These wonderful memes gained a stronger influence to the human mind during the Age of Enlightenment, and enjoy still overwhelming popularity. Yet, reality looks more like a zoom through an fractal landscape than the still life science dares to study.
The mind, the tool that allows awareness of the connectedness of life, suffers from neglect of scientific observations. Even psychology withdrew from William James idea of introspection to the creation of endless scales and methods to measure electric and chemical activity.
Our emotions, modern psychology tells us, sit in the amygdala, which controls our emotion by sending out neurotransmitters. The DNA holds the blueprint for these neurotransmitters, which are composed out of set twenty different amino acids. If we find ways to chemically or electromagnetically influence the brain, we can manipulate behaviour. If we look closely enough we might even identity the genetic origin of undesirable traits.
Unfortunately this implies that psychology has reached a stage of dogmatism, in which dogmas from neighboring disciplines slip through the filter of skepticism. A lot of biologists still adhere to genetic determinism, and have rather strange ideas about evolution. Our genes, however can only yield any influence on your development in the right environment.
Yet the soulless idea of a biochemical automaton fits nicely into lack of concept of the human mind that psychology so desperately evades. The human mind, however, commands a community of about 50 trillion cells, each one organised into labor sharing components.
Each cell reacts on its environment, and functions for the common greater good. In a balanced and resourceful environment each cell can theoretically produce any protein coded in its DNA. Science has no interest in finding out why which protein gets produced, as it lacks interest in exploring evolution without the preposterous assumpting that mankind is its pinnacle.
Genes are a wonderful thing, and without them the world would look differently. But like anything alive, taken on its own, without embedding them into a proper environment, nothing will happen. That inherent limitation of genetic engineering does not stop scientists from conducting experience with our perma-evolving biosphere.
Nature and nurture don't compete about their influence to create another living being with an individual set of patterns of behaviour, they cooperate. We can certainly find competitive elements in the way natural systems interact, but self-organisation and cooperation dominate in the game of life.
We live on a spot of universe that provides an abundant excess of energy. Chlorophyll converts this energy, and makes it available for other life forms. The sun provided enough entropy for the primordial soup to cook up life, and sustained it in an abundant variety for billions of time our planet spun around it.
The dependency on this complex, solar-power driven universal life support system becomes more apparent when we try to escape from it. Although the spherical structure of our planet still makes many minds spin, some people dreamt about living on the moon or even on mars, which unlike our planet, have no atmosphere. Our habit of breathing oxygen depends on the primary solar energy converters, that not only provide the basis for chemical energy conversion but only conveniently produce this gas so important for our metabolism.
This appears only as a lucky coincidence if you haven't understood evolution (or misunderstood Darwin in popular ways). Although the analytic western way of thinking favors to consider systems separately, preferably in the dysfunctional state of being deconstructed to its basic elements.
The species that exist today exist today because they managed to coexist best. The term ecosystem describes this interdependency of species precisely, yet the sanitised nature patches in the crowded cities of this planet make the complexity of ecosystems hard to fathom, especially on a global scale.
The information age provided a power boost for the dichotomy meme. One and zero, the binary division of the world showed its supremacy by the digitization we experience nowadays. If computers operate binary, and can do so many things, maybe life is just black and white? 1 = humanity, 0 = nature?
The way some people treat our planet demonstrates that this mind set exists, and an elaborate set of laws protects their business interests against greedy mother nature. Deliberately destroying parts of our life support system seems foolish, but rationality has not the strongest influence on human behaviour.
The idea that evolution has a winner, like a competition, distracts from the amazing ways of cooperation between species. The "us or them" meme still goes strong. Once we lost the from God appointed position as owner of planet, we might end our siege of nature as well.
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