The super genome has vastly expanded the idea of the responsive and adaptable cell. It opens the door for many other exciting prospects. A responsive and adaptable cell can modify its DNA as its environment poses new challenges and opportunities. It can receive and interpret messages from the brain and respond in kind. The cell therefore adapts to our life experiences, constantly reorganizing and attaining balance to better serve itself and other cells in the body. What we witness is a mind-body partnership. The human mind is conscious. It uses adaptation, feedback loops, creativity, and complexity in astonishing ways—they are the prized possession of our evolutionary place in Nature. Cells mirror the mind, giving physical expression to it.
There’s only one problem with this picture, and it’s a big one. The theory of evolution doesn’t consider that genes mirror consciousness. Introducing a term like “the intelligent gene” would be anathema, even though most geneticists didn’t protest “the selfish gene.” To be selfish implies making choices to serve only oneself, and it takes consciousness to do that. Our cells make choices all the time. Imagine a steel pellet moving in a circle on a sheet of paper. The pellet seems to be magically moving on its own, until you look under the paper and see that a magnet is actually controlling it. Something similar seems to be happening with the activity of cells in your body.
Let’s say you were somehow able to observe heart cells individually, and for no apparent reason they start twitching like mad, only to slow down a minute later. They appear to undertake this action on their own, but if you step back, it turns out that the person who owns the heart ran up a flight of stairs. The heart cell responded to instructions from the brain, and the brain was obeying the mind. That’s how the partnership works. What we deem intelligent is the person, not his cells. Even brain cells come second in the partnership, because mind is always first.
Evolutionary theory finds itself in the reverse position, putting matter first. Mind, as far as conventional modern Darwinism is concerned, evolved from basic cellular activity that was mindless. Chemical interactions became more complex, as did the cell’s ability to adapt to its surroundings. Single cells started to clump together to form complex organisms. After hundreds of millions of years, the clumps became specialized, and the central player was a clump that evolved into nerve cells, primitive nervous systems, and finally primitive brains. We know all of this because, lucky humans, our clumped nerve cells stand at the peak of brain evolution. The human brain made us conscious, aware, creative, and highly intelligent.
This book has proposed, to the contrary, that cells and genes participate in the same mind field as the brain. This theory is acceptable to anyone who believes, as Darwinians do, that matter comes first. But our view has one big advantage. It opens up a new frontier in the mind-body partnership. Pandas will never stop eating bamboo shoots; tigers will always stalk deer; penguins will always walk across the Antarctic ice fields to lay their eggs—at least for the foreseeable million years. It would take at least that long for a mutated gene to alter such powerful instinctive behavior.
But human beings can change their diet, renounce violence, become vegetarians, and have babies in a warm hospital instead of the Antarctic. We are endlessly adaptable. Therefore we’ve pushed evolution far beyond physical boundaries. Our skin radiates heat in such quantity that spending a winter’s night outdoors would be fatal to a naked human, yet we’ve sidestepped such a huge disadvantage through clothing, shelter, and fire. We’ve become evolutionary oddballs, without a doubt. But our next advance may outstrip anything accepted in mainstream Darwinism.
Human beings could be the first creatures in the history of life on Earth to self-direct where their evolution is going. If so, the super genome becomes the key to everyone’s future, starting with what each of us is thinking and doing right this minute.
To get there, however, three major changes would need to be established in our understanding of evolution, and each of them would topple a pillar of Darwinian theory.
First, evolution must be driven by more than random chance.
Second, evolution has to drastically speed up, able to bring changes not in hundreds of thousands and millions of years, but in a single generation.
Third, evolution must be self-organizing and thus mindful, allowing for the influence of choice making, learning, and experience.
These are serious challenges to the status quo. Ordinarily the argument would take place within the small circle of professional evolutionists. But the goal is so important to everyone’s life that we want to bring you into the privileged circle. As much as any famous geneticist deserves to talk about where human evolution is headed, you also deserve to. Let’s examine the three changes to Darwinism that need to occur, not because we two authors say so, but because these are the very changes that may lie ahead, thanks to the new genetics.
We mentioned at the outset that the notion that all new mutations occur only randomly belong among the discarded myths about genetics. At that point, the sound of many an angry evolutionary biologist hurling heavy objects across the room could be heard in the background, because far and away the phenomenon of solely random mutations has been a primary tenet of Darwinism. To claim otherwise has been a standard line of attack among anti-evolutionists with a religious agenda, and it’s hard to remove that stain.
In Darwinian theory, the mutations that drive evolution aren’t driven by life experiences. According to Darwin, a giraffe didn’t acquire its long neck because it wanted to have one or needed one. The longer neck appeared accidentally one day, and that lucky mutated giraffe then gained a survival advantage that was naturally selected to be passed on to subsequent generations. It’s obvious that a longer neck allows giraffes to reach leaves higher up on a tree, but Darwinism doesn’t allow for any “why” to intrude. Classical evolutionary theory doesn’t allow you to say a long neck appeared “because” the animal needed to eat higher up on the tree; it would say the new mutation was random and persisted “because” it gave the animal this new ability to survive.
