Image credit: Aaliyahzemba, “Mirror selfie”
part 4 of a series
To shew in perfect sight
The great Magitian Merlin had deuiz’d,
By his deepe science, and hell-dreaded might,
A looking glasse, right wondrously aguiz’d,
Whose vertues through the wyde world soone were solemniz’d.
It vertue had, to shew in perfect sight,
What euer thing was in the world contaynd,
Betwixt the lowest earth and heauens hight,
So that it to the looker appertaynd;
What euer foe had wrought, or frend had faynd,
Therein discouered was, ne ought mote pas,
Ne ought in secret from the same remaynd;
For thy it round and hollow shaped was,
Like to the world it selfe, and seem’d a world of glas.
– Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.ii.18–19
For most of human history, no one knew what they looked like. Which, on balance, is probably a good thing, as for most of human history there weren’t such conveniences as baths, combs, electric shavers, fluoridated water, plastic surgery. As a consolation, everyone knew what they smelled like—and what everyone else smelled like—which couldn’t have been good. It’s a marvel that the race managed to procreate, reeking reasonably guessed as a barrier to coupling, which is essential to procreation, thus fitness. On the other hand, you suppose (or infer, based on experience), given the urges attending Homo nosce te ipsum, needs must.
The first mirrors known to archaeology hail from the Neolithic settlement of Çatal Huyukin in Southwest Anatolia (modern Turkey). Made of polished obsidian, they date to ~6,000 BCE. That’s something like 224,000 years after the appearance of anatomically modern humans. Let that sink in. Previous to all that, unless you were lucky enough to stumble upon a pool of still water (with the sun just right, like Narcissus) or have found a particularly shiny stone, your shadow would have been the only disembodied you you could know.
Mirrors made of polished copper appear around 4,000 BCE in Mesopotamia, with Egypt catching up a mere millennium later, followed by China a millennium after that. Central and South America brought up the narcissistic rear, with only polished stones in use around 2,000 BCE. By Greco-Roman times, bronze mirrors were most common. A more expensive variety was also on offer, made of speculum metal, a mixture of two parts copper and one part tin, with just a pinch of arsenic. Tin, being in scarce supply, was the expensive component. But as the rich stubbornly persist, speculum mirrors remained in use for ages; the primary mirror of Newton’s reflecting telescope was made of the pricey metal.
Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, reports that glass mirrors were invented in Sidon (in modern Lebanon) before his time (Natural History XXXVI.66), but in over a century of excavations, none have been found. The earliest glass mirrors in the archaeological record date to the third century CE, are nowhere close to Sidon, and are very small—from under one to three inches in diameter. Not particularly useful as a looking glass for self-admiration. Was Pliny imagining things? Passing on dodgy info? Lying?
What kind of world, you reflect in disappointment, would it be with elders making stuff up to pass down through the generations?
Oh wait, that’s the world you live in.
Socrates, so Diogenes Laertius tells us, realized the pedagogical value of mirrors. “He recommended to the young the constant use of the mirror, to the end that handsome men might acquire a corresponding behaviour, and ugly men conceal their defects by education” (Lives II.5). He is also said to have carried a mirror around to shove in the face of drunks, showing them how disgusting their visages had become under the influence of wine insufficiently mixed with water. No wonder the Athenians wanted to get rid of him. That and his ugly mug, which he tried to veil behind learnedness.
You, as it turns out, can also be a mirror. You might adopt a communication strategy known as “reflective listening,” mirroring verbatim what you just heard from the poor sucker who’s trying to have a conversation with you, adding something like “Did I get that right?” at the end. Followed by, “How do you feel about that?” Keep that up long enough and you’ll find a diminishing pool of poor suckers wanting anything to do with you.
A more subtle form of you-as-mirror can be useful in social gatherings. Finding yourself at a cocktail party (which, already a misery, probably required by your partner’s employment, said partner not usually reeking, which is some consolation; everyone glancing around to see who they should see, interact with, to gain some advantage, desperate to get out of the conversational wedge they currently find themselves in), how to survive? Become a human mirror. Ask your interlocutor about themselves, pretending interest. Bingo! Everyone loves to talk about themselves. That will generate a monologue lasting, with luck, at least long enough until it might, despite best efforts, become obvious you have no genuine interest. Just before which point you can gracefully say, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I see my partner needs a drink,” or, “Oh, look, there’s so-and-so, let’s go say hello,” touching your interlocutor affectionately on the forearm (forearms being a safe touching point for all genders, real or imagined), thus to escape.
