part0012

On Saturday, February 28, 1953, two men walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridgeshire, England, and announced a discovery that would forever change the world and the way we think of ourselves. At noon that day, Cambridge University scientists James Watson and Francis Crick announced to their colleagues who were having lunch at the pub, “We have discovered the secret of life!” 1 Watson and Crick had just made their breakthrough discovery of the double helix pattern of the DNA molecule—nature’s code for life.

DNA is held within each cell of our body in threadlike structures that are called chromosomes. As humans, we have 23 pairs of chromosomes in our cells. Each chromosome, in turn, is made of smaller, more precise regions of DNA called genes. It’s the codes contained within the genes and chromosomes that determine everything about the function of our bodies, including the regulation of hormones and blood chemistry, how fast and to what size our bones grow, the size of our brains, the kind of eyes we have, and how long we live—even automatic functions such as breathing, digestion, metabolism, and body temperature. With a discovery of this magnitude, it would seem that the greatest mysteries of our existence would be solved. Many have been. However, due to the deeper insights that DNA discoveries have made possible, scientists now face a quandary when it comes to interpreting where the new information about our genetic code fits into the accepted human story.

In 1987, a paradigm-shattering discovery was made in the Caucasus region of Russia, near the border between Europe and Asia. Buried deep in the earth, in a place called Mezmaiskaya Cave, scientists discovered the remains of a Neanderthal infant—a baby girl that lived about 30,000 years ago! For reference, the last ice age ended about 20,000 years ago, meaning that this baby was alive during the ice age. Her remains were in an extremely rare state of preservation, and scientists were able to determine her age as somewhere between that of an unborn seven-month fetus and a two-month-old infant.

William Goodwin, Ph.D., from the University of Glasgow commented on the exceptional discovery. “It is something of a mystery how this child’s remains were so perfectly preserved. . . . Normally you only get material with this degree of preservation in material from permafrost areas.” 2

I’m sharing many details here because this landmark discovery was the turning point when it comes to answering the question of where humans fit on the evolutionary family tree.

Using forensic techniques, like the futuristic technology that’s depicted in the TV series CSI , scientists were able to extract mitochondrial DNA from one of the baby’s ribs for analysis. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is a special form of DNA that’s located within the energy centers (mitochondria) inside each of our cells, rather than in the chromosomes, where most of our DNA is found. The reason mtDNA is key when it comes to the question of human evolution is that we inherit it only from our mothers. It’s passed from the egg of a mother to both her sons and her daughters, and this typically happens without any of the mutations that can lead to new features in children. This means that the mitochondrial DNA lines in our bodies today are the direct descendants, and exact matches, of the mitochondrial DNA of the woman who began our particular lineage long ago. Because of this unique quality, mtDNA is used to study how people and populations in one place relate to those in other places. It’s the uniqueness of this form of DNA that set the stage for the bombshell revealed by the Neanderthal infant.

Using the most advanced techniques, with results that are accepted in the highest courts of law, Russian and Swedish scientists tested the Neanderthal infant’s DNA to see how similar hers was to that of modern-day humans. In other words, the scientists wanted to know if the Neanderthal girl was actually one of our ancestors, as the evolutionary family tree leads us to believe. The results of the first studies were published in obscure scientific journals, which concluded, according to the Smithsonian Institution, that “the Neanderthal mtDNA sequences were substantially different from human mtDNA.” 3 Although this single statement sounds relatively benign, it’s the equivalent of an earthquake with the epicenter right at the root of the human evolutionary tree. Few mainstream news sources shared the discovery, however, and those that did offered the technical details without simplifying them for lay readers or interpreting their significance.

All of that changed, however, in the year 2000. It was then that researchers at the University of Glasgow Human Identification Centre published the results of their own investigation comparing Neanderthal DNA to that of modern humans. The results of their study were shared in a way that made sense even to the most nonscientific reader. And the meaning of what they found could not be dismissed. The conclusion of their report was shared in the peer-reviewed journal Nature and directly stated that modern humans “were not, in fact, descended from Neanderthals.” 4

Now there could be no turning back. While scientists had originally believed that the mtDNA of the Neanderthal infant would solve the mystery of our ancestry, it actually did just the opposite.

