Prime Mammal

I remember being about sixteen, driving with my dad. "Bad Moon Rising" by CCR came on. I loved music from the late 60s, early 70s. It all felt like a distinct moment in time, full of incredible songs.

I asked him what it was like to be alive when all of that was happening. If they realized how fortunate they were. He looked at me, confused. Not dismissive, just unsure how to answer.

At the time, I didn’t understand why.

Years later, I was driving and “Zombie” by the Cranberries came on. A great song. One I loved when it came out and my kids love belting it out with me now. It hit me that I was about the same age when "Zombie" was released as I was when I asked my dad about music that came out when he was young.

But it didn’t feel like a moment. It was just one song among hundreds, maybe thousands, that I heard around that time. Some stuck. Some didn’t. Some still show up now and then, attached to specific memories. Most faded into the background.

There was no clear boundary. No sense of “this is the era.” Just a continuous flow. That helped me understand my dad’s reaction. He hadn’t experienced “the 60s” the way I imagined it. He experienced a sequence of days.

There’s a thinking tool from Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett that captures this idea. He calls it “no mammals exist” or "prime mammal." It sounds wrong at first. Of course mammals exist. But the point is that categories like “mammal” don’t exist as clean, natural boundaries in the world. They’re labels we impose on a continuous process of change. Evolution doesn’t produce sharp edges. It produces gradients.

We draw the lines afterward.

The same thing happens outside of biology. We talk about “eras,” “movements,” “cultures,” as if they are discrete things. But they aren’t experienced that way. They’re constructed after the fact, compressed from a continuous stream into something we can name and talk about.

That doesn’t make them useless. It makes them tools. And like any tool, they can help us see or cause us to miss what’s actually there.

The danger isn’t that we create categories. It’s that we forget we created them.