Vessels of the Rock

“D.K. Belyaev and his colleagues took captive silver foxes, Vulpes vulpes, and set out systematically to breed for tameness. They succeeded, dramatically. By mating together the tamest individuals of each generation, Baylaev had, within 20 years, produced foxes that behaved like Border collies, actively seeking human company and wagging their tails when approached. That is not very surprising, although the speed with which it happened may be. Less expected were the by-products of selection for tameness. These genetically tamed foxes not only behaved like collies, they looked like collies. They grew black-and-white coats, with white face patches and muzzles. Instead of the characteristic pricked ears of a wild fox, they developed ‘lovable’ floppy ears. Their reproductive hormone balance changed, and they assumed the habit of breeding all the year round instead of in a breeding season. Probably associated with their lowered aggression, they were found to contain higher levels of the neurally active chemical serotonin. It took only 20 years to turn foxes into ‘dogs’ by artificial selection.”
-Dawkins, The Ancestors Tale.

My body has within it some tens of thousands of Carbon atoms. By all likelihood, there is somewhere in some vital organ, a single Carbon atom which was at a previous time of my mother, and yet before that of some leaf or piece of meat, and was still earlier a constituent of some vast geological formation. Even before that it was Helium or Hydrogen, forged into something wholly different in the unimaginable conditions of a star. And in a time yet to come, when the last x-thousand Carboned creature lies flat and dead on whatever wasted version of this globe proceeds, it will float for lonely millennia as stable atmospheric CO2. Of these things are Men made, and each is but a nexus of such histories.

I'm coming home in two weeks. Almost none of you have any idea how that feels.