BRAIN SCANS, COMAS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

In hospitals and care facilities around the world there are thousands upon thousands of patients lying in a comatose vegetative state, their basic biological functions being maintained by life support systems.  After being in such a state for a period of time, the question uppermost in the minds of their relatives, loved ones and care givers is: "Is there still anyone in there?" If there is some voluntary movement that the patient still has control over: the ability to wiggle a toe, to flex a finger, to clench a jaw, etc., then at least yes and no questions can be asked to establish a line of communication and determine whether or not there is still someone in there.  Yet for those patients completely paralyzed, the determination of this question, until very recently,  has been impossible, even though those closest to the patient often have strong feelings as to whether or not their loved one is still there.  An eye that is open but unmoving can appear vacant at one moment and then focussed and present at another; a feeling of extra alertness, a different kind of energy,  can be communicated to loved one's even if there is no observable movement.  Yet at some point, even if some family members have a sense that he or she may still be in there, because of the enormous costs of maintaining a patient in this condition and the huge emotional strain for loved ones who find no ultimate resolution to this question, a heart rending decision must be made.

As upsetting as this situation is for so many people, it is also, in a way, deliciously ironic.  In this age of rigid materialist thinking, with the finest measuring and observing devices for examining the human body and brain inside and out, there was no way of knowing whether or not the person, the being, was still dwelling within that body.  And mind you, if, God forbid, a child of uber materialist Steve Pinker or 'man is just a computer' Richard Dawkins, or a child of any of the whole cult of neo-Darwinists, were in this condition, then Pinker and Dawkins and all the neo-Darwinists would be just as desperate to determine if their child (not their child's body but their child)  was still dwelling inside that body.

Adrian Owen, a neuro-scientist from the University of Cambridge, UK, now working in Canada, has dedicated himself to finding measurable answers to that daunting question.  A patient named Kate Bainbridge  contracted a viral infection that had put her into a coma for months.  Doctors determined that she was in a vegetative state and the time for answering the 'dreaded question' was quickly approaching.  Meanwhile Owen had been using positron-emission tomography in healthy people to show that a part of the brain called the fusiform face area (FFA) is activated when people see a familiar face.  When the team showed Bainbridge familiar faces and scanned her brain, "it lit up like a Christmas tree, especially the FFA," says Owen.  "That was the beginning of everything."  Bainbridge responded quickly to rehabilitation and now in a wheelchair but otherwise active wrote to Owen to thank him for the brain scan, "It scares me to think of what might have happenned to me if I had not had mine.  It was like magic, it found me."

What is most intriguing about all this for me, is who and what is this person that all these people are desperately seeking within this comatose body but are not able to directly observe?  When Ms. Bainbridge declares that it found 'me' what is the 'me' that was found?  The most fanatic of the materialist cult may say that it is her brain, especially her cerebral cortex, capable of complex activity, that was found.  But was it Kate Bainbridge's cerebral cortex, especially her FFA, that was excited to see her relatives and loved ones?  Does the cerebral cortex get excited when it sees familiar faces?  Does it feel lonely when it doesn't?  If it does, which part of the cerebral cortex, even which part of the FFA is experiencing these feelings?  Is it the electrons that are running through it?  Is it the nerve cells or some chemicals within the nerve cells that were feeling so lonely and isolated and longed so deeply to establish contact?  When Ms. Bainbridge describes the unspeakable torment of being so completely paralyzed within her body that she could not establish any contact although she desperately wanted to and knew that her loved ones desperately wanted her to as well, is it, once again, the chemicals and electrons in her brain that were feeling all this?  And there are hundreds of billions of neurons in the brain and exponentially more electrons.  Did Ms. Bainbridge experience all these feelings as if there were many billions of parts of herself communicating this isolation and then this exhilaration at making contact?  Or did she experience this experience as we all, all living beings, experience our experience, as a unitary consciousness; as one being, one self?  Did she say, "It scares all of us to think of what might have happened to the hundreds of billions of us if our multitude had not had ours (the brain scan).  It was like magic.  It found the entire horde of us"?    Or did she say, "it scares me to think of what might have happenned to me  if I had not had mine.  It was like magic. It found me".  Is the FFA experiencing Kate's excitement, or is it recording Kate's excitement?  Are the complex wirings of the FFA assisting Kate in defining and recognizing those familiar faces, or is the wiring recognizing the faces by itself?  Can wiring do anything by itself or is wiring merely matter, and like all other matter, can do nothing by itself because it has no self, and must be used and designed by a being that does have a self that desires and experiences things.  And is this self the very same self that all of Ms. Bainbridge's loved one's were so anxious to make contact with, an unobservable self, a self that is the context of experience and the milieu of desire, and which expressed her gratitude by writing a letter to Dr. Owen?

Although the positron-emission tomography test was able to show that patients were still alive and present, it did not yield any information beyond that.  It was not a method whereby Dr. Owen could ask questions of the patient and find out how they were feeling, if they needed more analgesic medication or less, if they would like to listen to the radio, to listen to a particular channel, etc. He started testing healthy individuals by asking them to imagine playing a vigorous, competitive game of tennis for thirty seconds.  Then he asked them to imagine walking through their homes, also for thirty seconds.  These imaginings were being done while the patient was receiving an fMRI brain scan.

The brain is, I believe, the only major organ in the body that does not have a way of storing fats in the form of glycogen to be converted to glucose when needed to be burned for energy.  So whenever we do mental activity we are directly using the sugar, the glucose, that is already present in our bloodstreams.  That is why our thoughts and emotional levels can change so dramatically when our blood sugar level dramatically rises and falls. (That is also why our energy and emotional level becomes much more stable when our diet is rich in complex carbohydrates, such as are found in whole grains, which slowly break down in the digestive system and enter the bloodstream over a period of hours, rather than rely on lots of sugary food and drinks which enter the bloodstream within seconds, creating a huge spike in our blood sugar level and stimulating the production of large amounts of insulin which continues to drive down the blood sugar level for hours after the initial surge, creating the craving for a new sugar hit).