Outside the field of evolution, we talk about “why” and “because” all the time. If a basketball player is three inches taller than everyone else on the court and scores more rebounds, it’s because he’s got the advantage of height. So why can’t we say the same about the giraffe? The reason has to do with how mutations are passed along. That first lucky giraffe had to survive or else its new mutation goes nowhere. Next the mutated gene had to appear in the next generation. If it still gave a survival advantage, the gene was now present in more than one animal—this improved its fighting chances.
But the odds were still hugely against it, because to be permanently established, the mutated gene had to find its way into the genome of every giraffe; the short-necked ones had to be so disadvantaged that they disappeared from the gene pool. The process is a numbers game, pure statistics repeated generation after generation. All that matters is the gene and how successfully it gets passed on. Evolutionists may speculate, using common sense, that a longer neck allowed favored giraffes to get at leaves that shorter giraffes couldn’t reach, but that’s not all there is to the story, scientifically. The hard data pertain to the persistence of a mutation over time.
Thanks to modern gene theory, the statistics of survival have been honed to a fine degree. Facing the iron wall of random mutations is daunting; you will find the entire genetics establishment rejecting your contrary ideas. At least that was true in the past, up to the last decade. Now the iron wall has become something else, a gap.
A gap is friendlier than a wall, because it only needs a bridge, not a wrecking ball. On one side of the gap we have the obvious fact that human beings are intelligent. On the other we have Darwinian theory, which considers intelligence a suspicious term. The term was corrupted by the intrusion of Intelligent Design, a movement that attempted to use science to justify the Book of Genesis. That attempt was foiled by massive protest from the scientific community, and we concur. So we don’t need to fight that same battle all over again. The rancorous divide between reason and faith needs to be healed, because both deserve their rightful place.
The gap is starting to close as new findings put pressure on conventional evolutionary theory. Random mutations aren’t the whole story, as the new genetics is fast proving. (As the great Dutch-Jewish philosopher Spinoza said, “Nothing in Nature is random. A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge.”) Natural selection isn’t the whole story, either. Unlike giraffes, microbes, and fruit flies, human beings don’t exist solely in the state of Nature. We exist in a culture that has deep influences on how the super genome works. If a bad mouse mother can pass on her behavior to her offspring, human behavior could be doing the same, but on a much wider scale.
If the gap between standard evolution and the new genetics can be closed, that’s tremendous news for you and every other individual. It means that you are actually evolving in real time, and if that’s true, huge things follow.
Can evolution remain intact while at the same time giving up on pure randomness as absolute truth? Can mindful evolution move from Darwinian dogma to established fact? It has to, if the super genome is going to fulfill its enormous promise.
The evidence that gene mutations are not simply random is steadily mounting. In a 2013 study published in the high-impact science journal Molecular Cell, researchers from Johns Hopkins University showed that when mutations are deliberately introduced into yeast to impair their growth, new mutations immediately arise to bring growth back. These are called compensatory secondary mutations. They are anything but random. Compensatory mutations can also arise if the solution in which the yeast is raised is depleted of necessary nutrients, creating a more stressful environment. Although yeast is a very basic organism, the lesson here is that when environmental challenges are evident, the genome can quickly adapt and compensate with necessary (nonrandom) mutations for purposes of survival. Epigenetic modifications of gene activity can be utilized for the same purpose.
Another study, concerning E. coli bacteria and published in Nature, arrived at a similar conclusion. Mutation rates were highly variable along different parts of the bacteria’s genome. Researchers detected a lower rate of mutation in genes with high activity. Contrary to the idea that all mutations are random, the mutation rate among genes appears to have been evolutionarily optimized to reduce the occurrence of harmful mutations in certain genes that are most critical for survival. By the same token, increased rates can be found where mutation is most useful—for example, in immune genes that have to constantly rearrange to make new antibodies as protection against invading pathogens. While it’s still not exactly clear how mutations are directed to some genes and not to others when the environment is challenging, a leading hypothesis that’s being explored is that epigenetics plays a key role.
Obviously Darwin, living in the nineteenth century, could not have known that mutation rates vary widely along different spots in the genome. He did not even know about the genome. It’s getting less and less tenable in the twenty-first century for strict Darwinians to abide by the dogma that mutations occur only randomly and are later subjected to natural selection. The actual rate of mutation at any spot in the genome is affected by multiple factors that vary for the purposes of DNA protection or repair, or by epigenetic factors. This isn’t a random process.
Is there enough room in the new genetics to say that each person is evolving at this very moment? Not yet. There are more hurdles to cross, beginning with the speed of evolution, a crawl so slow that species often take millions of years to evolve.