Your attempt to nosce te ipsum by interrogating the origin of origins (the cosmos) turned out to be a Big Flop, doing little more than lowering your estimation of cosmologists to that you’ve long had of apologists. And, it must be noted, the latter have little use for mirrors (beyond preening), having instead revealed texts; cosmologists love them, having learned from Newton: mirrors can be used to learn things, if learning is of interest. Or, extrapolating theories suggesting learning, to be endlessly debated with the heat of a thousand suns, their calculations promising intellectual luminosity. Which, you know? Gotta pass time one way or another. So.
Among their latest is the James Webb telescope, whose primary mirror is actually 18 mirrors made of gold-plated beryllium, polished to a degree recalling the shield Athena lent Perseus to slay the Gorgon Medusa, Perseus wisely using the shield as a mirror to accomplish his task lest he be turned to stone by gazing directly on her snake-encircled visage.
The ancients failed to record the cost of Athena’s shield; the James Webb Telescope cost nearly $11,000,000,000—or, for speakers of the King’s English, 11 thousand million. Your tax dollars! And for what? So cosmologists could wow the public with pretty pictures, thereby justifying both the expense (beauty being priceless) and their cantankerous existence: Thousands of new galaxies! Two of them, known as “The Penguin” and “The Egg,” are “locked in a cosmic dance!” Star “nurseries!” Dying stars, consumed by diabolical black holes!
Turns out, stars and galaxies have life cycles: they’re born, live for a time, and die, just like Homo nosce te ipsum. They’re similarly stalked by angels of death. Next thing you know SCOTUS will be declaring them “legal persons” (like corporations) endowed with free speech rights, exercised in the form of campaign contributions. Peter Singer’s next book will be entitled Star Liberation.
And what might those pictures, all the new (if disputed in interpretation) knowledges, do for securing nosce te ipsum, the ultimate goal being wisdom? Make you feel smaller, less significant?
The Milky Way, with its billions of whatevers already accomplished that, all by itself, you snort, noticing the thinness of your wallet, raided as it has been by federal star gazers.
On the upside, even more something for apologists to claim couldn’t have come from nothing. Except, Genesis 1:1–3 doesn’t start with nothing….
Announcing the first images Webb’s mirrors returned in July 2022, the presiding president, looking ever more like an animated corpse, provided the what for: “These images are gonna remind the world that America can do big things and then remind the American people, especially our children, that there’s nothing beyond our capacity, nothing beyond our capacity.”
Your heart swells with the pride of a true patriot. Oh the thought of flag waving children, full of capacity. Worth every penny.
Like apologists, gorillas have little use for mirrors. Upon seeing their reflection in a sparkling glass mirror that some sneaky primatologist installed on a browsing path, a male of the species will jump into fight mode, rising to his considerable height and making threatening gestures, believing it’s met its competitive match. This is known as a “social” response (however anti-social you might think it), in contrast to self recognition. The eyes, said to be mirrors of the soul, are taken extremely seriously by gorillas, a returned gaze being a call to arms.
Which, as you think of it, is entirely unfair. Maybe start them with polished stones, then obsidian, help them climb the metallic mirror ladder—ever so slowly, with the patience that your sort enjoyed over millennia.
You can’t just spring a modern glass mirror on them, you think in moral outrage.
Monkeys never recognize themselves in mirrors, and not for lack of eyes. They’re hopeless. Closer to evolutionary home, chimps and bonobos will initially have a social response, interpreting their reflection as a stranger of their own species and responding with threats, attempts to socialize or submissiveness, likely corresponding to their rank. But after a period of time, they cotton on and understand they’re seeing themselves, begin to explore their body parts previously unseen (though not unsmelled…). Which is pretty much what Homo nosce te ipsum groups do on first exposure (as you can see in a handy video here).
The Prince of Botany, whatever else he may have gotten wrong, got one thing right. Or maybe two things. First, he wasn’t particularly interested in the spheres above. He, learning from his father to tend his garden, widened the scope of the garden he felt in need of tending, nose pointed south not north. He left north to others, chiefly Newton.
The second thing he got right was assigning your sort to the Regnum Animale. As a visual learner, Carl looked for physical similarities in his organization of the Creator’s works, leaving behavior unaddressed. Unless subtly, in his nosce te ipsum hint. Presumably, nosce entails more than staring into a mirror. Could it mean, look to your neighbors to understand yourself. But if so, who are your neighbors?
In evolutionary terms, that would be chimps and bonobos, as everyone knows. Except, not everyone. Lots of everyones believe what the Prince of Botany did: the Divine Creator made all species in the form they currently appear. Nearly the rest of everyones, giving passive credence to Darwinian evolution, believe you’re descended from chimps. Which to them, explains a lot. Like, you’re a horrible, violent, selfish species, ever prone to self aggrandizement, cheating, murder. Alpha males rule societies by virtue of being bigger, stronger, tougher, more violent—ever subjugating females in a grievous patriarchy, said females wanting nothing more than to pass their days in empathy and nurture. All the bad things you can imagine thus explained.