Playing a competitive tennis match and recalling wandering through your house are two very different activities.  Tennis requires much more adrenaline, a keen and expectant focus on the ball, and the stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system with energy moving into the musculature of the limbs and away from the digestive system.  Imagining walking through one's home is not adrenalizing, but requires memory of objects and spatial relations and by recalling various objects and rooms stimulates many connected memories laden with personal meaning.  When healthy people imagined playing tennis, more blood would flow to a part of the brain called the premotor cortex or the supplementary motor cortex.  When they imagined navigating through their house, more blood would flow to the parahippocampal gyrus, associated with memory and feeling.

By doing the same test with patients in a vegetative state, some of them responded exactly as did the healthy patients.  The increased blood flow to the premotor cortex meant not only that they had heard the instructions, but that they had understood the words and remembered something about what the game of tennis was like and what it required.  The increased flow to the parahippocampal gyrus also proved their ability to hear, to understand and to remember.  In those responsive patients, Dr. Owen followed with further testing.  He gave the patients a series of yes and no questions asking them to imagine playing tennis if the answer were yes and wandering through their house if the answer was no. At first they were asked a series of questions to determine beyond any dispute that they were in there and conscious.  For instance, "Is your name Harry?,"  "Is your name Joseph?,""Do you have a brother?," "Do you have a sister?," etc.  Then they were asked questions that were relevant to their care:  "Are you in pain?,"  "Would you like the radio on?,"  "Would you like the window open?," etc.

Dr. Owen is still working on refining his technique so that it can be done more efficiently and economically and become common practice in the care of comatose patients. This is certainly wonderful news for people in so-called vegetative states and their loved ones, but it is also, to my mind, amazing news to anyone who is in the possession of a brain and a body, healthy or otherwise.  Let's look at the first part, imagining playing tennis.  The subject, whether healthy or paralyzed, at some point decides whether to follow these instructions or not.  This decision is probably made before the instructions are given.  The healthy patients are either volunteers who have some interest in science and believe in the potential value of the research or are getting paid for their involvement and want to do the job with integrity.  The comatose patients, one would guess, would probably be willing, even extremely eager, to follow these instructions because they promise to provide a way of making desperately desired contact. But once the patient decides, he or she commits the energy necessary to do the task and that commitment, in the case of the imagined tennis game, results in a reapportionment of the blood flowing through the brain, a reapportionment that can be measured by the fMRi equipment. And it also results in the precise hundreds of millions of neurons of the premotor cortex that would lead to an actual game of tennis if the circuits going from those initial neurons were allowed to continue moving to the precise muscles that would make all the required movements possible.  With the healthy patients those signals do not continue because they are asked to stay still and just imagine the game and in the comatose patients there is some break or damage that connects those circuits leading from the premotor cortex to the actual musculature.  In either case there is no outward observable movement.   So just by deciding to imagine such a thing, we humans (whether mobile or paralyzed) are able to rearrange the cranial blood supply and cause the firing of the precise millions of neurons that would initiate the activity that we are imagining.

Now you may have heard of psychokinesis or telekinesis.  This is the supposed ability of people to move or bend objects just with the power of their minds, with no physical contact between the person and the object.  Uri Geller made an entire career of either doing this or tricking people into believing that he was doing this.  Whether or not Uri Geller, or anyone else, has such an unusual gift or is really a trickster, is of very little interest to me.  I am not concerned so much about unusual people with unusual gifts.  I am much more concerned about the amazing gifts that usual people, that all people, that even totally paralyzed people have and exercise, whether they realize it or not, at every moment of their waking existence.  Simply by deciding to do something, by wanting to do something, we immediately rearrange the blood flow to the brain to energize the exact pattern of millions of neurons that enable us to do, or to imagine doing, what we want to do.  Now I said that 'we' rearrange the blood supply to the brain, but, of course, we have no direct involvement in this process at all.  It is being done for us.  We cannot appear on the Jay Leno show to show off this amazing gift, because everyone has it and no one, unless they are in the possession of very sophisticated medical equipment, can observe it. Never the less it is no less amazing, in fact, far more so, than Uri Geller bending a key from five feet away.  On a microscopic level millions of utterly precise changes are being initiated just by our decision. Whether you call this process which takes place every moment we decide to do anything, whether we are deciding to imagine playing tennis, deciding to go to war with Iraq, or deciding to scratch our nose, whether you call this psychokinesis or telekinesis, it doesn't matter.  But what is going on is that merely your decision, prior to any force, prior to any movement, prior to any re-arrangement of energy, just your decision, made without any physicality what so ever, engenders millions of utterly precise physical processes.

Ready! Get set! Go!  Go is the actual burst of muscular energy that begins a race and unfortunately, of course, it is beyond the ability of a totally paralyzed person.  Get set is the movement into the exact physical position that the runner wants to be in to commence the race, and this too is beyond the purview of the paralyzed.  Ready is the inner preparation, the sharpening of the focus (you are the focus), the distribution of the blood supply, the re-arrangement of energy and the stimulation of the precise array of millions of neurons of the pre-motor cortex, prior to any external movement at all; and all of this, thanks to the findings of Dr. Owen, is, through the instrument of their will alone, within the purview of even the totally paralyzed.

The common modern day view of the human body is that it happens to be there as a result of an enormous series of freak accidents that gradually took place over billions of years in the random interplay of physical forces, and that the purpose of the human body is to conduct basic biological tasks to insure its survival and its replication.  This view of how our bodies arrived, particularly from the perspective of the mind boggling level of complexity and syncrhronicity that we now know exists, a very small part of which  we are now just beginning to understand, is ludicrous for many, many reasons which are elucidated in several other posts of this blog. Also, and importantly, the body, by itself, does not want to survive.  The body, even the brain, does not want to survive and does not want to replicate.  The body, even the brain, are matter, are molecules and electrons, and proteins and fats and sugars, and like all matter, they do not want anything, and they do not care about anything.  Neurons don't care if they are idle or if electricity is flowing through them.  The digestive tract doesn't care if it is empty or full.  There is no such singular entity as 'the body.'  There are, however, literally quadrillions of parts and simultaneous processes in this body that are all working  synchronously with each other.  This sychronicity is not the result of an actual unit called 'the body' but of a unitary consciousness.  When people say that there is a transcendent conciousness, a cosmic consciousness, they mean that there is a being, not a physical entity, but a being, which, among other things, has designed and evolved your body, each organ of which is the result of an idea to allow the organism to deal more effectively with a changing environment and which allows you, among many other things, to arrange all the precise neurons and alter the blood flow and prepare the energy flow which allows you to do whatever you want to do the moment you decide to do it.