Key 9: The discovery of an extraordinarily well-preserved female Neanderthal infant—dating back 30,000 years—and the comparison of her mitochondrial DNA to ours, tells us definitively that the earliest modern humans were not the descendants of ancient Neanderthals.

If we’re not descendants of Neanderthals, then who are our ancestors? Where do we fit on the tree of evolution—do we even belong in Darwin’s evolutionary family? The comparison of DNA from Neanderthals and other primate fossils has shed new light on this question. In doing so, however, it’s also forced scientists to ponder a new possibility when it comes to unraveling the mystery of our origins.

When I was in school during the 1960s and 1970s, learning about Neanderthals and other prehuman beings such as the Australopithecus (the famous Lucy) and the Homo habilis (the handy man), we were taught that there was another member of the evolutionary family tree who was a close ancestor as well. In those days, the name used for these distant relatives was the Cro-Magnon. Today, however, that term is no longer used. Paleoanthropologists have replaced it with another that makes more sense, and the reason is self-explanatory. The new name used to identify the beings once known as Cro-Magnons is anatomically modern humans , or AMHs.

Scientists generally agree that AMHs first appear in the fossil record approximately 200,000 years ago and mark the beginning of the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens —the term used to describe the people living on earth today. 5 While fossils of bones themselves are more resistant to the elements and can last for millions of years, the DNA found inside bones—in the bone marrow—is much more fragile and typically exists only in relatively recent remains. So although AMHs appeared on earth 200,000 years ago, the oldest DNA discovered from them so far is from a man who lived in Siberia about 45,000 years ago. 6

In 2003, further advances in genetic technology allowed for the comparison of the earliest anatomically modern human bodies with four newly discovered Neanderthal bodies. A team of European scientists compared the DNA from two AMHs, one that was 23,000 years old and another that was 25,000 years old, with DNA from the remains of the Neanderthals, who were variously dated as living between 29,000 and 42,000 years ago. An article on the findings published in National Geographic News , quotes one of the co-authors as saying, “Our results add to the evidence collected previously in different fields, making the hypothesis of a ‘Neanderthal heritage’ very unlikely.” 7 Once again the Neanderthals, often portrayed as primitive cavemen in movies and cartoons, were eliminated as possible ancestors of early modern humans.

Now that we know who our ancestors were not, the focus of paleoanthropology has shifted to discovering who they were. The DNA studies have narrowed the broad field down to one particular candidate. And it’s not the candidate supporters of Darwin’s theory expected.

Scientists now believe that the AMHs are us, and we are they. Any differences between contemporary bodies and those of the AMHs of the past are so slight that they don’t justify a separate grouping. In other words, although ancient humans didn’t necessarily behave like we do, they looked like us, functioned like us, and appear to have had all of the “wiring” in their nervous systems that we have today.

Stated another way, we still look and function as they did 2,000 centuries ago, despite our incredible technological achievements. A 2008 study of AMH remains (still called Cro-Magnon at the time), performed by collaborating geneticists from the universities of Ferrara and Florence in Italy, tells us that these similarities are more than superficial. Researchers report, “A Cro-Magnoid individual who lived in Southern Italy 28,000 years ago was a modern European, genetically as well as anatomically.” 8

It’s the fact that members of our species, Homo sapiens , haven’t changed since our earliest ancestors first appear in the fossil record that poses a problem for the traditional story of evolution, which is based upon slow changes over long periods of time. Discoveries that could not have been made in Darwin’s time have shed new light on this lingering mystery.

The set of all human DNA, the human genome , was the first DNA sequence of any vertebrate to be entirely mapped. The international effort that made this mapping possible—the Human Genome Project (HGP)—was the result of the largest cooperative biology project in the history of the world. 9 In June 2000, U.K. prime minister Tony Blair and U.S. president Bill Clinton jointly revealed that the first draft of the human code of life had been successfully completed. In doing so, they announced to the world that this unprecedented act of cooperation had opened a new era of lifesaving genetic medicine, and the global industry and economic boom that would follow.

