The Wonders of Nature

September 2023

A story from a hike in the Slovenian Alps back from my college days. Although never an experienced hiker, let alone climber, back then I often went on solo hikes, loved it. This one started from the car park at the head of a valley and then continued almost level, or perhaps slowly ascending, through the woods on the right side of the valley and thus gradually rising above the valley floor. It was a partially cloudy spring or summer day and the walk was pleasant. There were no other hikers that day (it was middle of the week, but that posed nary an obstacle for the college student) and I had all the peace, all the beauty of nature for myself to enjoy. During the hike I often heard sounds coming from somewhere above me that seemed like stone chips trickling down the rock face and I was thinking it must sure be from a mountain goat (like a chamois or an ibex) walking on a ledge up on the mountain and accidentally throwing debris down.

After one hour of walking along the axis of the valley the alpine woods opened to mountain grassland and there the trail reached a sort of a funnel, a narrow part of a steep gorge that from there continued up between two mountains, gradually widening further up. I decided to stop there to take a break, for after that the steeper part of the path up the slope of the gorge awaited me. So I turned to enjoy the view of the valley below and of the mountain ridges on the other side. It was a soothing sight of pristine alpine nature in all its indifferent beauty. But at a certain moment I suddenly turned into a spectator of myself, I don't know how else to put it. What happened is within a split second I turned hurriedly to my right - for no apparent reason - and started running away, not up nor down the mountain, but simply to the side, and I distinctly remember having an acute awareness of what was going on, or observing clearly what I was doing, but not knowing at all why my body was doing what it was doing - that is, running away as fast as it could go. I felt an all-pervasive urge to bring the action, that was set in motion, to the end. After a couple of leaps filled with indeterminate fright, I reached the shelter of some trees and bushes, turned around, looked up the gorge and saw this large rock the size of a van coming down the slope from behind the mountain in leaps that must have been 50 to 100 meters long, landing with a menacing thud each time it hit the ground only to bounce back into the air, rotating wildly as it did so, and continue its mad dash for the valley floor. It passed some 30 meters by me, smashed into the thicket below the path and continued its way down, all the while accompanied by the frantic sound of breaking branches until it was too far to be heard. It passed right where I was standing seconds before. Had I not run, I would have been flattened, the thing probably wouldn't even have noticed that it left a red pancake in its wake.

What happened there? The running part was probably a good old-fashioned run for your life thing. But what surprises me is the part before that. If what made me run was an instinctual reaction, I must say its working felt pretty weird because it never alerted the conscious mind of its finding (not to my recollection), simply executed an evasive maneuver. Once, on another hike, I almost stepped on a snake and the instant I was to set foot on it and a subconscious watchman recognized the danger I automatically extended my step and jumped over it but at the same time the conscious mind recognized that wiggle on the ground as a snake. (It was probably not poisonous anyway, not many of those here.) Not so with the boulder. I realized that there was a potentially dangerous situation only after I have already come towards the edge of the gorge and turned around to see what the heck is going on. If I recall correctly (this happened almost 25 years ago), prior to the reaction, when still resting my eyes on the beautiful scenery in front, I may have heard another round of debris starting to trickle down somewhere on the other side of the mountain behind me (its other side was giving on the slope that ended in the gorge where I was standing). I think I may have also heard a distant thud or two of probably when the boulder dislocated and started its way down, but consciously that meant nothing to me, I was completely unaware of any threat or danger. What I got - from probably some instinctive pathway - wasn't a polite invite like "Oh, the system registered an unusual auditory signal, would you please care to look over your shoulder and ascertain what is going on", not even "I sense danger, please check it out and act accordingly". It completely skipped the "inform me" part and instead what I got was an immediate and overwhelming physical reaction that I wasn't remotely in charge of but was merely witnessing as in a movie - although not from the proverbial outside, but from the inside, from the usual place where awareness or consciousness dwells.

If we are really equipped with such an instinctual reaction, I am only guessing that in humans it could have developed relatively recently (of course building on past instinctual reactions), only after modern humans left Africa because in Europe and Asia the dangers like avalanches and crumbly mountain sides are probably more common and therefore impactful and bound to cause selection than they would be on the plains of the savanna - but this is just wild speculation by a total noob.

There's yet another angle to such an instinct. Contemporary research shows that human genome consists of around 19,000 protein coding genes, ie. genes that are responsible for production of material in the body (the genome itself is 50-100 times larger, but the remaining 98-99% of the genome does not code for any protein, although it is still important as it is involved in regulation of protein-coding genes). How do you store a person's eye color, the fine structure of the eye, nose shape, hair color, shape and timing of their teeth coming out, structure of blood vessels, bones, bowels, brain, the lot … with 19,000 genes? Not to mention that the number must somehow also account for the rather rarely used instinct of running away from crazed boulders, among other instincts. A basic mobile phone app probably requires more than 19k lines of code! So how do you code a human with 19k protein-coding genes? Sometimes, if not often or regularly, nature can really leave you marveling at what miracles it produces.

Ivo Makuc, 2023
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