There is also fascinating evidence that cancer mutations are not entirely random, as previously thought. Since the scientific details are rather dense, see the Appendixes, this page, for a technical discussion of this issue.
In traditional Darwinism, a species must wait around for a gene mutation to occur randomly. If it promotes survival, the mutation establishes a new behavioral or structural feature in the carrier. It can then take millions of years to spread through the population of the species. But with epigenetics, these changes can happen in large swaths of the population in the very next generation.
Establishing exactly how long it takes for evolution to occur is arguable, and the discussion can begin in many places. Let’s start with Darwin’s “special difficulty,” as he called it, a difficulty that would have far-reaching effects. The problem had to do with ants and honeybees. Darwin could not fathom how sterile female ants continue to show up generation after generation in the colony even though they cannot reproduce. He noted how different the sterile females were in terms of behavior and body shape from the fertile females. Even though the sterile females obviously couldn’t propagate and therefore had zero chance to breed, how could their genes keep being passed on? Darwin didn’t know about genes, but his theory depended on survival, which isn’t possible if an entire class of ants is sterile.
Finding the answer was impossible until the advent of epigenetics, long after Darwin passed on. Epigenetics explains how chemical modifications of DNA can permanently alter gene activity, turning it up or down. This process can happen after the moment of birth, sidestepping the baffling issue of passing on new genes—all that’s needed is to modify the existing ones. On his own, Darwin got close to the answer. He speculated that it could be found in the caste systems of honeybees.
Depending on the type of food the honeybee larvae eat, they can be candidates for queen or instead end up as sterile workers in the hive. The difference comes down to a special food known as royal jelly, which contains nutrients that foster greater development of the ovaries. It’s been shown that the precise mechanism involves epigenetic alterations of select genes. While the queen bee’s diet allows her to live for years and lay millions of eggs, the brief life of a worker bee is relegated to keeping house, taking care of the young, and foraging—basically doing whatever needs to be done for the good of the hive.
A similar mechanism functions in an ant colony. Darwin ultimately went on to propose that in the case of ants, natural selection does not apply only to the individual but also to the family and society. He was beginning to see how an entire colony could be viewed as a single evolving “super organism,” which is how we see it today.
Diet can further modify gene activity to program certain honeybees to emit pheromones instructing them either to take care of the young or to go out and bring back food. Gene activity can be modified by the action of enzymes known as histone deacetylases (HDACs), which remove chemicals known as acetyl groups from the epigenetically modified genes. It turns out that royal jelly contains HDAC inhibitors that secure a honeybee’s position as a possible future queen. Interestingly, while we were writing this book, the FDA approved the drug Farydak, the first epigenetic drug—a HDAC inhibitor for treating recurring forms of a specific cancer, multiple myeloma (MM). Farydak reverses epigenetic changes that occur on certain genes, with the intention of preventing the spread of MM to other parts of the body.
After 150 years, Darwin’s “special difficulty” has led to the realization that epigenetics determines not only the fate of bee larvae, but also their later behavior. This genetic detour speeds up evolution for all practical purposes. Just as important, it makes evolution personal. In standard Darwinian theory, evolution is totally impersonal. To take hold, a new gene mutation must be passed on within a large chunk of the population of plants or animals. The flightless wings of a penguin, for example, allowed the whole species to survive through diving in the sea and swimming continuously after fish. But epigenetics changes the life of the individual. In the case of the honeybee, the entire life of a single sterile female is determined by epigenetic modifications. This difference may have explosive implications for human beings. We’ve been offering the mounting evidence that epigenetic switching is the key factor in lifestyle choices and well-being. But getting evolutionists to consider, much less agree with, this new scheme meets with considerable resistance.
There is presently a heated controversy over whether Homo sapiens has genetically advanced over our relatively brief life as a species. After leaving Africa 200,000 years ago, our ancestors populated far-flung locales around the world, and as they did, the facial features, skin, and skeletal structure of each major group became distinctive. An Asian face doesn’t resemble a European face in key ways, just as African skin resembles the skin of neither one of those populations.
As the noted biologist and writer H. Allen Orr explains, “Geneticists might find that a variant of a given gene is found in 79 percent of Europeans but in only, say, 58 percent of East Asians. Only rarely do all Europeans carry a genetic variant that does not appear in all East Asians. But across our vast genomes, these statistical differences add up, and geneticists have little difficulty concluding that one person’s genome looks European and another person’s looks East Asian.”
It’s been argued that so much is different from genome to genome that the time line must be sped up to account for it. Some evolutionists believe that up to 8 percent of genetic changes occurred through natural selection in just the past 20,000 to 30,000 years, a blink of an eye in evolutionary time when you consider the rise of the horse, for example, from a small ancestor, Eohippus (Greek for “dawn horse”), which was only twice the size of a fox terrier and roamed North America between 48 and 56 million years ago.
