Joyas Voladoras, a thought provoker
On first read, this text seems disjointed and disorganized, like the author is trying to connect hummingbirds to humans by connecting them both to adjacent animals, and those adjacent animals to other ones until there is finally some connection… but there is something here (and we’ll get to what that is later). Me, unable to understand this, began searching for patterns, connections as to why this was relevant, why this was written in such esoteric style — just why?
It becomes clear after a few reads and re-reads that despite the headline, the article doesn’t actually revolve entirely around the Joyas Voladoras, the hummingbird. Instead, it uses the hummingbird as a medium to speak about different things. From a hummingbird, he biologically zooms out and speaks to firstly different animals, then different animal groups, slowly connecting dots together between every living thing, until finally reaching us humans. All of us, no matter how different we look or function, find common ground in that we churn inside, that for how big or small we are, we hold so much inside. All of this pulled a memory from my subconscious, something about a banana sharing in the ballpark of 50% of its genetic encoding with us. I decided to investigate.
Dessimoz Lab at the University of Lausanne and the University College London, published an article on just this matter. It confirmed my memory, humans share 50% of our DNA with a banana — a mindblowing statistic. Turns out Brian Doyle, the author of Joyas Voladoras, was totally right even in a way he hadn’t included. On levels we can’t even comprehend, every living thing is interrelated and most of the time, not just by a little bit, but by a lot.