Then there is our consciousnes itself.  There are several current scientific theories as to what is the 'cause' of consciousness: the patterns of electricity in your brain, the patterns of magnetic fields surrounding the brain, the patterns of gyruses and sulci (hills and valleys) of the cortex; the patterns of chemical deposits within the neurons, etc.  Whichever pattern or combinations of patterns is responsible, what is the organ that allows you to translate those electric or magnetic or chemical or shape patterns into the sunsets and concerts and hot dogs and birthday cakes and complex relationships and the smell of jasmine, and a myriad of other experiences which you experience at every moment of your life and is the real content of your life? allows you to translate these electrons, this magnetism or these cortical shapes into your life?  There is no such physical organ.  It is again, the cosmic consciousness that is the translator;  that enables you to experience your experience.

What of  the genes, which, by themselves, are merely codes for the manufacture of strings of amino acids.  What or who makes sure, or sets up the fantastically precise and intricate mechanisms to make sure,  that the genes are fired at the precise time they are needed (the timing system being far more complicated than the genome itself), that these coded strings of information are transcribed into movable messages and delivered to the precise place they need to go to be translated into amino acids,(again both the process of transcription and translation being fantastically precise and complex),  makes sure that these strings of amino acids are folded in an absolutely precise way with the absolutely precise addition of sugar and fat molecules when needed, into the absolutely precise protein molecules, each of which, and there are many quadrillions of them at work in your body at this very moment, are utterly precise microscopic machines designed to perform an utterly precise and specific function; takes these protein machines, many of which are structural, and forms these structural protein molecules into all the shapes and shapes within shapes and shapes within shapes within shapes, that form the contours of your body, your organs, your organelles, your bones, your cappillaries, your villi, etc., etc., etc.

It is this very same cosmic consciousness that adds new genes to an existing organism (Darwinian evolution has no explanation for the addition of a new gene) which entails the rearrangement of a gene firing system which is far more complicated than the genome itself, entails the re-arrangement of the blood supply and the nervous system to supply and support whatever new organs or adjustment to old organs are engendered by this new gene, requires the reapportionment of the real estate of the brain, and often the reapportionment of the structure of the whole body to maintain the same equilibrium with the addition of new organs and the modification of old ones, and is undertaken not because of a random collision of molecules or a 'mistake' in the replication of genes, but because of a cosmic decision that a new material is needed in order to execute the new ideas that cosmic conciousness wants to introduce; these ideas including new organs, enhanced brain  capacity, and whatever improvements to existing organs are envisioned (a new gene providing, by itself, not a new organ, but a new raw material which is used in all cases in the body for many new applications and requires the unfathomably precise and unfathomably synchronous adjustment to all these organs and systems and firing patterns). Not the body, but the cosmic consciousness wants you to survive, and either supervises the growth and development of your body and the evolution of all bodies, either directly, or by creating the fantastic equipment of transcendent complexity and synchronicity that breathes us, that allows us to digest food, to replicate ourselves, to eliminate wastes, to maintain our metabolism and our body temperature, and provides us with a set of biological desires, so that, with no biological knowledge of our own, we are able to survive simply by eating what we want when we are hungry,  drinking what we want when we are thirsty, sleeping when we are tired,  warming ourselves when we are cold, cooling off when we are hot, and partnering with the being that we want to partner with when we are horny.  And on top of all this, and especially with humans, this equipment provided by the cosmic conciousness, allows us to do, at every moment, what we want to do, which is the real purpose of our body brains, of evolution.  The purpose of our bodies is not just to survive, but the survival of our bodies and brains is provided for us so that we can have an experience of doing what we want to do when we want to do it.

Not that we all enjoy perfect freedom, far from it.  Others impose their will upon us and force us into situations which we had no part in choosing and would never have chosen for ourselves.  The world is plagued by people who exploit their power to force others to do what they want with no regard to what the rest of us may want.  Yet even in these forced situations we do, certainly with no eagerness, what we choose to do.  We perform a slave wage grindingly dull job because we prefer that to starving.  We are forced at gunpoint to do things which are abhorrent to us, again because we would rather endure that indignity than get shot, etc. Yet still, although we may not have chosen the situations that we find ourselves in, within the limits of the options those situations provide us, we still do what we want to do; or prefer to do over even less desirable options.

What we desire is a certain kind of experience, for ourselves or for others.  Desires come from the non-material world of beings, and the goal of desires is, by somehow using or manipulating the world of matter, to be able to enjoy for ourselves or provide for others, a  certain experience in the non-physical world of spirit. The material world is the intermediary between desire and experience.

It is because we have bodies and brains that are instantly responsive to our wishes, that we, the human race, has enormous freedom, to make what we want to make with our own lives, with our societies and with our planet. Will we create a world of shared happiness and mutual provision, or will we destroy our world by pitting ourselves against imagined competitors (thank you Charles Darwin) and ruthlessly pursuing goals that are antagonistic to the happiness of others?  This is the great experiment.  This is the drama that all of life, including brilliant and purposeful biology and brilliant and purposeful evolution has created with infinite care, patience and transcendent intelligence, to prepare us for.

Dr. Owens work with comatose patients is a remarkable step forward in the care of these patients and in improving the quality of the existence of those who still abide in those paralyzed bodies, and it so clearly shines a light on who we are and who and what we are not.

Your comments are always welcome.

