Greetings,
"It is easy to overlook the implications of this relationship between the past
actions and experiences of our ancestors and the particulars of our present
species, since they so radically implicate our unique human capacities, our
special modes of knowing, feeling and thinking, within the constructive
processes of the past. As evolutionary biologist David Barash explains:
If evolution by natural selection is the source of our mind's a priori
structures,
then in a sense these structures also derive from experience—not the
immediate,
short-term experience of any single developing organism, but rather the
long-term
experience of an evolving population.... Evolution, then, is the result
of innumerable
experiences, accumulated through an almost unimaginable length of time.
The a priori
human mind, seemingly preprogrammed and at least somewhat independent of
personal experience, is actually nothing more than the embodiment of
experience
itself. (1979, 203)
"The Buddhists and biologists thus largely concur that the very forms and
structures of human life result from the accumulative actions of innumerable
beings over countless generations. Like all species, we too have been formed
and conditioned by an immensely long and complex series of transformations..."
(William S. Waldron,'Common Ground, Common Cause: Buddhism and
Science on the Afflictions of Self-Identity')
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