Axis B: Ordinariness

Having looked at all the reasons we are each considerably more unique than the proverbial snowflake, we now take the opposite view: You and I are just typical repetitions of the human theme, fitting very comfortably into the norm by almost every standard of measure.

Typical Bodies

We should be very glad our bodies are ordinary, and generally we suffer when they are not. The practice of medicine only works because almost every human body has the same plan, right down to the location of every tiny nerve and capillary. If you have dextrocardia (Wikipedia), your heart is on the right side of your chest, not the left. That can cause a critical delay in treatment if you need an EMT's assistance. ("I can't find a heartbeat!" "She's breathing, what's the matter with your stethoscope?")

Because we are typical from the gross details right down to the most subtle chemistry of cell respiration, we can be helped when we are sick. The Heimlich Maneuver can be taught to everyone because everyone's airway and lungs and rib-cage work the same way. (But that is also why choking on food is common enough that it is worthwhile teaching the Heimlich: everyone's airway has the identical stupid design, sharing a path with the food-way.)

On any physical measure you care to take -- height, weight, finger-joint length, microbial population of the gut, lung capacity, blood lipid fraction -- whatever doctors can measure now or will figure out how to measure tomorrow -- each of us will be found somewhere on a bell curve and almost always, comfy at the fat center part of the curve.

You and I share a body plan with everybody else and the differences between the extreme examples on any scale are really small. The difference between the tallest and shortest people is what, a factor of four? Between the skinniest and the heaviest, perhaps a multiple of six? I will go out on a limb and say that nowhere in the human race will you find a difference of one order of magnitude (10X) between the most and least of any measure. (But differences of an order of magnitude can be found for example between the largest and smallest trees, cetacians, hailstones, and lots of other products of natural processes.) Even when two human bodies differ greatly on one scale, for example weight, IQ, visual acuity or hair length, they remain near-identical on most other measurable scales.

Even when the gross details of our visible anatomy differ, the internal organs don't. There is much less variation in the size of hearts and livers than there is in body weight or arm length. The 500-pound man has a heart pretty nearly the same size as that of the 90-pound model. There certainly are differences in the efficiency of internal organs; as a pathetically feeble bicyclist I am very aware that my heart, although it may be the same size as Lance Armstrong's, is nowhere near as efficient at moving blood around. Or maybe it's his lungs that are better than mine, or his blood platelets. There is one or a few bell-curves in which Lance and I are found in the opposite tails, thus accounting for the difference in our cycling capacities. But even then, on most measures, he and I will be similar. (I wonder in which measures I exceed him? None of any external significance...)

We are all very, very similar to each other. This is unsettling to think about. One time that it becomes very unsettling indeed is when we come across a picture of a lot of human corpses: a heap of Nazi death camp victims, or a row of people drowned in the 2004 Tsunami. The sight of human bodies lined or stacked like awkwardly-shaped cordwood strips all pretense of uniqueness, leaves us knowing that our bodies, too, could be flung in such a pile and would not stand out in the slightest.

Similar Minds

Our minds, too, are much alike. No big surprise, since minds arise from the physical basis of our brains, which vary little in their anatomy. Again, we can be glad our minds are alike, because that's what makes communication possible! There could be no teaching, and no story-telling, if our minds were even as varied as our hair styles.

Philosophers worry at great and inconclusive length about whether your experience of "red" (or "hot" or "sweet") is the same as my experience of those things. How can we know? We can't. It is at least conceivable that when you and I stand side-by-side and look at a red flag, I see red and you hear (what I would call) a C#-major chord.

Possible, but damned unlikely. This is the sort of thing that philosophers like to chew on, but since the hypothetical you and I are using near-identical corneas, retinas, optic nerves and visual cortexes to see the red flag, the only practical conclusion is that your experience is very much like mine -- in this and every other physical perception.