After the success of the HGP, the same techniques used to map human DNA were then applied to other living things. For the first time, scientists could go beyond educated guesses about our genetic relationships and actually compare our life’s code to that of any other form of life. The results were nothing short of mind-boggling. While scientists have long known that chimpanzees, for example, are our nearest relatives, for the first time DNA maps allowed them to see just how close that relationship really is.

Genetic mapping revealed that there is only a 1.5 percent difference that separates us from chimpanzees, or conversely stated, we share over 98 percent of the same DNA. 10 When the mapping methods were applied beyond primates, the results were equally astounding. For instance, we share 60 percent of our DNA with a fruit fly, 80 percent with a cow, and 90 percent with a common house cat. We obviously don’t look or act like a fly, a cow, or a cat. The big question that comes from such revelations is this: If we have so much in common with other creatures genetically, then why are we so different from them?

The answer to this question goes back to an unexpected discovery made during the HGP: that a single gene can be activated in different ways, and to different degrees, to do different things. What this tells us is that it’s not so much about what genes we have in common with chimps, cows, flies, and cats. It’s more about how those genes are activated—or expressed. A gene called FOXP2 , now understood to be directly linked to our ability to form complex speech, is a perfect example of what I mean here.

FOXP2 is shorthand for Forkhead Box Protein P2, a protein that’s involved in the human ability for language. Located on chromosome 7 (precisely at location 7q31), the FOXP2 protein is coded from a gene that has the same name, FOXP2, and is present in both humans and chimpanzees. 11 , 12 It’s obvious, however, that chimpanzees can’t sing the Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven” the way a person can! This fact tells us that there is something more than the gene itself that’s involved here. There’s something in the way the gene expresses itself that gives us the ability to consistently create the sounds of language. In 2009, a study published in the journal Nature gives us a clue as to what that “something” is.

Scientists knew from earlier research that humans and chimpanzees both possess the FOXP2 gene. They’d also determined that the human version of the gene had changed (mutated) at some point in the past, and that the change happened quickly—not slowly and gradually, as the theory of evolution would suggest. Now researchers at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA had determined that this change happened precisely at a critical moment in the unfolding of the human story. According to these scientists, the mutation happened “rapidly around the same time that language emerged in humans.” 13 This was a pivotal discovery because for the first time a specific set of mutations in FOXP2 was scientifically linked to our capacity to create complex language.

Additional studies took this research even further and determined when this particular change had happened. According to Wolfgang Enard of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the mutations in FOXP2 that make our complex language possible “happened in the same time frame when modern humans evolved.” 14 A BBC News World Edition report clarifies this relationship, stating that our capacity for language happened when “changes to two single letters of the DNA code [the representations for the building blocks of amino acids] arose in the last 200,000 years of human evolution.” 15

The speed and precision of the mutations in FOXP2, occurring in just the right two places in the DNA code, are further examples of the kind of change that does not lend itself to the theory of evolution—at least not as we understand the theory today. Why did the changes happen in the way they did? What could have caused just the right shift of DNA letters, at just the right place, within just the right chromosome, to give us the extraordinary ability to share our feelings over a candlelight dinner for two, chant wildly when our team wins the Super Bowl or the World Cup, and whisper into a lover’s ear? The best science of the modern world has now given us the answer. The question is, are we willing to accept what the DNA reveals?

Because humans are classified as the most complex and advanced member of the primate family, it was reasonable for scientists to expect that we would have more chromosomes than our less complex relatives. This is where an unexpected twist in our DNA story begins. Our nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzees, have more chromosomes than we do, with a total of 48 in their overall genome. Ironically, humans have only 46. In other words, it looks like we’re missing two chromosomes when we’re compared to chimps. It’s only been recently, using advanced methods of DNA sequencing, that the mystery of “where they went” appears to have been solved. In doing so, however, we once again find ourselves at the threshold of a deeper mystery that holds startling implications!

A closer look at our genetic map shows that our “missing” DNA isn’t really missing at all. It’s been with us all along; only it’s been modified and arranged in a way that wasn’t obvious in the past. New research reveals that the second largest chromosome in the human body, forming 8 percent of the total DNA in cells, human chromosome 2 (HC2), actually contains the smaller “missing” chromosomes found in the chimp genome. 16 In other words, at some point in the past, for reasons that remain controversial, two separate chimp chromosomes got combined into a single larger chromosome that is our chromosome 2.

