shadows of forgotten ancestors - richard dawkins

[...]... on a study of the political and emotional roots of the nuclear arms race—which led us back to World War II, which of course had its origins in World War I, which was a consequence of the rise of the nation-state, which traces straight back to the very beginnings of civilization, which was a by-product of the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals, which crystallized out of a very... Gospel of Dirt 5 Life Is Just a Three-Letter Word 6 Us and Them 7 When Fire Was New 8 Sex and Death 9 What Thin Partitions … 10 The Next-to-Last Remedy 11 Dominance and Submission 12 The Rape of Caenis 13 The Ocean of Becoming 14 Gangland 15 Mortifying Reflections 16 Lives of the Apes 17 Admonishing the Conqueror 18 The Archimedes of the Macaques 19 What Is Human? 20 The Animal Within 21 Shadows of Forgotten. .. hundreds of millions of years after that The largest ones melted the surface, boiled away the oceans, and flushed the air off into space This earliest epoch of Earth history is, appropriately, called Hadean, hell-like Perhaps life arose a number of times, only to be snuffed out by a collision with some wild, careening worldlet newly arrived from the depths of space Such “impact frustration” of the origin of. .. inspiration and a heightened sense of urgency, it was during the years of preparation of this book that we became the parents of Alexandra Rachel and Samuel Democritus— beloved namesakes of unforgettable ancestors CARL SAGAN ANN DRUYAN June 1, 1992 Ithaca, N.Y Prologue THE ORPHAN’S FILE Having seen a small part of life, swift to die, men rise and fly away like smoke, persuaded only of what each has met with... Nanrei Kobori, late Abbot of the Temple of the Shining Dragon, a Buddhist sanctuary in Kyoto, said to us God is an invention of Man So the nature of God is only a shallow mystery The deep mystery is the nature of Man Had life and humans first come to be hundreds or even thousands of years ago, we might know most of what’s important about our past There might be very little of significance about our... consecutive pages, nothing as elaborate as a complete chapter Many of the words are blurred Most have been lost.7 Here then is one version of some of the early pages of the orphan’s file, the missing note that should have accompanied the foundling on the doorstep, something of our beginnings and the forgotten ancestors that are central to the outcome of our story Like most family stories, it begins in the dark—... odd-lot, motley new moon As you watch, an Earth-sized body plows into Uranus, knocking the planet over on its side, so once each orbit its poles point straight at the distant Sun Closer in, where the disk gas has by now been cleaned away, some of the worlds are becoming Earth-like planets, another class of survivors in this game of world-annihilating gravitational roulette The final accumulation of. .. makeup When we look there, or to the Southern Highlands of Mars, or to the moons of the outer planets, we find a myriad of impact craters, piled one on top of the other, the record of catastrophes of ages past Since we humans have returned pieces of the Moon to the Earth and determined their antiquity, it is now possible to reconstruct the chronology of cratering and glimpse the collisional drama that... business In fact, the history and fate of our planet and the beings upon it have been profoundly, crucially influenced, through the whole history of the Earth and not just in the time of its origins, by what’s out there Our oceans, our climate, the building blocks of life, biological mutation, massive extinctions of species, the pace and timing of the evolution of life, all cannot be understood if we... ancient Greeks, Uranus,6 god of the sky, and his wife Gaia, goddess of the Earth Ancient Mesopotamian religions had the same idea In dynastic Egypt the gender roles were reversed: Nut was goddess of the sky, and Geb god of Earth The chief gods of the Konyak Nagas on the Himalayan frontier of India today are called Gawang, “Earth-Sky,” and Zangban, “SkyEarth.” The Quiché Maya (of what is now Mexico and . alt=""