THE CENTRAL DOGMA

Frances Crick, one of the co-discoverers, along with James Watson, of the double helix formation of the DNA molecule, put forth what he called, and later regretted calling, 'The Central Dogma.'  He didn't regret or rescind the ideas put forth in The Dogma but just the use of the word 'Dogma,' (too dogmatic, perhaps?). The Central Dogma  is basically this: that all genetic information begins in the nucleus of a cell, in the DNA molecule, and is carried out from the nucleus by mRNA messenger molecules and is then translated with the use of tRNA translator molecules into a string of amino acids that, when folded and further manufactured with the addition of possibly fats and sugars, carries information out to the rest of the body.  So, then, all genetic information, and by that Crick means all the information necessary to construct a living new born infant, starts in the DNA within the nucleus of the cell, as a string of coded nucleic acids,  is transcribed and transported out of the nucleus into the cytoplasm of the cell where it is translated into a string of amino acids which are then further manufactured into protein molecules which either do their work within the cell or are transported to the exterior of the cell, and it is solely this information and this direction of the flow of information, from the nucleus outward, which is responsible for the construction and function of the entire living body, at least until birth, at which point the newborn is subject to environmental and cultural and nutritional influences which will effect, to some degree, the further development of this newborn into maturity.

Now an entire newborn body begins with one fertilized cell, one ovum, which contains one human genome; and it is, according to this Cental Dogma,  from this one genome in this one cell that all the information required for the construction of that one miraculous human new born containing perhaps five trillion cells, including at least two thousand different types of cells, and all sorts of incredibly complex and synchronous and coordinated systems  like the digestive system, the reproductive system, the metabolic system, the circulatory system, all the sense organs, the system of locomotion, to say nothing of the many billions of coordinated neurons of the brain; all of that, all of it, according to Crick, begins with the information in that one genome, in that one fertilized ovum, and proceeeds out from there.  And please notice that Crick is really saying two things in The Dogma. He is saying as to direction that information moves from the nucleus out and not the other way; and he is saying as to origin that all this information begins in the nucleus.

Just what is the information that Crick was referring to that originates in the DNA molecule?  This is information transmitted through the genetic code which consists of four nuceotide molecules and it is simply the arrangement of these molecules that codes for amino acids. Every three successive nucleotides that are part of a gene is called a codon and each codon is coded for the manufacture of a particular amino acid. The large majority of nucleotides in the DNA molecule are not directly part of a gene sequence, although many of them are signals that trigger and help execute the transcription of genes to the mRNA molecule which transports this coded message out of the nucleus.  All the nucleotides that comprise a gene are coded for all the amino acids that are necessary in the manufacture of a particular protein.

As with any code, the intelligence of that code, the brilliance of it, does not lie in the code itself.  The alphabet is a code,  but the brilliance of a novel, an essay, a play, lies not within the alphabet, within the individual letters of that code, but in the author who arranged those letters in a certain way to convey ideas.  The same is true with numbers, a different code.  If an equation is brilliant, it's brilliance does not lie hidden somewhere within the numbers and symbols of the equation, but in the ideas that the equation represents, ideas that were communicated by the author of the equation by arranging certain of those numbers and symbols in a way that communicated his idea.  And the same is true with computer code, Morse code, or any code.  Codes are vehicles for the communication of ideas. Sometimes these ideas are communicated directly to another intelligent being, and sometimes they are communicated to a machine, intelligently if not brilliantly constructed in a way that enables it to "read" that code and respond to it. In the case of telephones, recording devices, digital cameras, computers and electrical clocks, signals sent in a code of electrical impulses are read by equipment in these devices which allows them to respond in certain ways that produce recognizable voices, sounds, pictures and written words.  But again, in these devices there is no 'intelligence'.  The intelligence lies in the arrangement of the equipment, in the fashioning of the equipment by using certain materials and shapes and in the arrangement of those materials and shapes in a way that allows that material to respond, but not consciously or intelligently, to the incoming signal.

Crick considered the genetic code to not be brilliant at all, in fact, to have no intelligence even associated with it.  He did not consider the genetic code to have anything to do with the communication of ideas, but simply with the delivery of information as to the construction of proteins.  And he also concluded that this information, the information as to the amino acid recipes of proteins, was all the information necessary to complete the construction of a fully developed human new born from one fertilized egg.

Is that true?  Are the recipes for the amino acid content of proteins (because that is what the genes are, at least that is all that one can conclude they are by observing a functioning gene) all that is needed for the development and construction of the fetus?  Remember that from the same genome every organ of the body, every cell type, every organelle, every system is manufactured.  The same genome can create so many different results because different parts of the genome are fired at different times and in different combinations.  The butterfly and the caterpillar originate from the identical genome, just with different genes and different combinations of genes fired in different patterns.  As complex as the genome seems to be, the firing patterns of the genes are exponentially more complicated.  Where are these firing patterns?  Many observable gene firings, (but perhaps not all gene firings, and we will discuss this later) are executed by the manufacture of protein molecules which, once constructed from a gene in the nucleus, have the capacity to re-enter the nucleus and trigger the firing of another gene or a whole set of genes.  These genes, in turn, may initiate the manufacture of other trigger proteins which, once constructed, will, in their turn, re-enter the nucleus and fire still different genes which will begin the manufacture of still new proteins.  As complicated as the genome is, these firing patterns and the mechanical sequences that engender them, including the conditions necessary in the cytoplasm of the cell to stimulate trigger protein molecules to migrate back to the nucleus and bond with specific nucleotides that will trigger the firing of new genes, all of these sequences, entirely different sequences of which are present in the two thousand different types of cells in the human body, are exponentially more complicated than the genome itself.

Further, the genetic information, first conveyed by an mRNA molecule must be delivered to the right manufacturing center (called a ribosome) within the cytoplasm of the cell where it is translated into a string of amino acids and then must be delivered to other organelles within the cell for folding and further manufacture (the addition of fat and sugar molecules, for instance) and then the finished protein molecule must be delivered to that spot within the cell, or delivered to that part of the body external to the cell, where it is needed to do its work. The information to construct and synchronize this delivery system, which includes a tail of nucleotides added to the gene sequence which acts as a zip code and allows the mRNA molecule to pass through certain portals and ducts and to avoid others, the whole system of portals and ducts and membranes, and the shapes and charges of these portals and the charges within the ducts, all of which allow the precise movement of amino acids, protein molecules and nucleotides to where they are needed within and without the cell, all of this must also be added to the timing system and the genetic information itself, as part of what is necessary to the construction and development of the human fetus.