In the midst of this controversy, where the data tend to be very “soft” and the conclusions speculative, it’s not even clear if our genome changed out of advantages in survival (getting more food) or mating. One camp suggests that genetic changes were not entirely due to random mutations and natural selection but were driven by culture. Because human beings live in collective communities, it is plausible, the argument goes, that traits that promoted community skills were favored through breeding and therefore got passed down to the modern day. But exactly how a gene promotes a specific skill is questionable. It’s intriguing to follow the struggle that Yale physician and social scientist Nicholas Christakis went through before publicly stating that “culture can change our genes.”
That’s the title of an online article from 2008 in which Christakis declares, “I have changed my mind about how people come literally to embody the social world around them.” As a social scientist, he had seen abundant evidence that people’s experiences—of poverty, for example—shaped their memories and psychology. But that was the limit. As a doctor, “I thought that our genes were historically immutable, and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics. I thought that we as a species evolved over time frames far too long to be influenced by human actions.”
Without using epigenetics to describe why he changed his mind, Christakis gives a striking example of how culture talks to genes:
The best example so far is the evolution of lactose tolerance in adults. The ability of adults to digest lactose (a sugar in milk) confers evolutionary advantages only when a stable supply of milk is available, such as after milk-producing animals (sheep, cattle, goats) have been domesticated. The advantages are several, ranging from a source of valuable calories to a source of necessary hydration during times of water shortage or spoilage. Amazingly, just over the last 3 to 9 thousand years, there have been several adaptive mutations in widely separated populations in Africa and Europe, all conferring the ability to digest lactose….This trait is sufficiently advantageous that those with the trait have notably many more descendants than those without.
Three thousand to nine thousand years is race-car speed across evolutionary epochs, but Christakis can no longer see any reason for doubt. “We are evolving in real time,” he writes, “under the pressure of discernible social and historical forces.” These words don’t seem dramatic until you realize that “social and historical forces” are to some extent under human control. After all, we start wars, wipe out entire populations, enforce starvation, and, on the positive side, bring relief to famines, cure epidemic diseases, and reform poverty.
The clincher for Christakis was a 2007 article by University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks and his colleagues in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offering evidence that human adaptation has been accelerating over the last 40,000 years. A sped-up rate of “positive selection,” the authors say, can be statistically proven by studying genomes around the world, supporting “the extraordinarily rapid recent genetic evolution of our species.” A panorama of possibilities suddenly opened up. Genetic variants may have favored some people to survive epidemics like typhoid after the rise of cities and much closer contact with others.
Once Christakis began thinking this way, he realized that culture isn’t speaking a soliloquy, and neither are genes—they have always been in a dialogue. “It is hard to know where this would stop. There may be genetic variants that favor survival in cities, that favor saving for retirement, that favor consumption of alcohol, or that favor a preference for complicated social networks. There may be genetic variants (based on altruistic genes that are a part of our hominid heritage) that favor living in a democratic society, others that favor living among computers….Maybe even the more complex world we live in nowadays really is making us smarter.”
Real-time evolution is crucial to the super genome. We can be certain that it’s happening in the microbiome, because bacteria live very short lives and are prone to rapid mutations. But if radical well-being is to become a reality, real-time evolution must apply to the whole mind-body system. How would that work? Before Darwinism triumphed, there were other evolutionary theories, and one in particular that foresaw that creatures could evolve in a single lifetime.
The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) was a supporter of evolution decades before Darwin. He was a hero on the battlefield against Prussia and a gaunt, determined figure in the laboratory. He eventually died blind, impoverished, and publicly ridiculed; until very recently, his evolutionary ideas remained an object of scorn, in fact, because they ran contrary to Darwin’s. Lamarck proposed that species evolve in accord with the behaviors of the parents. For example, he claimed that if you read hundreds and hundreds of books and become learned, you would then have smart children. Obviously this is not the case. But in view of epigenetics, Lamarck’s ideas now appear a little less absurd.
He could be considered the father of “soft” inheritance, which lies at the core of epigenetics—traits that get passed on to the next generation if the mother or father has had a strong enough experience to create epigenetic marks (like undergoing a famine or torture camp) or if the pregnant mother smokes or drinks to excess, or is exposed to environmental toxins. With the tremendous advances in genetic analyses of genomes all the way from the human to the viral, we have validated not just Darwin’s theories of “hard” inheritance but also some Lamarckian principles as well. Without being exactly right, he is no longer absurd.
A growing body of epigenetic data says that Lamarck was at least on the right track. Soft inheritance is a prime example of sped-up evolution. Yet it still remains to be proven that lifestyle changes in the parents can be passed on to the next generation. Are they strong enough, and do they persist long enough at the epigenetic level? These are open questions at present. Lacking any knowledge of genetics, Darwin could never even attempt to answer these questions. But some combination of soft and hard inheritance one day will.
