The Invention of Origins: IV. The Endpoint Looking Back

Imagine that a species appears at the end of a long history and asks:

Where did we come from?

The question seems straightforward.

But the word we has already reorganised the history.

The universe is billions of years old. Earth has a long geological history. Life has existed for an immense period before humans appeared. Countless organisms have lived, reproduced and disappeared. Most evolutionary lineages ended without producing anything that subsequently asked where it came from.

Yet when humans tell this history, we naturally select the events that connect to us.

The result is a peculiar transformation. A vast and branching history becomes a path.

The history of the universe becomes the history of a universe that eventually produced stars, planets and life. The history of life becomes the history of life that eventually produced humans. Earlier organisms become ancestors. Earlier capacities become precursors. Earlier environmental conditions become enabling circumstances.

Nothing in this reconstruction need be scientifically wrong.

The danger lies elsewhere.

The endpoint can begin to look as though it was the point of the history.

This is an artefact of perspective. We cannot tell the history of humanity without beginning from the fact that humanity exists. But the existence of an endpoint makes the preceding history look different from how it appeared while it was unfolding.

Before humans existed, there was no human future to organise the past.

There were possibilities.

There were contingencies.

There were organisms responding to their circumstances, reproducing, changing and disappearing. There were innumerable futures that never happened.

We know only the one that eventually contained us.

That knowledge is powerful enough to make contingency look like inevitability.

Perhaps this is why expressions such as “the origins of humanity” can be subtly misleading. They are useful shorthand for a scientific history of human emergence. But the phrase can also suggest that somewhere in the deep past there was a beginning whose significance was already determined by what humanity would become.

There wasn't.

There was a history.

Humanity became one of its outcomes.

And because we are that outcome, we naturally organise the history around ourselves.

This does not make the history unreal. It makes our standpoint part of the history we tell.

The endpoint looking backwards sees a line.

The history itself contained a branching possibility space.

Perhaps the most important question is therefore not:

How did the universe lead to us?

but:

Why does a history look as though it led to us when we are the ones looking backwards?

The answer may tell us something not only about evolution, but about explanation itself.

For when the endpoint becomes the standpoint, the result can begin to masquerade as the reason.