[MD] understanding pattern

[MarshaV]

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')