It’s the way these smaller chromosomes combined that may solve the mystery of mutations such as those in FOXP2, and ultimately, the mystery of human origins. While scientists acknowledge that the mutations definitely occurred in FOXP2 and that they happened within the time frame that correlates with the rise of anatomically modern humans, they can’t really tell us what caused the change. But they can tell with chromosome 2. And it’s this difference that sets chromosome 2 apart.

New technology has revealed precisely what happened to create HC2. I’ll share the discovery in two ways with you: first in the scientists’ own technical language from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to reveal the discovery itself, and then with a simpler description in lay language to illustrate why this discovery is important to our discussion.

Many of the characteristics that make us uniquely human arise from the DNA fusion that resulted in human chromosome 2. HC2-linked traits include qualities such as our intellect, the growth and development of our brains in general, and specifically the largest part of our brain, the cortex, which is associated with the way we think and act and our capacity for emotion. 18 HC2 contains over 1,400 genes that continue to be mapped and explored today. While a full list, in technical nomenclature, is available through the reference I’m citing in the endnotes, in the following chart I’ll share a few simplified examples of these genes to give you a sense of the crucial roles they play in our humanness. 19

From this small sampling, it’s clear that human chromosome 2 plays a significant role in contributing to who, and what, we are. This is especially apparent for the genes TBR1 and SATB2, located on HC2, and the role they play in the development and function of our advanced brain and our extraordinary capacity for emotion. In light of the significance of HC2, the question of how it came into existence becomes more important than ever.

Unlike the previous example of the FOXP2 gene, where changes simply show up in a genome comparison—meaning at one point in time they don’t exist in the genetic record of fossils, and at another point in time they do—human chromosome 2 has preserved a record of how it came to exist. It’s what this forensic evidence may truly reveal to us that has opened the door to so much speculation. This is where the story of our past takes an unexpected turn, with deeper implications that make our origins begin to sound like the theme of a really good science-fiction novel. You see, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study states that although this kind of fusion is known to happen occasionally, it’s rare.

What accompanied the fusion itself opens the door to our new human story.

In the language of the researchers describing this discovery, the fusion was either “accompanied or followed by inactivation or elimination of one of the ancestral centromeres, as well as by events which stabilize the fusion point.” 20 While this language is admittedly complex, the message is clear and simple. The study is telling us that during the fusion, or immediately afterward, the overlapping functions from what were originally two separate chromosomes were either adjusted, turned off, or removed altogether to make the new single chromosome more efficient.

This fact strongly implies intentionality. And as we’ve discovered previously, that intentionality led to humanity’s possession of many of the extraordinary functions that are found in no other form of life on earth.

The answer to question 1 is that scientists simply don’t know. As of this writing, scientists cannot say with absolute certainty why primate DNA got merged in the way that it did, yielding AMHs. While there is certainly no shortage of theories and speculation attempting to explain the mystery, 25 years after this finding was made, the truth is that, at present, there still is no scientific consensus for what could have triggered this miraculous-sounding event.

One thing appears to be certain, however: The DNA that makes us who we are, and what we are, is not the result of the process of evolution that Charles Darwin described. My sense is that if we can answer the second question—how the fusion occurred—what we discover will ultimately help us answer the question of why, and much more. When we can answer definitively how the ancient genetic fusion happened and how specific pieces of the fusion were modified so precisely and so quickly 200,000 years ago, the solution to these mysteries will lead us directly to an explanation for why such an extraordinary event took place.

As you may imagine, the discovery of an ancient and complex DNA fusion is interpreted by scientists in different ways. And the differing interpretations have triggered a landslide of controversy. Even after the publication of the article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences described previously, staunch supporters of the evolutionary theory for humans have argued that there are other explanations for the DNA fusion. One theory, for example, proposes that humans and apes, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, all share a common ancestor and that a “split” separated us from them long ago.

