only about 60 grams of protein a day, but the great majority of us consume far more protein than that; the same is true of sugars. Excess nutrition does no good to cells; on the contrary, it does much harm and creates innumerable diseases.
Most of the pressures brought by survival and reproduction are far from rational. In other words, we constantly exaggerate all kinds of dangers in our own minds, magnifying them a hundredfold or more, which wears us out. We worry that we or our descendants will freeze or starve; we worry that we will have no one to support us in old age; we worry that we will have no money for medical treatment when ill. Because of these worries, many people force themselves to do all sorts of things beyond their physical and mental endurance. In the end, as if a curse upon themselves had come true, some people actually fall ill. They strain to plunder and possess, sacrificing their health and losing their peace in the process.
Nor can we face birth, old age, illness, and death with equanimity. Many people seek ways to live forever or extend their years and cannot calmly accept death, even though death is our inevitable fate and a natural law all living things cannot escape. In nature, humans may well be the species most afraid of death. If we could remove the fear of death, our lives would be far happier. But the great majority cannot remove it; this fear torments people at certain stages of life, for instance when we know that we or our loved ones are near death.
The main things our lives go through are cell division and differentiation. From a single fertilized egg cell, we gradually become a human being with a full set of organs, entirely through cell division and differentiation. Through cell division and differentiation we form various tissues, organs, and systems. Our respiratory system helps us take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide; our circulatory system, without a moment's rest, delivers oxygen, water, and nutrients to every cell in the body while carrying away waste; our digestive system helps us digest food, and our excretory system helps us discharge waste; in this process, the bacteria that live in symbiosis with us contribute enormously, acting as decomposers and helping us solve many problems; our brain and nervous system help us command and govern the whole body.
All of this proceeds entirely without our awareness. Our body is the most developed and precise machine in the world; even now, human scientists are still full of unknowns about it. We only roughly know how it works; we are not yet capable of making fundamental changes to it.
Genes determine how our somatic cells operate. Genes are strings of code; our somatic cells strictly follow these codes to shape themselves and to build the various tissues and organs of our body. For example, the reason we have black rather than blond hair is that one or several genes determine our hair color, and we inherited these genes from our parents. Those with blond hair inherited blond-hair genes from their parents, so their hair is different from ours.
The human gene pool contains roughly twenty-five thousand or more genes—some scientists estimate thirty to forty thousand, with some still undiscovered. Some genes originated from viruses or bacteria that once attacked us and, over many years of evolution in our bodies, were transformed. Biologists call us diploid because at each position on our chromosomes there are two copies of a gene, one from the mother and one from the father.
The process by which we become alive is like solving a permutation-and-combination problem; the genes we inherit appear so randomly. Which genes become dominant and which recessive is also a very random matter. So "I" becoming "me" is entirely a random phenomenon; our fate has been full of randomness from the very beginning. If we can fully understand this randomness, we will not be unsettled by all sorts of "accidents." Accepting this randomness calmly can reduce more than ninety percent of our anxiety and attachment.
Every gene has both benefits and possible drawbacks. Some genes favor reproduction, but they also make their carriers more prone to cancer than other people. For example, carriers of BRCA mutant genes may be more sexually attractive and better at attracting the opposite sex than carriers of the corresponding wild-type genes, giving them more opportunities to reproduce; at the same time, these carriers are also more prone to cancer.
Some genes may make one person smarter than another, but intelligence is only a wishful notion of ours. Those so-called smart people may simply be a group of over-reactors whose adaptability to the environment is actually inferior to that of slower people. As an old Chinese saying has it, "the clever are undone by their own cleverness"; over-reactors easily fall victim to their own overly strong reactive capacity.
Humans are always repairing the various flaws in their genes in order to survive better; people develop epigenetic changes in response to their environment. Thus humanity is not fixed; humanity also evolves constantly as the environment changes. Ultraviolet rays are strong in Africa, so Africans' skin is darker. To those who value whiteness as beauty, such skin may not seem attractive. But in fact, the unique dark-skin genes Africans evolved to adapt to the environment helped them resist UV damage. Ultraviolet radiation is the chief culprit in melanoma; the rate of melanoma among Black people is far lower than among White people.
This is truly the old frontier-guardian's loss—who knows but it may be a blessing? When we lament that our intelligence is inferior to others', we overlook that our adaptability may be stronger than that of the exceptionally bright; when we lament that our skin is not as white as others', we overlook that our risk of melanoma is far lower than that of fair-skinned people; when we lament that we are less attractive than others, we overlook that our risk of breast cancer and other cancers is much lower.
The shortcomings that the god of fate bestows on us, viewed from another angle, are precisely the gifts it grants; the strengths it bestows, viewed from another angle, are precisely its curses. Therefore, strengths are not grounds for pride but should rather arouse our vigilance; shortcomings are not grounds for pessimism but have aspects worth our gratitude.
Studying biology this way, would anyone still find biology dull?