We began this chapter by saying that evolutionary theory needed to undergo three changes for the super genome to fulfill its potential. We’ve covered the first two, removing the barrier for random mutations and speeding up the rate of evolutionary change. What remains is the third and potentially most controversial point, bringing in a role for mind. Since the very word is so explosive, we will substitute terms that describe how systems work when they become highly complex and evolved. There is no use butting heads with arch-materialists—many of them consider mind an offshoot of physical activity in the brain, like the heat thrown off by a bonfire.
We wrote an entire book, Super Brain, about the relation between mind and brain, strongly supporting the position that mind comes first, brain second. But a book on genetics must stand on its own. There is no controversy, or little enough, that complex systems are self-organizing, using feedback loops as a form of learning. Learning implies evolution, whether we call it mindful learning or the behavior of a complex system. With that settled, let’s proceed.
What would mindful evolution look like? It would have direction, meaning, and purpose. The beauty of a brilliant bird of paradise in the New Guinea rain forest, the fearful symmetry of a tiger, the quivering gentleness of a deer—all such traits would be intentional. There would be a reason for them to exist beyond survival of the fittest.
As with other aspects of the new genetics, the absurdity of such a notion has gradually been softened. While it’s still a huge leap to claim that evolution has a purpose and a goal (technically known as teleology), it’s no longer viable to call evolution totally blind. The pivot occurred when the concept of self-organization began to take hold over the past few decades. When you were a teenager, you probably had a typical teenager’s bedroom where the lack of organization is total, with clothes strewn everywhere, an unmade bed, and so on. But as an adult you faced the need to organize your life, since the alternative is chaos. Evolution was faced with the same dilemma, and becoming more organized in order to avoid chaos brought the same solution.
In 1947 a brilliant neuroscientist and psychiatrist, W. Ross Ashby, published a paper titled “Principle of the Self-Organizing System.” His definition of “organization” didn’t revolve around its usefulness, the way it’s useful to run an organized business instead of a disorganized one. Nor did Ashby judge being organized as good versus bad. He claimed instead that organization pertains to certain conditions among the connected parts of an emerging system. This turns out to have tremendous implications for how our genome organizes itself.
In Ashby’s view, a self-organizing system is composed of parts that are joined, not separated. Most important, each part must affect the other parts. The way that the parts regulate each other is the key. A stove isn’t self-regulating. If you put on the teakettle and walk away, the temperature gets hotter and hotter until the water boils away and the kettle starts to melt and fuse with the burner. But a thermostat is self-regulating. You can set the desired temperature and walk away, knowing that if the room gets too hot, the thermostat will turn off the heat.
You couldn’t survive if your body operated like a stovetop. Processes cannot be allowed to run away with themselves. An unchecked fever of even five degrees above normal human body temperature threatens brain damage and eventually death. Growing too cold shuts down the metabolism and leads to hypothermia, which in extreme cases can also prove fatal. The self-regulation of a thermostat exists everywhere in the body, regulating not just temperature but dozens of processes. Because of self-regulation, you don’t grow and keep on growing; your heart rate doesn’t speed up and keep on accelerating; the fight-or-flight response doesn’t make you run away and keep on running.
Every cell in your body developed through orderly, self-regulated steps, reaching amazing complexity in the fetal brain. In the span of nine months, beginning with a single fertilized egg, nerve cells begin to differentiate, at first in isolation but quickly forming a network. By the second trimester, new brain cells are being formed at the fantastic rate of 250,000 per minute, and some estimates raise this to 1 million new cells per minute just before birth. These cells aren’t simply globs of life bunched together. Each has a specific task; each relates to other nerve cells around it; the entire brain knows where every one of its 100 billion cells belong.
Connections, networks, and feedback loops are key to all self-organizing systems. Billions of years ago, early bacteria may have started out independently, but as they encountered one another in the soil, they began to interact and form communities—eventually they totally depended on one another to survive and thrive. In our bodies, as we’ve seen, bacteria network with our own cells. They share much of our DNA and interact to form an immensely complex and sophisticated microbiome. Evolution has made our survival completely dependent upon them. If in the twentieth century we spent most of our time figuring out how to fight microbes, in the twenty-first century we are focusing on how to harmoniously coexist with them. The super genome is the ultimate self-organizing system, because it reflects the entire history of life on Earth.
DNA, it goes without saying, is incredibly orderly, putting billions of base pairs in order. This is more than ordinary chemical bonding, however. Inside a cell, active self-organizing is going on. Specific chromosomes occupy specific positions in the nucleus. Only 3 percent of the genome is actually made of genes, and the gene-poor regions are near the edge of the nucleus, where there is the least ability for epigenetics to modify gene activity. In contrast, the gene-rich areas of the genome are in the center of the nucleus, where regulation of gene activity is most concentrated. Genes that are controlled by the same proteins tend to cluster together in genomic “neighborhoods,” making it easier for those proteins to find the genes they regulate all in one place. Everything we see in the genome says it is not laid out randomly, but logically. With that said, it would be a mistake to then go to the other extreme and say it was “designed” this way. The design becomes apparent only after the fact. The journey there was carried out by the principles of self-organization.