Then there is the arrangement of the nucleotides themselves.  There are three billion nucleotide base pairs tightly and precisely folded over and over into the nucleus of each cell in your body. In fact if this ball of nucleotides were unraveled it would yield one amazingly thin string of nucleotides ten feet long.  That is ten feet of nucleotides folded over and over in each of the one hundred trillion cells in your body, or a string of nucleotides, if they were all attached, one to the other,  long enough to stretch to the sun (not the moon, but the sun) and back three times.  Because so many nucleotides are folded over and over so tightly in the nucleus, the great majority of them are not able to be accessed by the trigger protein molecules and other molecules that aid in transcription that float through the fluid of the nucleus. Each type of cell regularly fires certain gene sequences to produce certain proteins and enzymes, as opposed to other types of cells which fire different genes.  Therefore, the nucleotides must be folded in a distinctive way in each type of cell so that the genes commonly fired, and the nucleotides that assist in the triggering and transcription of those genes, are exposed to the nuclear fluid and accessible to those protein molecules.  Often the triggering molecules are located hundreds of thousands, even millions of nucleotides away from the genes they are triggering, but because of the precise folding of the nucleotides they wind up adjacent to or abutting those gene sequences that they assist.   So there is also the information to govern this gargantuanly complex (see post 'JUNK DNA') job of folding the three billion nucleotides in each of the five trillion cells of the new born, into two thousand utterly precise and distinct patterns.  Among the twenty-five thousand or less recipes for proteins that make up the human genome the information that guides and governs all these amazing folding patterns is nowhere to be found.  So this information regarding the thousands of different folding patterns of nucleotides within the DNA itself, must also be added to the timing information, the delivery information and the protein recipe information.

And let's not forget the amazing series of twists, turns, undulations, foldings and unfoldings, the formation of ridges and layers, that the growing cell mass of a newly fertilized and mitotically dividing egg makes as it develops.  Where is the information that governs this?  Certainly it is related to the genome.  An egg containing a human genome goes through its own particular acrobatics and a sparrow egg goes through its own distinct, but equally precise series of acrobatics.  Each species has its own system.  But where is the information governing all these amazing gymnastics? All of this information is absolutely vital to the development of a newborn human or, in fact, to the development of a newborn of any species.  Does it really make sense to say that all this information is 'within' the nucleus of that one fertilized ovum?

And all of this fantastically complex information still has nothing to do with the shapes that these protein molecules and amalgams of protein molecules and sugars and fats, form themselves into. I remind you that a gene is just a recipe for a string of amino acids.  Where is the information to shape that string of amino acids into a protein molecule?  And where is the information which shapes those manufactured proteins into the organs and organelles and bones and body contours, and shapes within shapes and shapes within shapes within shapes, all of which are absolutely essential to the functioning of a healthy newborn?  And it is the shape of all of these biological components, just as much as the materials that they are made out of, that makes humans human, and that allows all the literally quadrillions of simulatenous biological processes to take place that are absolutely necessary to the healthy functioning of a newborn baby.  Everything that we have described so far, and it is complex enough to probably give you a headache just reading about it, pertains only to the manufacture and delivery of the building materials necessary to the construction of the body.  Everything, everything, must be precisely shaped and this has nothing directly to do with the genes.  Each gene is involved in the manufacture of a material, not a shape; and many, if not most genes, are involved in the manufacture of material that is used in numerous differently shaped organs and organelles within the body.

At the risk of turning the headache that I have already given you into a raging migraine, I must tell you that there is still much, much more information needed to have a functional, living newborn.  A baby is born with a set of desires.  First it is hungry or thirsty (I never know whether to refer to the desire for breast milk as a hunger or a thirst, but if there were such a word it would include both , perhaps 'thunger').  Then it is tired, which is the desire for sleep.  It desires to stop pain or discomfort when it feels pain or discomfort and it desires to continue feeling comfort, safety and pleasure when it experiences comfort, safety and pleasure.  All of these desires may be related to sense organs which are made from proteins and conduct electrical signals to the brain, but the desires are not identical to the sense organs and nerves that they are related to.  Sense organs and nerves are made of proteins and conduct electricity.  This electricity which results in a pattern of neuron firings must be translated into an experience, an experience which is not physical, which cannot be directly measured or observed, which the newborn experiences as a desire.  Every living body needs things from it's environment and the pursuit of those things requires behavior.  Living beings behave, in other words, use energy to accomplish things, not because the body needs them (the great, great majority of living beings, with the exception of a tiny fraction of those who have studied biology know nothing about their body's needs).  They may not 'know' anything, but they 'experience' desires, and we, every living being, is the recipient of a set of desires which is ingenuously calibrated to satisfy our biological needs.  In other words, we do things because we want to do them, and the things we want to do (until and unless our human culture convinces us otherwise) are the very things that will fulfill our needs and guarantee our survival.

So this system of desires, which cannot be directly seen or measured, but which can be deduced from our behavior, even though there is no physical organ that translates sense organ and neural stimulation into experience, is a system without which we could not possibly survive (imagine a being which had no desire to eat or drink; no desire to avoid pain; no desire to seek the things it needed) and which must be designed and created with enormous detail and precision.  So the koala when it's body needs nutrients climbs a eucalyptus tree, not because it needs nutrients but because it is hungry and when it is hungry it desires eucalyptus leaves. The wood beetle, also in need of nutrition, and also experiencing hunger, climbs the same tree but goes no further than the bark, because the bark is what the wood beetle craves just as the leaves are what the koala craves.  To maintain its health and survival, for the koala, eucalyptus leaves are the perfect food, and for the wood beetle, eucalyptus bark is the perfect food.  And when the koala feels sexual desire he seeks out another koala, not to insure the survival of his species, but because he feels horny and when he feels horny he desires to be with another koala, just like the wood beetle, when he feels horny, desires to be with another wood beetle.  Both of these, totally ignorant of their own biology, their own species, or having any idea or interest in what is needed for the survival of their species, have an experience which has nothing to do with knowledge, but which drives each of them toward another member of their own species.  Their survival as a species is assured not because of testosterone and estrogen, but because when there is a lot of testosterone and estrogen in their bodies this translates into a desire, a non-physical desire, to sexually encounter a koala in one case and a wood beetle in the other.

