Memento Mori

Although I’ve categorised this post as "Science", it could equally have been "Society" or even "Art".

What it is, is a reference to a beautiful and thought-provoking essay: The proper reverence due those who have gone before, written by Paul Z. Myers and posted on his Pharyngula blog. It is a wonderful example of the essayist’s art.

An example of the beauty:

That’s another thing; a bone isn’t just beautiful operational engineering, it’s a trace of a person. It’s a melancholy memento of all that’s been lost…here is this human being who struggled and loved and dreamed and hurt for sixty years, and all that I had of her was a few exquisitely patterned swirls of hydroxyapatite. So much was gone, so much lost, and that’s the fate of all of us—all it takes is a few generations for all personal memory to fade away, and all that’s left is abstractions. For most of us, there won’t even be bits of dry bone in a box in a forgotten room, we’ll be ash and slime, our existence unremembered.

And to get our brains thinking, Myers points out that if you take the Bible to be the record of the history of a people (hundreds of thousands, if not millions of individuals) covering a span of 2,000 years, then you would need 1,600 Bibles to cover the span of time that lies between us and Lucy.

Do your brain a favour – go and read his post.