Being an anatomist probably made me a better person

I realize that the titular statement is open to misinterpretation so let me head that off at the pass:

I’m not saying this prescriptively, like you should learn anatomy to become a better person (you should learn anatomy because it’s accessible and it rules), or that knowing anatomy makes people better. I’m also not saying this distributively, like anatomists are better people than non-anatomists. I’m saying it in the narrowest, most literal, and most personal sense: I think I (and possibly no-one else ever) am now at least a slightly better person than I used to be because of my experience with human anatomy.

Here’s my thesis, which only occurred to me for the first time in my life yesterday: marinading in a job where I am forcibly confronted with the fact that humans are physically pretty darned variable under the hood, and thinking a lot about that fact and writing about it, has made it a lot easier for me to accept that humans are probably even more* variable in terms of their personalities and brain chemistries and psychological and emotional drives and preferences and tolerances, and I think that acceptance has made me a little more compassionate.** (Along with educating myself about the various spectra that people fall on, myself included, and finally taking stock of the Godzilla-sized footprints that ADHD has left all over my career and my personal and professional relationships — about which much more another time, probably.)

* More variable than we are physically because our brain chemistries and emotional states are changing all the time, faster than we’re remodeling our bones or making new capillaries.

** This is a relative statement and not a very strong one. I still have plenty of chunks of unexamined and un-remodeled stupidity inside. And plenty of people have upped their compassion without being prodded by data.

This dovetails productively with another of my favorite lines of thinking, which is pondering how little actual evidence we have for almost everything. Galileo’s telescopes had notoriously narrow fields of view. I’ve built replicas (you can get kits online 4 cheap) and such telescopes are pretty frustrating to use, like peering at the night sky through a drinking straw. There’s an obvious analogy with paleontology, where we often have only a handful of bones of one individual of a species that must have included billions or trillions of individuals across its entire temporal range — a particularly haunting thought for someone cursed with an interest in variation. But I think metaphorically that’s how almost all science is: peering at a universe that is effectively endless in its complexity through a series of drinking straws.

That narrowness-of-evidence is applicable to daily life, in terms of making assumptions about other people’s motives and intentions. Probably that person did not cut me off in traffic because they’re a selfish a-hole deliberately trying to show dominance or run me off the road, they were just occupied by thinking about their ailing parent or how they’re going to afford the next little stretch or whether they’ll have any time to spend with their kids by the time they get dinner on the table, and made an innocent mistake. (I’m not saying that excuses their incautiousness whilst directing two tons of steel and glass at 70mph; this is about the calculation going on in my head in the wake of the near miss.) And so on. I can talk with a close friend for hours, and neither of us will express ourselves perfectly, and each of us will interpret the conversation differently, and remember it differently, and that’s just how life is. Maybe the best we can do is become aware that we’re still — always — peering at the world and at each other through drinking straws.

So I think:

1. People are not just different from each other, but surprisingly so, and probably in more directions than we even have words for yet; and
2. Individually each of us has very few lines of evidence regarding other people’s internal lives, and the ones we do have are buggy and inaccurate.

…and mashing those two thoughts together makes me want to ask a lot more questions, listen more carefully to the answers, entertain more possibilities, jump to fewer conclusions, default more often to being patient, humble, and forgiving, and maybe above all, to commit fewer failures of kindness. Happily, those also seem like good traits to cultivate as an anatomist and paleontologist.

I’m not saying there aren’t unrepentant jerks in the world. There are plenty, and some of them are having a moment. But most of the folks I interact with aren’t unrepentant jerks, and it’s pretty cool that science gave me a couple of new ways of thinking about that, and of remembering that I probably look like an unrepentant jerk sometimes through other people’s straws.

The photo up top is of a bee in my garden. I don’t know what it was thinking, but I’m willing to venture that it was some variation of “Whoo-hooo, lavender baby!” And incidentally, at least here in southern California lavender is pretty bulletproof if you give it some level of water above ‘complete neglect’, and it’s fun to run your hands through because then they smell nice. So if you take nothing else away from this post, try growing yourself some lavender. Bees love it!