Addictions are insidious, making their onset difficult to detect. That makes overcoming them difficult in a species given to habitual behaviors ranging from a morning coffee, through watching a TV series, to detrimental drug and alcohol use. Habits are comforting. They make us recognizable to ourselves. “I’m in the habit of…,” you say. Unfortunately, by the time inimical habits become recognizable, many addicts have already suffered physical, emotional, and mental downturns from which recovery is very difficult.
Take a step back. Really far back, say, millions of years. If you have ever looked at the geologic time scale, you know that geologists, after centuries of examining rocks and fossils, have divided both physical and biological history into eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages. Those divisions have not come easily. They required thousands digging and climbing rocks, drilling deeply, and developing and applying technologies over generations. Now we have a picture, and we can say, for example, that there was a “middle period” of life we designate as the Mesozoic Era, the Age of Dinosaurs (Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods). In each of those periods, paleontologists have determined patterns of life: Some critters lived in the sea; some were herbivores; some carnivores.
But there are no more dinosaurs, are there? In fact, millions of species have arisen and gone extinct during the three eras of life, just as we have seen extinctions of the Vietnamese rhinoceros, the Pinta Island Tortoise, the Tasmanian Tiger, and the Grand Cayman thrush. That geologic time scale I mentioned earlier lists, if we don’t count our own time of species killing, five great extinctions. One of them, called the Great Dying, wiped out 95% of species at the end of the Permian Period and another knocked off the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period. In place of those that became extinct in the past, other species arose to take up residence. After the Great Dying, for example, the Age of Dinosaurs began.
The chief hypothesis about the extinction of the dinosaurs lies in a bolide impact that created the crater at Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula some 65 million years ago. The common notion is that dinosaurs were happy critters until this monstrous object from space slammed into the planet. Dr. Manabu Sakamoto and others from the Universities of Reading and Bristol recently challenged this scenario. The scientists did a statistical study that seems to show dinosaurs in decline before the impact. Had dinosaurs possessed our conscious self-awareness, would they have recognized the subtle declines their various species were undergoing?
You might ask, “So, what’s all this have to do with addiction?”
Some initial event precipitated the change in life habits, such as an internal biological mutation or an external environmental change. For the creatures of various geologic ages, the oncoming of the event was unrecognizable because each was occupied by its habit of life. Poor dinos! Without recognizing the harmful nature of their life habits, they began a decline that was hastened by a dramatic external event, a collision with a 10 km-wide asteroid or comet. So, the dinosaurs kicked the bucket after an insidious decline they could not, once it began, stop.
Life changes when habits change. During the past 540 million years new species arose by unconscious adaptations to fill niches left by their extinct predecessors. Only conscious life has a chance to recognize how habits, patterns, and addictions can lead to an extinction of some kind. Only conscious life has the ability to adapt by changing habits.
We are the only replacement species with the ability to alter behaviors by analysis and forethought; yet, many of us seem to disregard on both a personal and a species level the lessons of the deep past. True, we might not be able to reverse widespread habits that affect all our species members nor stop an incoming rock from space, but we certainly have the chance to alter our personal behaviors. Inevitable personal extinction is just around this life’s next corner, but there’s no inevitability to maintaining an injurious habit and suffering a self-imposed decline.
The dinosaurs, like other species, unconsciously declined until the moment of impact. Don’t be a dinosaur.
Take a step back. Really far back, say, millions of years. If you have ever looked at the geologic time scale, you know that geologists, after centuries of examining rocks and fossils, have divided both physical and biological history into eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages. Those divisions have not come easily. They required thousands digging and climbing rocks, drilling deeply, and developing and applying technologies over generations. Now we have a picture, and we can say, for example, that there was a “middle period” of life we designate as the Mesozoic Era, the Age of Dinosaurs (Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods). In each of those periods, paleontologists have determined patterns of life: Some critters lived in the sea; some were herbivores; some carnivores.
But there are no more dinosaurs, are there? In fact, millions of species have arisen and gone extinct during the three eras of life, just as we have seen extinctions of the Vietnamese rhinoceros, the Pinta Island Tortoise, the Tasmanian Tiger, and the Grand Cayman thrush. That geologic time scale I mentioned earlier lists, if we don’t count our own time of species killing, five great extinctions. One of them, called the Great Dying, wiped out 95% of species at the end of the Permian Period and another knocked off the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period. In place of those that became extinct in the past, other species arose to take up residence. After the Great Dying, for example, the Age of Dinosaurs began.
The chief hypothesis about the extinction of the dinosaurs lies in a bolide impact that created the crater at Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula some 65 million years ago. The common notion is that dinosaurs were happy critters until this monstrous object from space slammed into the planet. Dr. Manabu Sakamoto and others from the Universities of Reading and Bristol recently challenged this scenario. The scientists did a statistical study that seems to show dinosaurs in decline before the impact. Had dinosaurs possessed our conscious self-awareness, would they have recognized the subtle declines their various species were undergoing?
You might ask, “So, what’s all this have to do with addiction?”
Some initial event precipitated the change in life habits, such as an internal biological mutation or an external environmental change. For the creatures of various geologic ages, the oncoming of the event was unrecognizable because each was occupied by its habit of life. Poor dinos! Without recognizing the harmful nature of their life habits, they began a decline that was hastened by a dramatic external event, a collision with a 10 km-wide asteroid or comet. So, the dinosaurs kicked the bucket after an insidious decline they could not, once it began, stop.
Life changes when habits change. During the past 540 million years new species arose by unconscious adaptations to fill niches left by their extinct predecessors. Only conscious life has a chance to recognize how habits, patterns, and addictions can lead to an extinction of some kind. Only conscious life has the ability to adapt by changing habits.
We are the only replacement species with the ability to alter behaviors by analysis and forethought; yet, many of us seem to disregard on both a personal and a species level the lessons of the deep past. True, we might not be able to reverse widespread habits that affect all our species members nor stop an incoming rock from space, but we certainly have the chance to alter our personal behaviors. Inevitable personal extinction is just around this life’s next corner, but there’s no inevitability to maintaining an injurious habit and suffering a self-imposed decline.
The dinosaurs, like other species, unconsciously declined until the moment of impact. Don’t be a dinosaur.
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