Which, interestingly, broadly aligns with the teachings of your dominant culture’s religious anthropology, whether you’re particularly religious or not. All have sinned and fall short of the glory, males in particular.
In fairness, nothing good can be said of natural selection—as good has nothing to do with it. The universe begins in dumb randomness; with the advent of life, it adds to randomness bloodiness in DNA and protein. Fitness is a might-is-right scenario: the strong survive, the weak suffer what they must. And for that, you have to thank who- or whatever got things rolling, an inscrutable process or some god—who, if the latter, must be bipedal, have a rigid pelvic girdle, hands (but not feet) with opposable thumbs, two eyes, a nose and a very loud mouth. You know, the one in whose image and likeness you were created. Also, like you, a narcissist, requiring endless praise.
Except, maybe it’s complicated. Yes, natural selection is merciless, in the sense that it has no understanding of mercy, only success. And yes, pretty damn bloody, as that is what is required in the context of finite resources and infinite desire, organisms locked in zero-sum competition.
Which is something like half the story (that half contested, as everything is in science, if not in other systems of thought…). The other half has to do with cooperation, starting with the very stuff that, in their billions, comprise you: your cells.
On the off chance that you weren’t home schooled, you may have a faint memory of things going by such names as prokaryotes and eukaryotes. The prefixes, pro and eu are telling. You might think pro indicates “in favor,” as in pro versus con. In which case you would be entirely wrong (evidence of home schooling). For some reason, scientists, who generally have no knowledge of ancient Greek, feel compelled to use the language to name things they see using various mirrored devices. (They probably have to consult colleagues in the Classics department, whom they otherwise disparage as “humanists,” along with anthropologists, the latter having earned the right of disparagement the old fashioned way.)
However that may be, prokaryote comes from the Greek πρό (pro), meaning “before,” and κάρυον (káruon), meaning “nut” or “kernel.” The kernel prokaryotes lack (having come before) is a defined nucleus. They also lack other kernels, like mitochondria and other bits and pieces, critical for you and your proper functioning, but superfluous to present concerns. Prokaryotes are single-celled organisms, the most famous among them being bacteria. And that’s about all you need to know. That, and the fact that the oxygen you breathe (or waste) is thanks to the oxygenic photosynthesis work of cyanobacteria over hundreds of millions of years. Bacteria split atoms long before Oppenheimer.
Eukaryotes, in contrast, have kernels (nuclei). They are also what you’re made of: billions of eukaryotic cells with kernels containing your DNA, where your genes are to be found, which determine what you have become. Or, that’s one version of the story; there are others. Whatever, the prefix εὖ (eu) means “true” or “good”.
Which might strike you as odd, as science is supposed to be about is, not ought. Ah well.
If you weren’t home-schooled, you might be clever enough to ask, OK, so how did we get from before (pro) to good (eu)? Good question. Gold star and all that.
It starts with predation of one sort or another. Either one prokaryote swallowed another, the latter somehow avoiding digestion. Or one prokaryote pierced another in a parasitic attack, said attack failing. Whichever, maybe both, the two ended up cooperating in a process known as symbiogenesis. The prefix, again a Greek one, σύν (sún), means “with, in company with, together with”.
Warming to your heart, all that eu and sym. Just the world you would like to inhabit—maybe the one Jesus teased (but never came), in your reading of his utterings. Maybe too warming?
Lest you start having thoughts, in some weird biological emotivism, eukaryote YEAH!, prokaryote BOO!, you might want to consider that the prokaryotes you just booed inhabit your gut in their trillions, making up most of your microbiome. There are more of them in you than there are of you: microorganisms are thought to outnumber human cells by 10 to 1 (though that ratio has been challenged); they provide vital functions, without which you would go the way of all flesh sooner rather than later. Prokaryotes can be very pro life.
It’s one thing to make the jump from pro to eu via sym. It’s quite another for the eus to team up to create a multicellular animal. Single-celled organisms (the vast majority prokaryotes) have been around for 3.5 billion years and were doing just fine. Multicellular animals didn’t appear until around 600 million years ago. And the singles are still doing fine, outnumbering multis 10^9:1—that’s about one billion to one.
You might ask, Why bother? Another good question and another gold star.
As you may have come to expect, no one really knows. Not that theories are lacking; people spend entire careers torturing yeasts and algae and bacteria in petri dishes to understand such an Earth shattering development—paid careers. Your tax dollars at work in humanity’s compulsive quest to nosce te ipsum.
