The Invention of Origins: VI. Before There Was an Origin

Before there was an origin, there were events.

They did not know what they were beginning.

A star formed. A planet cooled. Molecules combined. Life emerged. Populations changed. New forms appeared. Others disappeared.

At each point, the future remained open.

Only later, when something has emerged from the history, can we look backwards and identify an earlier event as its beginning.

This suggests that an origin is not necessarily something that exists at the beginning.

It may be something that exists only in retrospect.

The distinction matters because beginnings are everywhere. Every event has preceding conditions. Every process has an earlier state. Every transformation can be traced further backwards.

If we insist on finding the origin of something, however, we eventually face an awkward question:

How far back should we go?

If the origin of humans is a particular population, what is the origin of that population? If it is a particular evolutionary lineage, what is the origin of that lineage? If it is life, what is the origin of the chemistry from which life emerged?

At every stage, the supposed origin dissolves into an earlier history.

There is no obvious point at which history itself announces:

Here I begin.

We supply the boundary because we already know what we are trying to explain.

This does not make origins fictitious. A particular event can be genuinely important in the causal history of something that follows. But its status as the origin depends upon the relation we subsequently establish between that event and the thing whose history we are tracing.

The event comes first.

The identity of the origin comes later.

This reverses a familiar intuition. We tend to think that the origin explains why something became what it is. But often it is the later thing that determines which earlier event counts as its origin.

Before humanity existed, there was no human origin.

There was only a succession of biological and environmental histories.

Before life existed, there was no origin of life in the sense that we now use the phrase. There was chemistry, physics and a changing planet.

The categories we use to divide these histories are ours.

And this may be one reason that origin stories are so powerful. They transform continuous histories into beginnings, and beginnings into explanations.

But perhaps a history does not need a beginning in order to be intelligible.

It may be enough to follow how one state became capable of another.

Then the question changes.

Instead of asking:

Where did this begin?

we can ask:

How did this become possible?

The first searches for a point.

The second follows a process.

And perhaps, before there was an origin, there was simply a history becoming what it had not yet been.