If this is true, the chromosome 2 fusion happened to us, and only us, and it happened after we had already split from the other primates. They kept their 48 chromosomes and we experienced the fusion that gives us our 46.

This idea makes little sense to me, as it suggests that the DNA that gives us our uniqueness didn’t appear until after the uniqueness that caused the split had already happened!

I’m not alone in my thinking, and, to date, evolutionary explanations have not received popular support. I’m sharing an example with you here to illustrate how a radical discovery that attempts to solve one mystery, such as the DNA fusion in chromosome 2, can create even more mysteries as its meaning is digested.

There is an additional consideration to be made when it comes to the way we think of evolution and the role it may have played in our lives. And while you probably won’t see this idea described in classrooms and textbooks (yet), I think it’s important to share it here for completeness. The idea is irreducible complexity. What this means is much simpler than its name sounds.

I mentioned previously that we have access to knowledge in our era about things that Darwin couldn’t have possibly known. It’s this fact that makes irreducible complexity worth exploring today. For example, Darwin couldn’t have known that even the simplest bacteria, the single-celled E. coli , needs 2,000 different proteins to exist; and he couldn’t have known that each of those 2,000 proteins has an average of 300 amino acids that make it what it is. The key here is that neither Darwin nor any scientist of the late 1800s or early 1900s could have known just how complex living beings really are. Until recently, nobody could.

Irreducible complexity essentially means that if any portion of a system stops working, the entire system fails. A common mousetrap is often used to illustrate this point. When all of the parts of a mousetrap are in place, it does what it was made to do—what it was designed to do: It trips a lever that traps the mouse that has taken the cheese or peanut butter bait, and ends the life of the mouse.

The trap is a system of parts, with each part performing a specific task to accomplish the ultimate goal. For example, there’s the lever that holds the bait and there’s the powerful spring that comes down with such lethal force when the bait is disturbed that the mouse doesn’t even know what hit it. While the trap sounds like a simple gadget, the key is this: If even one part of the device is missing, the trap simply won’t work. Without the spring, the lever will never snap. Without the lever, the spring will have nothing to trigger. Because all the pieces of the trap are needed for the system to work, it’s fair to say that we can’t streamline the mousetrap in any way. We can’t reduce it to a simpler system and still have the system be functional. It is irreducibly complex.

If we apply this idea to the human body, we see a similar result.

We all know that when we scrape a knee, the site of the injury will generally bleed briefly and then the bleeding stops. The reason it stops is that blood clots at the site of the scrape. We’re so accustomed to seeing this process that it’s easy to take the complexity of our blood clotting for granted. We just assume that it’s going to happen. And the fact that it does is a perfect example of irreducible complexity. When we scratch, cut, or break our skin, 20 separate proteins must be already in place and ready to act for our blood to clot and the bleeding to stop.

This fact is key to our discussion of irreducible complexity for one important reason: If even one of the 20 proteins needed for clotting is missing, the bleeding will continue. Whether we wait 10 minutes or 10 hours, the result will be the same. Our blood can only coagulate when all the proteins that make clotting possible are in place.

Our blood’s ability to clot is an example of a life function that could not have developed through evolution. To do so, 20 proteins would have already needed to be formed and in the same place before the blood that gives our bodies life could form. If these components had not already been in place, our ancestors would have bled to death with the first minor injuries they sustained—meaning we might not be here, because they might have died without producing offspring. And this is only one example.

Here’s another. The little waving arms (cilia) that allow cells, including sperm cells, to travel in fluid have more than 40 moving parts that must all be present for the cilia to wave. If any part is missing, the cells can’t move. If ancient sperm cells from a male of our species had not been immediately empowered to “swim” toward the egg of a female, reproduction could not have occurred.

The human cell has been called the single most complex piece of machinery ever known to exist. Until the mid-20th century or so, cells were essentially thought of as tiny bags of salt water holding dissolved elements. We now know that nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if we could enlarge a single cell to the size of a city, we would discover that the cell is more complex than just the infrastructure that keeps it going. A sample of a cell’s important structures includes:

This is just a sampling of the myriad processes that are happening at any given moment in each of the approximately 50 trillion cells of the human body. As we discover what each process does, it becomes obvious that all this cellular machinery had to be already created, and in place, for our earliest cells to do what they do. From clotting blood to swimming cilia, the body holds many examples of irreducible complexity.