Self-organizing systems exist as their own reasons and cause—they constantly re-create themselves with new interactions. This leads to new states of order that are never complete. For example, an atom is actually a sub-microscopic system that obeys rules of orderliness. Electrons are arranged so that an atom of oxygen is different from an atom of iron. But room has been left for change. Because the outer electrons in these atoms can bond, ferrous oxide—common rust—is created. It, too, isn’t completely stable, leading to more changes. Rust is more complex than either oxygen or iron, its two components. Thus complexity fuels greater self-organization, and vice versa.
This is the continuing miracle of evolution, that it defies chaos by making ever greater creative leaps. If you pile up sand on a beach, you get a sand dune. It’s massive but not complex; nothing holds it together as a system—one hurricane is enough to disintegrate the dune and make it disappear. But as cells accumulate in a fetus, they don’t simply pile up like grains of sand. They bond, interact, and organize. So a strong wind doesn’t cause the human body to disintegrate.
But this is just the beginning of the story. Complexity and self-organization, proceeding hand in hand, learned how to create life, and life learned how to think. Set aside for the moment that thinking, as most evolutionists see it, emerged only with the human brain. The entire march of events leading up to the brain shows that new states of order are never complete. As the eminent theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman put it, “Evolution is not just ‘chance caught on the wing.’ It is not just a tinkering of the ad hoc, of bricolage, of a contraption. It is emergent order honored and honed by selection.”
The chemical bond that joins oxygen and iron atoms to make rust is physical, but the operation of your genome contains something that goes far beyond the physical. The technical term for this invisible X factor is self-referral. It means that a system keeps tabs on itself by constantly sending messages back and forth so that a circle of change is also a circle of stability.
The key to self-referral is the feedback loop. When a gene makes a protein, you can be sure that either directly or indirectly that protein will help regulate the activity of the gene somewhere down the line. Simply put, if A produces B, B must in some way directly or indirectly govern A. Your own choices, physical or mental, come back to govern you. The scale can be very large or very small. If you are single and decide to marry, this decision puts all your past memories in a new light, just as getting sick puts wellness in a new light and growing old puts youth in a new light. Each phase of life moves forward while at the same time gathering the past around it.
Self-referral is also how your genes can respond with just what’s needed for your life today while never losing sight of their programming from the past. At the same time, through mutations and epigenetic marks, the present has the capacity to alter these instructions. This is the basis of self-referral at its very roots. Nothing is produced in the universe without coming back to somehow control that which produced it. In spiritual terms, there is the principle of moral balance between good and evil (the law of Karma), stated in Christianity as “As you sow, so shall you reap.” In Newtonian physics, it’s the third law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Opposites should pull a system apart, but they don’t, because the invisible element of self-organization keeps them intact.
Feedback mechanisms underlie the links between an organism and its environment. Allow us to explain this a bit technically, because feedback is such a strong element of the argument. We now know that genes are resilient to forces and counterforces. In evolution, new mutations occur when there is stress and challenge in the environment. When challenging conditions arise, the DNA of certain genes becomes exposed so it can be switched on or off by epigenetics, or turned up or down in activity by specific proteins called transcription factors. This first involves changes in the actual folding and topography of the DNA.
As a result, the exposed regions of DNA can be more prone to mutation. So in this model, which is increasingly becoming more accepted, mutations do not occur in random spots in the genome. Changes in the environment lead to changes in how the DNA is folded (not in the actual sequence of base pairs). This determines which gene regions are exposed to possible mutation. In other words, the environment, life exposures, stresses, and outside challenges affect how the DNA is folded in the nucleus, laying certain regions more exposed to mutation than others. In this case, mutations aren’t random but arise downstream of environmental conditions. Even though some speculative thinking is involved here, the feedback between genes and outside conditions is key. It enables an organism to adapt to the conditions that Nature brings. So reliable is this mechanism that it has sustained life from the first primordial micro-organisms onward.
As every component of the genome emerged and interacted with other components, they regulated each other to assemble what appears to be a logical design. But in actuality there was no preconceived design, either historically or in the future. Natural processes achieve their results in real time, through self-interaction. Our minds struggle to grasp how this can happen. Leonardo da Vinci marveled, “Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.” In essence, Nature is all about feedback loops. While our genes set the stage, we determine the character we play on that stage and choose the characters with whom we will interact. And, in return, the set on the stage adapts to us. We are modifying our genes with our words, actions, and deeds all the time. This feedback system has been the cornerstone of evolution and always will be.