Emotional perceptions are another matter. The brain is unique among body parts in that its whole purpose is to learn, and it changes throughout life. All our other organs aim at being consistent, and returning to a consistent state after any injury. The brain (and for this essay, I extend "brain" to include all the distributed parts of the body that cooperate in emotional responses) changes and adapts with every experience, so in the pattern of our emotional responses to life, we are each as potentially unique as our individual life histories are. You didn't grow up on a dairy farm in the Pacific Northwest in the 1940s, or attend college in the 60s or live in England in the 70s; and I didn't grow up and form my emotional patterns in the marvellous places you enjoyed. It's a wonder we even speak the same language...

But that wonder is in fact demonstrated, millions of times a day. People whose life histories are so drastically different can yet agree, cooperate, work together, fall in love, teach each other's children, manage each other's finances, enjoy the same novels, plays, and art, vote for the same candidates. Those things simply could not happen if it were not the case that all of our minds tend toward very similar responses. In mental and emotional measurements, as in physical ones, we end nestling fraternally in the fat part of most bell-curves.

In the physical realm I know that Lance Armstrong and I are in opposite tails of some distribution or other. Similarly, in mental abilities I have had the privilege of being in the presence of some really smart people. I rank as smart by some measures; well, I'm on the right-hand side of the IQ curve. But I've talked to and worked near people whose abilities were wayyy over there from me. And I've occasionally tried to teach something to people who were on the other side of the curve and been frustrated by it. So there are outliers; and perhaps the mental and emotional bell-curves are a bit flatter, have longer tails than the physical ones. Just the same, human society, human art, human culture in general could not work if we were not all very closely alike in the way we think and feel.

Alike and Different

We are each absolutely unique; we are each absolutely typical. Which is it? The answer is "yes."

Next time: the Lone Cowboy/Corporate Cog axis.

Axis A: Uniqueness

Each of us is an utterly unique event. This follows from the two things that make us what we are: genetics and history.

Unique Inheritance

Genetically, every physical trait we have is determined some of the tens of thousands of genes our DNA. Gross features like our hair and eye color; subtle features like our tendency toward, or resistance to, certain diseases; features obvious from the cradle and features that only manifest late in life: every possible trait with an organic basis is established by our genes.

And, because the physical structure of our brains provides the machinery of thought, many if not most of the major tendencies and capabilities of our minds and personalities are also established by our genes. Whether we are risk-averse or risk-seeking; whether we can remember musical harmonies, or only remember melodies, or are tone-deaf; whether we are good at spatial orientation or get lost in a closet; whether we flourish in company or prefer to brood alone: all these traits are life-defining and all have a genetic basis. (In twin studies, identical twins separated at birth often prove as adults to have near-identical tastes in clothes and food.)

We get this package of traits and possibilities from our parents, of course, but in an amazing way. In our DNA, each gene is present in double form, two copies, one copy on each side of the ladder-shaped DNA molecule. The copies are not identical. We got one copy from Mom and one copy from Dad, and they can differ. There are lots of complex rules about which copy the cell actually uses when it needs to make a protein (sometimes the paternal copy wins, sometimes the maternal one, which is why my balding hair pattern is exactly like my mother's father's) but the basic idea is: your traits are a mix of your parent's traits.

But wait, there's more. When a male's body makes a sperm, or a female's, an egg, something absolutely zany happens. The double strand of DNA is unzipped, with each strand going to make one germ cell (sperm or egg). That makes sense; when an egg and sperm get together, they'll combine their single strands to give the child a set of properly double-stranded DNA, one strand from each parent.

Let's let one letter stand for each gene along your DNA, at this point just M for Mom's and D for Dad's. In this view, your genome is pretty boring, just a series of gene pairs MD-MD-MD-MD...

But wait, there's more: before making two germ cells, the split strands of DNA randomly exchange segments of genetic information (Wikipedia:meiosis). So what you get from your father's DNA is a random mixture of his parent's contributions. And what you get from your mother's DNA, likewise, a random mixture of genes she got from Nana and Fafa.