To even the most skeptical scientist, it’s obvious that the DNA of life is based upon structure, order, and the sharing of information that tells our cells what to do and when to do it. In nature, this kind of order is often seen as a sign of intelligence.

Key 11: The 20 proteins that make the clotting of blood possible and the 40-plus components of the cilia (wiggly tails) that allow cells to move through a fluid are just two examples of functions that could not develop gradually over a long period of time as evolution suggests. In both examples, if even one protein or component part is missing, the function of the cells is lost.

In candid interviews late in his life, Albert Einstein shared his belief that an underlying order of information exists in the universe, as well as his sense of where that order comes from. During one of those conversations, he confided, “I see a pattern but my imagination cannot picture the maker of the pattern. We all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.” 21 In our search for human origins, the very presence of the order and intentionality we see in our DNA is a sign that Einstein’s invisible piper exists.

There is an additional theme of evolution theory that I have intentionally waited until now to mention. It’s a corollary to Darwin’s theory, first stated by a colleague and fellow supporter of Darwin, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Through his work, Wallace defined the evolutionary principle that paves the way for the rest of this book. Building upon Darwin’s original work, Wallace made an extraordinary observation when it comes to the development of new features in a species. I’ll share Wallace’s corollary, stated in his own words, and then apply his statement to what we now know about our own development.

In the final chapter of his book Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection , published in 1870, Wallace leaves no doubt with his readers about what he’s saying: “Natural Selection would only have endowed savage man with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of a philosopher.” 22 In this somewhat complex passage, Wallace is stating that nature only gives us what we need, when we need it, and does so through evolution, which Darwin defined as a slow and gradual process. In other words, the theory says that we have abilities such as standing upright, advanced peripheral vision, and the ability to share our emotions through smiles, frowns, and other facial expressions because we needed them at some point in the past.

Herein lies the problem. We’re all over-endowed! And it appears that we have been since the dawn of our existence.

Key 12: Humans appeared on earth with the same advanced brains and nervous systems we have today and with the ability to self-regulate vital functions already developed, contradicting the corollary to evolution theory that nature doesn’t “over-endow” with such features until they are needed.

Following 150 years of the best human minds applying themselves under the auspices of the world’s most respected universities, being funded with tremendous sums of money, and using the most sophisticated technology available to solve the mystery of our origins, if we were on the right track, it would seem that we’d be farther along than we are today. In light of the failure of Darwin’s theory to explain our existence, and in consideration of the new evidence that I’ve presented, it’s reasonable to ask the question that’s become the big pink elephant in the room: What if modern science is on the wrong track?

What if we’re trying to prove the wrong theory and writing the wrong human story? The answer to this question is the reason I’ve written this book. If we’re on the wrong track, it may help to explain why so many of the solutions applied to the world’s problems aren’t working. This would mean that our thinking and the “solutions” our approaches have produced are based on something that’s not true!

Why not allow the evidence to lead us to the story of our past, rather than trying to force the evidence into a template that was formed over a century and a half ago? If we’re serious about solving the deepest mystery of our existence, it would make sense for us to open our minds and allow for another interpretation of the data we’ve collected during a century and a half of study.

What if there is no evolutionary path leading to modern humans? What if the pieces of the genetic puzzle that makes us who we are were suddenly locked into place all at once rather than accumulating gradually over time? What would such a story look like? The data from studies of human chromosome 2 and other DNA studies, the lack of fossil evidence documenting the transition from one hominid species to another, and the lack of common DNA between humans and less advanced primates all suggest that we may not belong on the same tree with the early hominids commonly shown in the textbooks. In fact, they suggest that we may not belong to a tree at all! The evidence suggests that our history may be represented best as a stand-alone shrub—an evolutionary bush—that begins and ends with us.

In other words, we may find that we’re a species unique unto ourselves.