These desires which lead us to the very things we need to insure our survival, are so specifically and brilliantly calibrated to insure our survival, and are so inherent in our understanding of life, that we don't ever stop to realize what an incredible, bewildering, brilliantly designed and specific system it is.  And, of course, it could never have 'evolved.'  How long would any creature last which did not experience 'thirst,' or had to develop thirst over thousands of generations of evolution, or had to 'learn' over thousands of generations more that the experience of thirst is satisfied by water; and had to learn through thousands more generations how to recognize water, how to move toward it and how to ingest it?  All of this is absurd.  All life forms have to begin with a set of desires that draws them to the things they need and with the ability to get to, ingest or use the things they need in a way that satisfies their desires but also, without their knowing it, guarantees their survival.

Evolutionary theory postulates a competition between species and within species for survival, and through this competition, the most functional, best adapted organisms survive and the less functional, less well adapted organisms fall by the wayside.  Modern science has discovered that organisms don't live in vacuums, but in eco-systems and there is at least as much cooperation as there is competition.  Even the pursuit of selfish desires,  from the broader context of the eco-system, is the very behavior that maintains the balance and insures the survival of the eco-system.  More importantly, for there to be any competiton, the competitors have to be functional on some level; in other words they have to be viable in order for there to be a competition.  No organism can be viable, can compete for survival at all, unless it is alive in the first place.  And to be alive, an organism must have a way to metabolize energy, to translate and transcribe nucleotides into amino acids and form amino acids into protein molecules; each protein molecule being, by itself, a precise microscopic machine perfectly designed to accomplish a specific task within the body; the organism must have a way of recognizing nutrient and energy sources in its environment and have a way of reaching those sources and then incorporating them into its body; must have a way of eliminating wastes, of circulating nutrients through its body and of sending electrical signals through its body as well, signals specifically designed and calibrated to conduct all the biological processes that need to be conducted and which allow the organism to do what it wants to do when it wants to do it.  All of these are prerequisites to life.  There can be no competition between living organisms until all these prerequisites are met.  So evolution, whether or not it is random at all, cannot even begin until all these systems are in place; systems which have no randomness in them whatsoever, but which are amazingly precise, specific and purpose driven.

Still everything we have described so far, with the exception of desires, exists on the material plane. Everything we have described, except desires, could be present in a stillborn baby as much as a live one. Everything we have described is the equipment that we use, but it is not us. We are consciousness; we are that which uses our bodies and brains, which experiences the world through our bodies and brains, but we are not our bodies and brains.  Somewhere in this process of fetal development from fertilized egg to new born, we arrived.  This is the thrill that parents experience when they feel the first fetal kick, because they then know that this physical mass that has been growing in the mother's belly is not just a physical mass, it is a living being that has its own desires. It is kicking because it wants to kick and that is our first proof that there is an 'it' there, separate from ourselves, that wants to do things, like kicking, because it, not us, but it, wants to do them.  So this consciousness which is the milieu of our desires and the non-physical bowl within which we experience all of our experience, and which is really who we are, this must arrive also.  Is it created from genes, and by genes, from within the nucleus of a cell, or do the genes and all the related information mentioned above,  create a perspective, a point of view, a way of experiencing the world which we, consciousness, choose to experience by committing to being born and living in this body?

If that is too 'spiritual' for you, then let's return to the discussion of all the other information. The truth is that we have no idea how all this information is communicated to the growing embryo.  We  can deduce that there is obviously an enormous amount of information that is being disseminated, but we cannot observe this information directly and there seems to be no physical organ or organelle or any set of molecules which are part of any observable mechanics through which this information is disseminated.  Does it then make sense to say that all this information begins in the nucleus?  Certainly all this information is associated with certain gene sequences, but how can we say that it is caused by these gene sequences?  Isn't it true with every other code that we know of that the information in the code does not begin with the code, but begins with the being that is communicating his or her ideas through that code?  And the observable code and the manufacture of proteins is only a small part of the information necessary to the construction and development of a newborn from a fertilized egg.

Can we say it is 'within' the nucleus or is it better, or more realistic to say that all these ideas, synchronicities and information perhaps pass through the nucleus but probably do not 'originate' in the nucleus; just like all the coded information necessary to play Brahms, Mahler, the Rolling Stones, and the lectures of Frances Crick, may pass through the wire that goes into your CD player, but it does not 'originate' in that wire. Wires, just like nucleotides, are not transcendentally brilliant.  Wires and  nucleotides have no intelligence at all.  They are intelligently constructed and arranged to convey all the 'brilliance' that you enjoy by listening to your CD player and by living in your body; but the wires and the nucleotides are utterly oblivious to what is being communicated through them.

It is around this time that some of you dear readers will begin to say to yourselves, "Wait a minute!  This guy doesn't understand evolution!"  Do you understand evolution?  Please tell me what is the creative process in evolution?  I understand that there are supposedly occasional random copying mistakes in the replication of gene sequences (averaging one mistake in one hundred million replications) and that these "mistakes" sometimes confer an advantage to the organism that is the recipient of these mistakes.  This makes perfect sense when we are looking at one celled creatures like microbes who have not changed their morphology, their shape, since their inception on this planet over four billion years ago.  It also makes sense when we are talking about genes that are not involved in the construction of bodies, but are enzymes that work, not in conjunction with other proteins, but by themselves, floating through the blood stream or through the digestive fluids and aid in our digestion and our immune system.  Yes, 'accidental' changes in these molecules may aid either our digestion or our immunity, because these molecules work simply by having the shape and pattern of charges that they have.  When they encounter a food molecule that needs to be digested, or a pathogen that needs to be removed, it is their shape and arrangement of positive and negative charges that allows them to bond with this molecule so that the process of digestion (in the case of food molecules in the digestive tract) or the process of elimination (in the case of pathogens in the blood sream) can begin.  Yet are these accidents? When a microbe 'accidentally' inherits a mutation which confers safety from an environmental threat or allows that microbe to digest something in an environment where the usual food source that this species had become adapted to is not available, then the microbe shares this genetic material with other microbes by developing pilli, or ducts, that transfer the genetic material from the microbe with the mutation to other microbes that need it in order to survive.  You may argue that the mutation is  'accidental,' even though the exact mutation that is needed always seems to arrive just in time during the course of the four billion year history of microbes and the four billion years of dramatically shifting environments; but how can you argue that gene sharing, that most amazing, sophisticated and precise process, billions of years old (when do evolutionists say that 'intelligence' begins?)  how can you possibly say that gene sharing, where the precise genetic material that is needed moves through a duct or pilli, into the precise place in another organism that needs this material, a process far more precise than what our twenty-first century surgeons are capable of, and a process that occurred billions of years ago, at the very inception of life, how can anyone possibly say that this is random, or that it evolved over many millions of years?  This is a process that was necessary to the survival of the microbial community.  That community would never have survived the millions upon millions of years necessary for any such process with that kind of amazing precision to develop randomly.  It is so obviously purposeful that it just becomes absurd to even think of it otherwise.

