There’s a meant-to-be-humbling metaphor that if the age of the earth equalled one year, then humans only appeared 10 minutes before midnight at year’s end.

でも, I object to that analysis on the grounds that it is reductionist and misleading. 

When you consider humans as a ‘leading edge’ of life’s evolution, then we represent 12 hours on that 24-hour clock. Going further with this thinking: it took 21.28% of the entire life of the universe itself to produce human life on Earth. The formula is in the Subject line.

That’s a monumentally long period of time.

I mean, wow. Humans as insignificant? 

Quite the opposite. Imagine a research project that took 4 billion years to produce a working model - us. That’s quite a process.

And that evolutionary history exists in every cell of our body. And it can inform the way we think about ourselves. FM was never shy to insert humanity into an evolutionary narrative - and rightly so. Any other way of thinking defies the unity of life.**

One significant feature of living systems exists in their binary nature. Humans have two sets of a lot of things: 2 eyes, 2 brain spheres, 2 lungs, 2 kidneys, sensory/motor, artery/vein, conscious/unconscious, focus/periphery etc. etc. In most cases, that binary function combines to create a holistic function. We don’t, for example, usually have an awareness that we are seeing with two eyes - but that binary function produces depth-of-field and stereo vision. Amazing.

Our skeleton is also binary - the axial skeleton of the head/spine and the appendicular skeleton of our limbs. This binary bone structure evolved over 500 million years of evolution within the Chordata phylum - to which we belong, along with fish, reptiles, birds and mammals to mention the most important.

Did you know, for example, that all mammals have the same basic blueprint of bones, muscles and nervous system? Each species modifies it dramatically to suit its needs, but our common ancestry is clear.

And it turns out - our motor system is also binary.

But this is still speculative. You can’t find any neuroanatomy book today that will clearly lay this binary nature of movement control, at least not in the same fanatical way that the different functions of our two brain spheres have been explored. It will come - I am sure of that - but perhaps after my little life is over.

Nonetheless, Alescovery teachers (should) know about the evolutionary nature of our binary motor system. It explains away a lot of the mystery of our work.***

Your learning begins by firmly placing humanity in an evolutionary perspective extending over 20% of the life of the universe.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

* Life on earth is estimated to have started 3.4-4 billion years ago. The universe itself is estimated to have been around 13.8 billion years. Therefore, it took more than one-fifth of the age of the universe to produce humanity. There are sure to be others like us, but maybe not so many?

** Ed Maisel, Editor of a compilation of Alexander’s writings, wrote in his long scholarly Introduction that Alexander had ‘fanciful ideas’ about evolution. These days the focus is more on FM's racially unsound statements. I prefer to strip away those ugly Edwardian ornaments and study FM’s insights into our underlying evolutionary progression.

*** I’ve written a paper about this - vetted by four of today’s top Alexander scientists for errors - for the 2022 Congress Papers of Berlin. You can read it here.