The world is marked by dividing lines—continents, countries, states, cities, towns, etc.
And the same holds true for the people who live in those territories.
The world’s human population is divided and sorted and categorized in many ways—skin color, religion, ethnicity, hair color, height, you name it.
Go ahead, analyze all you want.
In all, the experts assert, some 108 billion people have lived on Earth.
(Just how did they figure that out? And wouldn’t you like to go back in time and meet #1? Actually, some estimates claim it’s “only” 107 billion.)
As a side note, today’s existing population comprises 6.5 percent of the total number of people ever born—we’re right at 7.6 billion people on the planet today.
7.6 billion! And now stop and think that 1 billion seconds is 30 years. So if every person on Earth today could count off and each person took a second to do so, it would take 228 years to complete.
Well, if you could get us all in a line and get us all organized, that is.
Let’s recognize one thing about all 7.6 billion of those individual human beings.
Actually, let’s go ahead and recognize that same fact about all 108 billion people who have ever lived.
They are (or were) all the same.
Yes, all the same.
Skip skin color, skip religion, skip hair color, skip it all.
Even, of course, race. Race is a fuzzy term at best.
Even Wikipedia knows this: “While some researchers use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits or observable differences in behaviour, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race often is used in a naïve or simplistic way, and argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic significance by pointing out that all living humans belong to the same species, Homo sapiens, and (as far as applicable) subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.”
Anatomists know this to be true. At Anatomy in Clay® Learning System we talk about this all the time—and this is something Jon Zahourek emphasizes in his talks.
Inside (where it counts), we all share the same pattern.
We are a slightly different expression of the same pattern.
Think about it – 109 billion examples of the same idea!
The big variations are the proportions of our bones, but we all have almost identical sets of muscles.
In fact, of course, we share the same pattern with all vertebrates—birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians and, of course, mammals.
Vertebrate animals are fundamentally identical. Our earliest ancestors, jawless fishes, all had gill arches and you can observe that same pattern in mammals. In the human embryo, the arches are first seen during the fourth week of development and appear as series of outpouchings of mesoderm on both sides of the developing pharynx (Wikipedia).
All vertebrate animals are fundamentally identical.
Dogs. Cats. That skunk in the woods. Gorillas. A shark. These are all different expressions of the same core idea.
And you.
That’s the beauty of studying anatomy. You are studying yourself. And all the 108 billion others, too.
We’re all the same.
#108billionpeople #allthesame #dividinglines #world #skincolor #religio #ethnicity #haircolor #height #earth #population #seconds #worldpopulationday #race #observabledifferences #naive #homosapiens #homosapeinssapiens #samepattern #sameidea #bones #muscles #vertebrates #birds #fish #reptiles #amphibians #mammals #jawlessfish #gillarches #embryo #pharynx #dogs #cats #gorilla #anatomy #studyingyourself #anatomyinclay