While looking-for-inspiration/researching-for-an-as-yet-unknown-fiction-project this evening, I came across this sentence:
the title of “Y-chromosomal Adam” is not permanently fixed to a single individual, but can advance over the course of human history as paternal lineages become extinct.
Wikipedia: “Y-chromosomal Adam“
“Paternal lineages become extinct.”
Whoa.
I mean, we’re familiar with bloodline stories (Game of Thrones, Star Wars, early British History, racism), so we’re familiar with the notion of a family being wiped out, but had you ever thought about it in terms of the identity of our “Y-chromosomal Adam” — the father of all our fathers?
Y-chromosomal Adam is a popular name for the scientific concept of the human male line’s most recent common ancestor (Y-MRCA). In order to be considered as Y-chromosomal Adam, you must have “had at least two sons whose unbroken lineages have survived to the present day. If the lineages of all but one of those sons dies out, then the title of Y-chromosomal Adam shifts forward” to your remaining son, who himself must have at least two sons whose unbroken lineages…etc.
I imagine standing at the root of that family tree, being Y-chromosomal Adam, and looking above me into the future, and watching as each of the branches in the crown slowly dies out, the blackness creeping from one side of crown to the other, and closer to the root, a slow black dust whispering away the future. But there, to my right, my sole remaining son’s branch, his crowning descendents still aflower with thin green segments of life, stretching and stretching, growing and growing, living beyond the rot. As the darkness swoops in and overtakes me, I split my trunk asunder and gift the world a new Adam. “Outlive it,” I cry. “Let the rot of it all die with me!”
~
I came to Y-chromosomal Adam on Wikipedia because I still “surf the web.” It may look objectively similar to scrolling through a feed, but surfing the web is a qualitatively different experience.
Scrolling through a feed provides a kind of opiate effect: it sucks away your energy and time; it leaves you with nothing to show for it; and when you come back to the real world, you feel at least a little bit dirty for having done it.
Surfing the web is different. It’s a more active experience, and it requires skill, attention, and a nimbleness of mind. Like knowing which wave to catch, one must know which ideas to pursue. You also have to be a more adequate judge of your information sources and be willing to track down a primary source to make sure you’re dealing with original information rather than a misinterpretation of that information.
My web surfing experience started because, before I started to write, I wanted to sync my conscious mind to the wordless music being played in my ears. I do the same thing when I’m downhill sking with headphones on, matching my line to the song as best as the mountain will allow. Tonight, syncing my music with my mind meant searching for the meaning of the title of the song being played in my ears: “Thule” (by The Album Leaf).
I already knew that Thule was a mythical northernmost land (think the concept Greenland or Norway as imagined by the Ancient Greeks), but I didn’t know much beyond that, and so from there, I started to surf.
Well, you can probably imagine the line I surfed from “Thule” to “Y-chromosomal Adam.” There were my hairpin cuts along the crest of a powerful crushing wave of Nazi mysticism. There was my lifesaving leap over a forum on 4Chan. There were relaxing, easy glides over populistly-written, science-based blogs, and loops back into and through Wikipedia.
But then I hit that phrase — “Paternal lineages become extinct.” — and I pulled up short.
Cue Keanu.
“Whoa.”