It is interesting to note that Frances Crick and James Watson who spent a good deal of their lives just studying the genetic code that produces proteins and did not study or think about all this other information that I mentioned above, were both utterly and deeply bewildered as to how just the genetic code and the system of protein manufacture could have originated.  Frances Crick's answer was 'transpermia,'  the theory that life began in some other part of the universe and arrived here embedded in an asteroid or a comet.  Crick figured that since the universe was billions of years older than the earth, that life could have had the time to evolve elsewhere and then be shot out, embedded in a meteor or meteorite, from another planet, or moon or asteroid by an explosion.  Then this life form, after managing to survive an explosion powerful enough to hurl it across space to our planet, and managing to survive the journey of several light years, because don't forget our entire solar system, not just the earth, is somewhat over four billion years old, so this life bearing meteor would have to have originated on another star system if not another galaxy, and then, of course, it would have had to have managed to survive the heat and force of it's crash landing on earth.  As utterly fantastical as this explanation is, even if it were true, it does not answer the question of how life originated at all.  It is just like going to a restaurant and after falling in love with the cheesecake, you ask the waiter if he would mind telling you how the cheesecake is made.  The waiter responds that, in truth, all the deserts are made at a commercial bakery downtown.  So your question remains unanswered.  You wanted to know 'how' and you got the answer 'not here.'  Research partner James Watson, when asked the same question, replies that it had to have taken 'a miracle.'  And, of course, there are some scientists in the field, foremost among them, Richard Dawkins, who see no problem at all.  The origin of life is so clear to this 'genius.'  He goes on and on about the perfect correlation between the transcription and translation of the genetic code and the workings of our most sophisticated computers, and since we, are identical to sophisticated computers, what is the problem?  Well, perhaps we are not identical to sophisticated computers.  Computers, to my knowledge, do not grow, do not replicate, have no desires of their own, do not read their own e-mails, watch their own videos, or experience anything in any way.  And even if they were identical to life, doesn't that fool Dawkins realize that human intelligence and ideas that were conceived by human intelligence, were at the core of every aspect of the creation, evolution, engineering and use of these computers?  He doesn't see a problem because, while he may have been exposed to the same biological information that Watson and Crick have been exposed to, the true depth and mystery of what he has been observing and studying for all these years has eluded him.  In the same way that attending Beethoven concerts your entire life does not guarantee that you will be a musical genius, spending your life in and around biological research labs does not guarantee that you will have any more depth or real insight than the shallow fool that you were when you first arrived.

In the time of Crick's major research, the cytoplasm of the ovum (the material outside of the nucleus) was considered to be one undifferentiated mass of albumen (think egg whites).  And it is true that within the albumen there are no visible structures, no organelles, no membranes or scaffolding to hold any interior structure together.  Yet, scientists have discovered more recently that there are within this supposedly undifferentiated cytoplasm, thousands upon thousands of protein molecules that, even though they are not held or bound by any visible structures, are arranged in the most precise and amazing way.  In the human ovum, once it is fertilized, it will begin to undergo a process of mitotic divisions so that one cell will become two, then four,  then eight, and very soon hundreds and many thousands of daughter cells that were once considered to be identical.  Yet all these cells will very shortly begin to differentiate into the two thousand different 'types' of cells that compose the body of the fully developed new born.  The reason that they differentiate is because they contain different distributions of protein molecules in their cytoplasm and these protein molecules are called 'trigger' molecules, because they are able to re-enter the nucleus of the cell and trigger the firing of certain genes which in turn causes the manufacture of specific proteins.  Since groups of these daughter cells contain different configurations of trigger proteins than other groups, different genes will be expressed in different cells leading to the manufacture of different proteins which, by itself, according to the common assumptions of most biologists, leads to different cell shapes, different shapes of organelles within the cell, and different cell functions, each cell's shape and composition being best suited to the function it will perform whether that cell becomes a nerve cell, a muscle cell, a skin cell, a heart cell, etc.

Going back to the original fertilized ovum, that cell, will quickly divide into a many-celled mass, will undergo an amazing series of twists and turns, the formation of clefts and layers and ridges and hollowed cavities; which will be twisted and turned, involuted and convoluted as it continues to expand and mitotically multiply. So the arrangement of trigger protein molecules within that first fertilized ovum, which are not held in place by any visible structure, that arrangement has to be so amazingly precise and it must be arranged with foreknowledge of where future cells containing those molecules, after all the twists, turns, multiplications, division into layers, convolutions and involutions, will end up. When Crick saw an entire genome of information within a nucleus surrounded by an 'undifferentiated' cytoplasm, of course, he surmised that all the information began in the nucleus.  But current research shows that the thousands of protein molecules and their amazing positioning within the egg cytoplasm contains the information necessary for the differentiation of the one fertilized ovum into two thousand varieties of cells and each in exact proper proportions.