The puzzle centers around cooperation, which generally makes no evolutionary sense. Cheating does. As an example, a certain bacterium (named, in Carl’s convention, Pseudomonas flourescens) quite readily forms multicellular mats on a static growth medium, the better to access oxygen. But once the mat is formed, clever cheaters emerge, happy to gorge on the oxygen but refusing to produce the glue holding the mat together. Result? The mat is destroyed. All of which indicates you’re faced with two problems, not one: How does the jump from single- to multicellular happen in the first place, and how can it persist given that cheaters have the better evolutionary hand?
From a logical perspective, here’s what you’re going to need: a trait that a) increases group fitness, b) punishes cheaters by reducing their fitness, and c) is hard to reverse once fixed, thus stabilizing the whole situation and allowing a new, more complex organism. You need, in short, a trait that makes nice out of nasty.
OK, fine, you mutter, all three of you in agreement and tiring of the whole nosce te ipsum project, looking longingly at your butterfly net. What might pull that hat trick?
Suicide.
What? Again, in unison. That makes precisely zero sense.
Except when it does. Programmed cell death, or apoptosis—as ever from the Greek, ἀπόπτωσις (apóptōsis, “a falling off”), from ἀπό (apó, “away from”) + πτῶσις (ptôsis, “falling”)—checks all the boxes in need of checking to produce you, with plenty of time on your hands to pass in one way or another.
The people spending their lives sorting all this out use microscopes “wondrously aguised” with a dichroic mirror, which, unlike normal mirrors, reflect only certain wavelengths of light while transmitting others. Fluorescence microscopes, allowing them godlike to witness the suicides from on high. The story they’ve put together from all this spying goes as follows:
High rates of apoptosis allow multicellular clusters to dodge the limitations inherent in volume and nutrient flow. The bigger the cluster, the worse it is for cells close to the interior. The suicides act as weak links; when they snap, reproductive units (propagules) are released, small enough to avoid inner-cluster limits on nutrient diffusion, thus able to grow faster than the parental mass. Any sneaky suicide candidate tempted to cheat, escape its fate and revert to existence as a single cell would find itself in a tough neighborhood. Outside the cluster, high-apoptosis cells fare poorly against low-apoptosis single cells, so escapees are selected against.
Programmed cell death is a clever (if grim) “ratcheting” trait—increasing a cell’s success inside a group—at catastrophic cost to the solitary cell slated for death. By acting as sacrificial victims, apoptotic cells tip the fitness balance from the individual toward the collective, reducing the chance that lineages will slide back to a unicellular existence. Once in place, ratcheting traits allow movement in only one direction, opening evolutionary space for more complex, multi-cell adaptations. Behold, group selection.
And what might that have to do with your favorite subject? Well, if you haven’t noticed by now, you’re more than a single cell. So something had to happen to get you here. Furthermore, you wouldn’t look like you apart from apoptosis. In utero, your hands and feet are large, paddle-like clumps of cells; apoptosis sculpts your fingers and toes. And if that weren’t enough, you would be very sick (or completely apoptotic) if programmed cell death were to stop. Between 50 and 70 billion cells in your body are culled each day in a highwire act. Too little apoptosis and you get cancer, autoimmune diseases and any number of unedifying conditions; too much and you get degenerative diseases (Alzheimer’s, ALS), AIDS lymphocyte loss, ischemic stroke, etc.
Ritual sacrifice, if not ubiquitous, is nearly so in pre-modern human cultures. It is known on every inhabited continent and has been performed for thousands of years. Offerings vary, from fruit gifts and wine libations to blood sacrifice, any member of Regnum Animale liable to be pressed into service. Why might that be? Some deep and widespread intuition, shared across time and space, evident in cultures entirely lacking contact? Perhaps it can be attributed to a shared history, with Homo nosce te ipsum having spent at least as much of its history in the role of prey as in that of predator? Might they have noticed how the panicked herd calms after the menace has extracted its blood price, their own herd not excepted?
Gods, as it happens, seem to share the same intuition, or are lashed to the same mast. So the Vedic deity Indra drinks soma while the gods eternally chant as they sacrifice; so the Zoroastrian Time God Zurvān offers incense and sacrifice for a thousand years in hopes of a son; so Apollo pours libations at a sacrificial altar; so Allāh and His angels performing ṣalāt for Muḥammad. So the Christian Father God offers His son in an atoning sacrifice, eternal life requiring an exceptional apoptosis in accordance with a universe so programmed.
The gods mirror their adherents in ritual observation of a fundamental constraint: it is only through death that there can be life.
A sacrifice is required.
In ancient Greek sacrificial ritual, a garlanded bull is led to the altar, to the accompaniment of flutes. The priests then sprinkle water on the bull’s head, making it nod, as if in assent. The deed accomplished in appeasement of the gods, the offending knife is thrown into the cleansing sea.