At a certain point, it seems totally arbitrary, conceited, and human-centric for human beings to claim the mind as our private domain. The notion that Nature mindlessly created our own mind doesn’t, at bottom, make much sense. The ingrained cleverness of evolution’s stratagems is astonishing, even in so-called lower life-forms. For example, gene-based changes in survival can take place by simple thievery. Take the case of the brilliant emerald-green sea slug Elysia chlorotica, which looks remarkably like a plant. When it’s time to eat, the slug swipes chloroplasts—cellular machines that can perform photosynthesis—from nearby algae to produce food for itself, the way a plant does, making sugar from water, chlorophyll, and sunlight.
This interesting case of chloroplast burglary has been known for decades, but more recently it’s been discovered that the crafty sea slug can also steal whole genes from the algae. These allow it to make its own food. Normally the stolen chloroplasts last only so long, but the genes the sea slug steals and binds onto its genome keep them going strong, producing meals far longer. It’s astonishing that an animal can feed itself like a plant through cross-species thievery of genes.
Something similar pertains to our species, too. Scientists used to believe that all the cells in our body contain identical genomes. But we are now finding that more than one genome can be found in the nucleus of a single human cell. More specifically, some people have been found with groups of cells that contain multiple gene mutations occurring nowhere else in their body. This can happen when the genomes of two different eggs fuse together into one egg. A pregnant mother can even gain new genomes in her cells from her child, who leaves fetal cells behind after birth. These cells can migrate to the mother’s organs, even the brain, and be absorbed. This event is known as mosaicism, and it looks to be far more common than ever imagined. In some cases, mosaicism is believed to contribute to diseases like schizophrenia, but for the most part it is considered benign.
Even among Darwinian strongholds, it’s become obvious that evolution is a complex dance between hard and soft inheritance. For example, sexual reproduction in most species is hardwired. A male fruit fly automatically knows that in order to mate, it must find a suitable female, tap her with his forelegs, sing specific songs, vibrate one wing, and lick her genitalia. No one has to teach this to the fruit fly. Every gesture is genetically hardwired, and the program is evolutionarily very old. But at some point long ago, these behaviors were not yet wired in; they had to evolve. Each choreographed component of the mating ritual individually emerged in some ancestral fruit fly male and then began to spread. Eventually the new trait became so successful that mating couldn’t take place without it. At that point, we call the ingrained behavior “instinctive,” “hardwired,” or “genetically determined.”
In other words, the behavior occurs with no thought necessary. It arises in response to a specific stimulus. A cockroach will automatically scurry away and hide when a light is switched on. A lizard will scamper off when a person’s shadow approaches. A squirrel will enlarge its tail to appear bigger when facing an attacker. These innate behaviors have become automatic to ensure survival. But it goes too far to claim, as evolutionary psychologists do, that human behavior is primarily a matter of survival.
This claim is an attempt to make us seem hardwired like fruit flies, cockroaches, and squirrels. Certainly we’ve inherited mechanisms from our mammalian ancestors that are innate—the fight-or-flight response is the most obvious example. But we can override our ancestral inheritance at will, which is why, for example, firemen don’t run away from a blazing inferno but toward it, or why soldiers on the battlefield will rush in under heavy fire to save a fallen comrade. Mind trumps instinct through choice and free will. In the same way—and this is the idea that outrages mainstream geneticists—mind trumps genes as well.
Is there a survival benefit to art, music, love, truth, philosophy, mathematics, compassion, charity, and almost every other trait that makes us fully human? Are these traits acquired genetically? Elaborate scenarios are devised every day by evolutionary psychologists who insist that they can show why love, for example, is just a survival skill or a tactic that evolved to make mating more possible. Every other trait is “explained” in similar fashion for solely one purpose—to preserve at all cost Darwin’s original scheme.
What’s anathema is any admission that Homo sapiens evolved using the mind, sidestepping genes altogether. Yet at a certain point it’s obvious that we pursue music because it’s beautiful, practice compassion because our hearts are touched, and so on. In some way these behaviors are inherited, but no one knows how. The existence of mind as a driving force is just as good an explanation as any, and often much better. It’s entirely possible that we “download” many of the cherished traits that make us human, not by evolving the tiny gestures that go into a fruit fly’s mating ritual, but by taking the whole thing at once.
For example, one hears of a child prodigy who has never had a music lesson and yet instinctively knows how to play an instrument as a toddler. The great Argentinean pianist Martha Argerich relates just such a tale.
I was at the kindergarten in a competitive program when I was two years and eight months. I was much younger than the rest of the children. I had a little friend who was always teasing me; he was five and was always telling me, “You can’t do this, you can’t do that.” And I would always do whatever he said I couldn’t.
Once he got the idea of telling me I couldn’t play the piano. (Laughter) That’s how it started. I still remember it. I immediately got up, went to the piano, and started playing a tune that the teacher was playing all the time. I played the tune by ear and perfectly. The teacher immediately called my mother and they started making a fuss. And it was all because of this boy who said, “You can’t play the piano.”
