The Story of Evolution. In My Own Words.

It was my birthday.

I got everything I wanted, which that day was sushi from the delivery place, a moelleux aux chocolat (that gooey lookin’ baked good displayed above), and a bunch of flowers. I was very happy with that. That’s the thing, my ‘unique selling point’ is that my default setting is happy, and I can be heard saying ‘this is the best thing I’ve EVER seen/eaten/heard/done’ at least once a week and really, really meaning it.

So for my birthday I decided I wanted to go see a classical concert. Not any old concert, this one was by the top orchestra in the country, in a pretty rad art deco building.

I thought I bought the best seats in the house, but then this human incarnation of Sonic the Hedgehog sat down in front of me:

They were playing

Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (it gets really magical around 2:11) which at that point I thought was the best thing I’ve EVER heard BUT NO.

Then a pianist came on to play Ravel’s concerto pour piano en sol majeur and sweet Jesus. Good god. Mother Mary. All the hairs rose on the back of my neck. I nearly cried. He played the whole thing from memory, no notation at all. The perfect coalescence of the orchestra’s timing was exquisite.

So while I was sat there shifting from cheek to cheek, trying to make sure each buttock got at least some blood flow, at some point I drifted off. And I thought to myself the following thing: at midday that same day I was sat in a sports café with two colleagues watching the activity in the university swimming pool down below. All those people lapping the lanes – they looked like

frogs with their splayed limbs. It reminded me at some point we used to live in water all the time. We were frisky cells jiggling around in the sunlight reproducing endlessly without thinking. Salt water was our milieu. We ate flies and each other. No sheriff in the mud puddle back then.

And then! At some point we were lizard gods, bigger than all the creatures, plotting to eat each other and getting our asses degraded by the bigger lizards. We didn’t have words to say ‘wrong hole, buddy’. Lizard monsters with wings and tails that, if you think about it, were probably caked in our own crap. We probably thought things like “Me eat tasty bird in tree. Me eat tasty egg of bird. Me eat… aaahhhhh motherfucker” CHOMP.

I will… sssss… rule your… sssss… assssss…

And then we were hairy stinky apes who banded together to hunt for smaller monkeys. We rolled in our own dung to cover our asses from predators tracking our scent. We gloried in our own execrable whiff.

I imagine the moment humans took the baton from the apes looked something like this. Just two guys making out a little.

When were we recognisably conscious, do you think? At what point did we start wondering about shit? When I was a kid I got a book out of the library and I memorised all the ‘eras’: the Pleistocene, the Mezozoic, all that bullshit and I knew what creatures lived when, for no particular reason.

Is there really that much variety in our species? Six billion and some change of us on this planet, that evolved from a couple of friction-and-sunlight obsessed cells. Logically you’d think we would all be stupidly alike. I mean, you think its weird when someone is thinking the exact same thing as you but like, hey: of course they are.

Anyway my point was, now look at us. A live orchestra is a beautiful thing to see. In the set up was a shiny golden harp from childhood fairy tales. They had a massive gong. It made me think of Delicious Tacos. Not the kind you eat, the kind you read.

I tried to come up with a superlative that would convey how the music sounded because it was pretty astounding. Mellifluous. Precise. How’d all those guys learn to play all those instruments together? The must practice for aeons. Further, is the tiny wizardy Japanese conductor really doing anything except waving his arms around? He was very cute: about 4 ft tall with lifts in his shoes and a dapper navy suit straight out of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Excellence is a thing you do not often witness. Culture is important. This is the apotheosis of our human society. When we are wealthy we invest in culture just like when birds have a rich food supply evolution throws in a few bonus things like the boy birds get some purple spots to make the girl birds more interested in doing the bird nasty with them in their crappy nests. Even when we are poor our desire to do more than just divide and multiply is present, e.g. in folk music. The crowd was unbearably silent: a sort of group instinct takes over, like if someone sneezes they’ll get mass lynched. In these moments, it’s really like we’re one, whether we’re listening together or playing together.

Anyway, at some point we became conscious. And we came up with music. I like it.