Now let's represent a genome with pairs from four letters: N for Nana, your maternal granny, F for mom's dad Fafa, M for dad's MomMom and P for dad's PopPop. Each gene copy you got from your mother was randomly an N or an F, and each copy from your father was randomly an M or P, so your genome (or mine) could be: FP-NM-FM-NP-FM-FP-NP-... with each gene one of 4 combinations of your grandparents' genes at that position.

A human genome has at least 20,000 genes. On that basis there are 4²⁰⁰⁰⁰ possible combinations of grandparental genes. That's already an unimaginably huge number but we can make it larger. Let your mother's four grandparents be a, b, c and d. Let father's be A, B, C, D. Now you can represent your genome as aC-cD-aC-bC-cB-bD-... and so on, with each gene being one of 16 possible combinations of great-grandparents' genes. Now there are 16²⁰⁰⁰⁰ ways to make a genome.

We could continue the math games, adding generations, but after the 6th or 7th (when the genome is a number in 128²⁰⁰⁰⁰) we have to start thinking about multiple contributions, where we inherit from the same people on both sides of the family (cousins marrying, etc.).

It doesn't matter. There won't be 16²⁰⁰⁰⁰ humans born in all of time, or 2²⁰⁰⁰⁰ for that matter. Your precise combination of genes, nor mine nor anyone's, has never existed and will never be repeated before the heat death of the universe.

Moment in Time

From the moment of conception a person's genome is in dynamic interaction with its environment. The body grows, changes, struggles, waxes and wanes as the environment lets it; and as soon as birth happens the brain begins to do the same. Every experience changes us. Even identical twins have different life histories, right from infancy: one is fed before the other; one sees a butterfly and the other is napping; one throws a snowball and the other is hit.

We are altered moment by moment by experiences trivial and shattering. Every interaction between our senses and the physical world changes us, as does every interaction with another person—obviously some more than others, but nothing that penetrates consciousness fails to leave a mark however light.

And your life history is different from mine and every other person alive, even people born in the same place, same time, same social class, same ethnicity.

And your history cannot be the same as that of any person born in another place or another moment in history. Sure, when you look at the ocean, you see "the same" ocean as did Whonk, the Neanderthal, and everyone between you and him. But you got to that view wearing shoes... and your perception of what you see is different in a thousand ways from Whonk's, because you know the ocean as the skin on a globe, something traversed by people. Even if you look at the ocean with your identical twin, you can't be certain the pair of you are seeing "the same" ocean—because of the time when you saw an Orca lobbing, and your twin was looking the other way and missed it.

Even if there were another genome like yours to nine places, the person bearing it couldn't be the same as you because that twin couldn't share your identical life history.

Summary

Bottom line: you, me, any human being, is as utterly unique as a phenomenon can be, never to be repeated. Any philosophy must acknowledge and build on this.

Next: we contradict all of the above.

The cruciform axis: overview

I've been thinking about four related statements.

All four can be justified by observation (and I will do that as we go along) and yet they contradict each other, at least superficially.

I think that these statements are really the four poles of an X-Y coordinate system, and by locating ourselves on the social plane that they define, we can learn about ourselves and say useful things about how we should behave.

Here are the four statements.

1. You are utterly unique, a one-of-a-kind event never to be repeated as long as the universe lasts.
2. You are utterly typical, barely distinguishable from the other 6,000,000,000 people that crowd this world.
3. You are an independent agent, solely responsible for your actions and for your own survival.
4. You are inextricably mixed into human society, depending for your very life on the actions of others and sharing responsibility for every success and failure of your family, school, and nation.

As I say, each of these can be justified by observation, and I mean to do that. Yet each pair is contradictory: a contradicts b, c contradicts d.

Each probably strikes you as having elements of truth, yet each probably seems like an exaggeration. In each pair, one probably seems more accurate and the other, more of a stretch. But which? My expectation is that different people will weigh the statements differently.