It’s impossible to know whether Argerich simply inherited either the genes or the epigenetic marks that were responsible for her amazing gift. There are inherited skills. Babies are born with the grasping reflex that allows them to clutch at the breast. They have a sense of balance, and some rudimentary but powerful reflexes for survival. For example, experiments have been done with babies only a few months old in which they are placed on a table while their mothers, standing a few feet away, encourage them to come closer. When the infants approach the edge of the table, they won’t go past it; they reflexively know that going over the edge means that they will fall. (There is actually a glass extension to the table, so the experiment is perfectly safe.) Because they want to be with their mothers, the babies start to cry in distress, but no matter how coaxing the mother is, her offspring obeys its innate instinct.
But music is a complex skill involving the higher brain, and unlike a simple reflex, much information must be learned, organized, and stored. How can it be that music prodigies, of which there have been many, somehow inherit a complex mental skill? No one knows, but it argues powerfully for mind being crucial to evolution, since evolution is entirely about inheritance. To deepen our sense of mystery, take the case of Jay Greenberg, a musical prodigy who ranks with the greatest in history, such as Mozart. The first time Jay saw a child-size cello at age two, he took it and started playing. By age ten he entered the Juilliard School with the intention of being a composer, and by his mid-teens Sony had released a CD of his Symphony No. 5, played by the London Symphony, and his String Quintet, played by the Juilliard String Quartet.
As for his working methods, Jay, like many other prodigies, says that he hears the music in his head and writes it down as dictation (Mozart also had this ability, although there is a process of refinement and creativity that goes along with it); perhaps unique to Jay, he can see or hear simultaneous scores in his head at the same time. “My unconscious directs my conscious mind at a mile a minute,” he told a 60 Minutes interviewer.
Prodigies cause amazement, but the whole issue of instinct and genetic memory is an incredibly interesting evolutionary concept. A flatworm can be trained to avoid a light by subjecting it to electric shock whenever it sees it. If the flatworm is then cut in half and the end with the head grows a new tail, or the tail end grows a new head, both halves will continue to avoid the light. How does a newly generated brain retain the same memories as the old one—is memory in this case stored in the DNA of the worm? It’s an open question how our own instinctive behaviors became encoded as memories in our DNA. We have yet to discover how long it took for them to be automatically programmed in us.
More interesting, we can ponder which of our behaviors not currently programmed or automatic in us right now might become so in the far future. We don’t know. But when identical stem cells can become any of two hundred different specialized cells in the body, it is epigenetics and coordinated gene activities that are at play. The highly orchestrated symphonies of gene networks are innate, and they give us the beginning of an answer about how complex skills can be “downloaded” intact. We can’t even be sure that inheritance is the correct term, given that musical and mathematical prodigies, like genius in general, are just as likely to appear in families with no background in music, math, or high IQs.
The purpose of this chapter has been to open new possibilities for you as a person who wants to gain control over your own well-being. We needed to discuss evolution in detail so that you may realize how much control you actually have. Evolving in real time is possible. Let’s review why.
Mutations aren’t always random but may also be induced by the environment and interactions.
Evolutionary change doesn’t need millions of years—it can occur in a single generation (at least in mice and other species).
Genes operate by feedback loops that constantly monitor for new messages, information, and changes in the environment.
The brain constantly interacts with the genome, bringing in the vast potential of the mind to affect every cell in the body.
These four points are the takeaway from this chapter, and they pave the way for the transformation that the super genome facilitates. They also pave the way for transforming our whole notion of how evolution works. You don’t need to be concerned with where genetics winds up a generation from now. At the present moment, you have enough knowledge to do something incredibly important—you can cooperate with Nature’s infinite creativity.
Evolution, after all, is only a scientific word for the creativity and organizing factors that drive the entire universe, but most especially life on Earth. The super genome records every creative leap that life has taken. Until the appearance of human beings, creatures lacked the self-awareness to examine their evolutionary state. A flatworm that is cut in half and forms a new brain containing its old memories has no idea that this enigmatic event has occurred. But you can use your awareness to direct where your life is going. The super genome will always respond, so even in the absence of rock-solid data, we propose the following possibilities:
Your intentions have a powerful effect on your genome.
If you set a goal, your genes will self-organize around your desire and support it.
Creativity is your natural state—you only need to tap into it.
You were put here to evolve, and the super genome was put here for the same purpose.
Keeping these conclusions in mind is important, because the environment continues to press new challenges on our genes. Unlike our ancestors, who had to meet pressures from weather and predators, many of these new stresses are unfortunately of our own making: global climate change, increasing pollution, artificially created GMO foods, antibiotic-resistant microbes, increasingly toxic pesticides, and contaminated food and water supplies. We all need to begin arming our genomes to ensure the survival of our species. In other words, we aren’t only responsible for our personal health and longevity, which relates to one super genome. The real super genome is planetary, and how you evolve has global implications. We don’t pose this as an anxiety-provoking responsibility, but a fascinating challenge. If and when humanity solves these new challenges, it will take a quantum leap in evolution, which is exactly how it has always been and should be.