Our Common Bond (We’re All Homo sapiens sapiens, Whose DNA Is 99.9999% Identical)

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Nothing human is alien to me.”—Terrence

“As the Apple is pulled down, the Earth is pulled up.”—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—10/4/10—Though surely inevitable, the strain created by a Black president in The White House is beginning to show, so it’s time to remind ourselves what we have in common, and that globalization doesn’t necessarily mean Americanization.

With 204 national teams competing in the 2008 Olympics, nearly seven billion humans will have a team to applaud in 2012. When Yao Ming plays in Houston, three hundred million Chinese turn on their televisions to watch American basketball, potentially quadrupling the size of the audience. If Yao turns an ankle, however, the economy shudders.

If you’re looking for globalism in sport, FIFA, which organizes soccer’s World Cup, boasts 208 member countries. As for political representation, 192 countries are currently enrolled in the United Nations, giving over six billion of us access to the world’s ear. Should the Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (population three) ever address the General Assembly, UNTV will surely broadcast the speech. Though his or her Excellency may address the council in Italian, the audience, which speaks some 6,800 languages and dialects, can listen to a simultaneous translation in English, the closest thing to a universal language the world has ever enjoyed. Thanks to the spread of English, someone will know at least, “OK,” “hotel,” “bar,” “sex,” “cool,” “weekend,” “stop,” “jeans,” “no problem,” “telephone,” “Coke,” “hamburger,” and “Marlboro.”

Isn’t it a comfort to know that if you have a few dollars you can order a meal, a drink, a bed, a prostitute, and a smoke wherever you are?

If you take the time to ask your foreign hosts about their color preferences, you’ll learn that the vast majority of us prefer pink over yellow. If you hear infants learning to speak on your travels, you may notice that they learn their vowels before the consonants. We all master the labial and dental sounds before tackling the velars and gutturals. If someone tells you of a nightmare in which he was naked and unprepared for a test, you’ll understand because you’ve had the same dream.

Moreover, someone in the vicinity will be able to play chess with you, and most will understand your facial expressions and body cues, win or lose. Though they were not grown or made outside South and Central America until the 16th century, tomatoes, potatoes, and chocolate are sure to be found close by. If it’s not too cold, there’s a good chance the people you see on the streets will be dressed in T-shirts, flip-flops, and jeans. If they’re laughing, you’ll recognize the pattern: a sudden explosion of syllables (heh, ho, he, etc.) each a 15th of a second long, repeated four or five times per second.

If you’re a physician, scientist, or engineer, the Indo-Arabic language of science and mathematics will serve you well, for it has long been universal. Of course, the symptoms for everything from malaria to AIDS are recognized by doctors of every stripe. All carbon-based chemists know Mendeleev’s table of elements, and every physicist is conversant with the laws of thermodynamics.

If you’ve brought your children with you, they will find their native peers enjoying “hide and seek” and jumping rope as much as they do. Some may chant rhymes that you learned as a child half a globe away. Should you need a break, 140 countries celebrate Earth Day every April 22nd. Should war break out, we can take some comfort in the fact that for 60 years now every nation has promised to abide by the Geneva Conventions.

Should you desire to worship with your new neighbors, you will discover that their Golden Rule is the same as yours—not just a rule, but the most esteemed rule of all. If you stay for any length of time, you’ll also discover that your neighbors believe that actions speak louder than words, giving is better than receiving, elders are to be respected if they’ve earned it, parents are to be honored, no one lives solely by what they put in their mouths, and the truth will make us free.

If you are a cultivated person, abstract art speaks a universal language, which is why abstractions are so common in ecumenical houses of worship such as the UN chapel in New York, the Rothko Chapel in Houston, and St. Henry’s Chapel in Turku, Finland.

If music is more to your liking, a major third elicits “joy” wherever that note is played while a minor third is “tragic.” As for composers, the world’s musicians play Mozart more frequently than any other because his orchestral work is the closest anyone has ever come to “absolute music,” music without a trace of nationalism. Even when lesser talents like Michael Jackson die, the world mourns, and a man in Macau spends $420,000 to buy the singer’s rhinestone glove.

If we really want to be fundamental in our search for a common bond, we should know that we’re all constructed of atoms recycled from long dead plants, animals, and stars. The life expectancy of an atom is ten (years) followed by 35 zeroes. A mere 13.7 (years) followed by eight zeroes is the time that’s passed since the Big Bang, so we can stop worrying about immortality. In one form or another, we’re all going to be around for a very long time.

Of course, every one of us is related to a small band of Africans who left the continent of our birth about 60,000 years ago, which makes us all Homo sapiens sapiens, whose DNA is 99.9999% identical. Furthermore, every time we drink a glass of water, we can be sure that at least one of those H₂O molecules passed through Jesus, Mohammed, or Buddha, and with every breath we take, there’s an excellent chance that some of those nitrogen atoms passed through Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.

But neither the good nor the bad will ever leave its mark on “our” water and air. Without the diphtheria, smallpox, rabies, and polio medicines developed by German, English, French, and American doctors respectively, our life spans would be about 30 years. In 2010, the world’s average is 67, the longest it’s ever been. And, only six to nine individuals separate us from every other person on the globe.

Just as 34 countries pooled their resources in 1990 to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, so would the armies of the globe rise to fight an alien invader that wished us harm. Given a common foe, the petty differences of melanin concentrations, hair sections, and nose widths would fade to insignificance. In addition, if James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s “Gaia Hypothesis” is correct, the entire earth and every natural thing on it is one “living, self-regulating organism.” Whether we have hemoglobin or chlorophyll in our vessels, we all have a common goal: the dissemination of DNA in the universe. For when the god(s) of your choice said, “Go forth and multiply,” He, She, It, or They did not place any spatial limits on our fecundity. He . . . just pointed us into space.

May the force be with us.