When I pay a disproportionate amount of attention to the human dramas my mind gets crowded my nervous systems revs up; but then when I just live, work and engage with life and it's infinite manifestations, it throws cold water on me and kicks me in the butt as if to say “yeah Donna, that is real and part of your adventure here but look at all of this. I mean, really see it all!”
DNA:Deoxyribonucleic acid is this one molecule, this two stranded, double helixed, funky twisted ladder with infinite varieties of four base elements is structured so 99.9% of DNA from any to humans will be identical. Identical! And that 0.1% , that non-conforming bit, is where things like my wild hair, broad shoulders from my dads side of the family and sallow olive skin tone comes from—- well that and so much more.
One Freakin’ Molecule! One primordial soup that gets recipe instructions to add an infinite variety of spices and ingredients, in just he right way, to cook up a human who is inextricably connected to all ( because we are also literally made of “star stuff”) all yet singular in so many ways....Astounding.
And our DNA is not all human- apparently there are remnants of other species that live in us. We all have some neanderthal in us. I like that.
Back in 1983 a scientist named Barbara McClintock received the Noble prize for discovering mobile genetic elements called transpons. They are sometimes called ‘jumping elements” because these genetic elements copy anapest themselves into different locations within a genome. Listeners, All these facts are worthy of serious deep dives.....
Here’s one more wild fact; if they were to be unlinked, the DNA strand in each of our cells would be 6 feet long (they are compressed in our cells) and since we have about 100 trillion cells in our bodies, the total DNA in our bodes, if
stretched out strand to stand would reach over 110 billion miles which, according to one science journal, would be hundreds of trips around the sun.
We are infinite and we are tiny and, as Walt Whitman wrote”, “we contain multitudes.
The more I know, the less I know, the more I wonder the more I bow to how mind-blowing so much is. And I am 100% good with that.
Commentaires