This is not to say that evolution doesn’t exist or hasn’t occurred anywhere. It does and it has. As a geologist, I’ve seen firsthand the fossil record of the evolution that’s occurred in a number of other species. It’s just that when we attempt to apply what we know of the evolution of plants and animals to humans, the facts don’t support the theory. They fail to explain what the evidence reveals.

If we were to place the essence of the new discoveries about us into a concise list, the statements that follow would offer a high-level summary. Additionally they would give us a good idea of where the new theories, and our new story, may be heading.

So now that we know what we’re not , what does the best science of our time tell us about who we are ? What does the new human story look like?

In the course of my life, I’ve discovered that when I find something that makes no sense to me, it’s generally because I don’t have all the information. I believe that the conventional scientific theory of human origins—the story we’ve been asked to accept—falls into this category. The evidence that I’ve shared in this chapter clearly doesn’t support Darwin’s story of evolution. While the science is good and the methods scientists use are sound ones, it’s our responsibility to recognize the limits of what science can reveal. As I mentioned previously, while scientific evidence can definitely tell us what has happened in the past, it cannot necessarily tell us why something has happened or if conscious intention led to the event.

For example, when we see a fire brightly burning on a warm summer night in the middle of a grassy field, scientific knowledge tells us that a spark of some kind has ignited that fire. It’s telling us that a fire can only come from a) a source of heat great enough to start the fire (the kindling temperature ), or b) another fire, such as the accidental spark of a lawnmower blade hitting a rock, the intentional spark of a match or a cigarette lighter, or the natural spark of lightning striking the ground. My point here is that without first knowing the circumstances that were in place when the fire began, science can’t tell us the precise reason that the spark occurred, or if it was an intentional act. If a fire occurred hundreds or thousands of years in the past, much of the evidence related to its circumstances would be lost in the fog of time. All we would know from the charred remains of a log or a scorched rock is that there had been a fire.

The fusion of DNA in human chromosome 2 is like that fire in the field. Science can tell us that the fusion making it possible occurred and how that fusion occurred. But because scientists can’t determine all of the circumstances surrounding the fusion—as these have been lost over the ages—we’re left to rely upon facts, logic, and deductive reasoning to make sense of what we see. The same point that I’m making here for our chromosome 2 can be made for our gene FOXP2.

I want to be absolutely clear that what I say next is not the conclusion of peer-reviewed science, although I’ve spoken with mainstream scientists who have told me that they suspect it is true, yet are reluctant to speak publicly about their suspicions for fear of losing their reputation, their credibility, and even their jobs. When I honestly consider the evidence that I’ve shared in these chapters, it simply makes sense to look beyond evolution and an unbelievably good run of biological “luck” to explain the fact of our existence.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that:

To honestly acknowledge these possibilities opens us to a paradigm that shifts the way we feel about ourselves and view our place in the universe. With this shift, we free ourselves from a paradigm of lonely insignificance and move into one of possessing a rare heritage that we are only beginning to explore. And that’s where this book begins. We’re here with the bodies and the nervous systems that afford us the abilities of compassion, empathy, intuition, self-healing, and much more. The fact of their presence within us suggests that we’re intended to utilize—and master—the sensitivities that we arrived with.

The new human story begins with our beginnings. It begins with the fact that from the time of our origin we’ve been neurologically wired for extraordinary abilities. This design affords us extraordinary ways of living and extraordinary lives.

The question that immediately comes to mind when we consider that we’ve had such advanced characteristics from our beginning is this: How do we fully awaken these capabilities in our lives today? In the chapters that follow, I invite you to share a journey of discovery in which we do our best to answer this question and explore what it means to be human by design.

Gene	Influence
Gene TBR1	Key in brain development, particularly the development of the cortex (the largest part of the human brain, which is associated with the way we think and act), our capacity for emotion, empathy, and compassion, and neuron functions (the so-called hardwiring that carries signals within the brain, and throughout the body, to process information)
Gene SATB2	Key in the development of the midbrain and forebrain
Gene BMPR2	Key in osteogenesis (bone tissue formation) as well as cell growth throughout the body
Gene MSH2	Known as a tumor suppressor or “caretaker” gene
Gene SSB	Key in the fetal development of organs that include the heart, brain, eye, kidney, liver, lung, skeleton, spleen, among others