So what we are left with is not a simple direction: starting from inside the nucleus and going outward, but a 'which came first' quandary, which is the same quandary that we come up with whenever we ponder the creation of anything in a spiritual vacuum.  We cannot imagine genes, whose sole observable function is to manufacture proteins, existing without the protection and structure of proteins, and we cannot imagine proteins being created without the expression of genes.  In the same way we cannot imagine suckling without mammary glands and newborns who already know how to, have the mouths and gullets and lips that are coordinated to, and the desire to suckle.  So what came first?  The chicken or the egg?  Proteins or genes? Suckling or mammary glands?  Locomotion or the desire to reach something?  Computer code or the machinery that had the ability to read that code?  Screws or screwdrivers; hammers or nails? The truth is that all material things begin with an idea, an idea that is the solution to a problem.  And that idea often contains at once several interrelated parts.  So the answer to what came first, proteins or genes, is neither one.  What really came first was the idea to have a sustainable life that could be built on the interplay of proteins and genes.

And now we arrive at the huge question of how can anything begin with an idea if there were no brains, no intelligence, to conceive this idea?  Can ideas precede life?  Can there be an idea without a brain?  Can ideas and intelligence even precede matter?  Can the material world as well as life be the materialization of an idea?  Can the materialization of the physical universe and life be the manifestation of the same idea?  This topic could easily be contained in another post, but since the first part was dedicated to a critique of Crick and the Darwinian world view, I want to offer another view that, to me, makes a lot more sense.



First, let's talk about the brain.  In our materialist society we have come to think of the brain as being the organ of our body that thinks, remembers and with the help of sense organs, that sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches.  The proof of all this is that whenever we do think, remember, see, hear, smell, taste or touch, clusters of neurons fire in different parts of our brains. The brain is made up of billions of neurons which, when fired, conduct an electric current through them and that current connects up with other neurons through extensions of the neuron called axons.  Since science is based on observation and measurement, and there is nothing else there that is observable or measurable, then it must be that the brain is doing all these things.  Yet when ever I speak into a voice recorder there is electrical activity also; and whenever I drive my car there is electrical activity in my odometer.  The voice recorder is not speaking, however, and the odometer is not driving.  They are both recording and measuring my voice and the distance I am traveling. I am talking and I am driving and these devices are recording and measuring that activity.  What I am saying is that the brain is recording our experience and defining our experience, but it is not experiencing our experience.  We think, we remember, we see, we hear, we smell, we taste and we touch things, but the big problem for science is that we, which is the ground of our experience, which is consciousness, which is context rather than content, which is the non-physical bowl which contains all our experience and is the milieu of our desires; this real We, cannot be seen, observed or measured. So if you adopt the scientific point of view, then we do not exist at all,  because there is no direct, observable evidence for our existence; and if you adopt the other point of view based on experience and not on measurement (because experience cannot be measured) we obviously do exist.  In fact our existence, our consciousness is the most obvious, realest, part of our experience, realer than any thing that can be observed or measured which is altered by the filter of our sense organs and is effected by our instruments of measurement.

 So we either do not exist and are a delusion of our brains, a delusion that developed at some point in time accidentally and hung around because it aided in our survival, which is what many evolutionary biologists believe; although if we don't exist and are merely a collection of cells, of proteins, fats, nucleotides and sugar molecules, then who is it who is trying to survive?  Who is it who cares?  Does your body, including your brain, really care whether it is dead or alive, functional or non-functional? Do your neurons care whether or not there is electricity running through them?  Do your heart cells really care whether they are contracting or not?  To my mind it is obvious that matter does not care what form it is in.  Machines don't care whether they are operative or broken or rusting.  I put gas in my car not because my car is 'thirsty' and wants gas, but because I want to get some place.  My car could care less.  And the same is true with all this fabulous, unfathomably complex equipment that I have been given, but that is not me.  My body and my brain do not want anything, and are not conscious of anything.  My body and brain are the interface of two beings.  One is the Cosmic Consciousnes, or God, or the Universal Intelligence, which designs and coordinates the literally quadrillions of simultaneous biological processes occurring in my body and brain at every moment, the purpose of which is to keep me alive.  And my body and brain are also the servants of me, my self, and are designed to do whatever it is that I want to do: to move when I want to move; to look at something when I want to look at something; to eat when I want to eat, to think about something when I want to think about something; in other words my body and my brain are the servants of my desires; designed, created and controlled by the Cosmic Consciousness or God to be able to survive as a working unit as long as possible to continue to be able to be the servant of my desires.

I am going to talk about those parts of our brains that are connected to how we experience things, to consciousness. It is important to note that a lot of the wiring of the brain is put there to conduct the automatic operations that guarantee our existence.  That wiring that coordinates all the literally quadrillions of simultaneous biological processes within cells and between cells, that sustain us and that we are not consciously aware of,  that wiring was designed by our Creator, or by the Universal Intelligence, and we inherit that.  But the wiring that is connected to defining our experience and the emotional content of that experience, and what is important and what is not; that wiring was initially put there by our experience.

Our brains record and define our experience, but they do not experience our experience.  Our brains are made up of neurons, or nerve cells, which conduct an electric current.  This is the same current, at the same voltage that flows through the neurons, when fired, of the visual section, the auditory section, the 'thought' section, the 'memory' section, the 'heat' and 'touch' sensation sections of the brain, etc.  Through all the various sections that researchers have recently discovered, flows the same electric current at the same voltage through almost identical neurons and leaving almost identical chemical deposits.  The amazing richness, depth and variety of our experience comes not from these similar patterns but from the way that we, not the brain, but we, us, consciousness, interpret these patterns, depending on their location in the brain.

 When the brain records our experience, it records our entire experience, not just what we were seeing and hearing at a given moment, but what we were feeling and how we were experiencing these sensations.  In this way the objects in our environment including the other people in our environment are associated with what we felt and thought when we initially encountered them.  Neurons have axons which extend from the body of the neuron and attach to other neurons.  Axons can stretch from one neuron all the way across the brain to another neuron, and one neuron can have  many hundreds or thousands of axons connecting to hundreds or thousands of neurons and creating an almost unfathomable number of possible pathways of curent.  So these experiences are recorded in a pattern of interlocking neurons.  Everything that we learn about an object: whether it is hard or soft, edible or inedible, friendly or dangerous, etc., accumulates in neural connections, so that every time we see the same object it becomes more familiar and known to us.  In this way the brain helps us define our experience, helps us create a world of seeming solidity, reliability and familiarity, and helps us learn to negotiate with more and more comfort and specificity in the environment that we have chosen to be born into.

 And we can change old neural connections by replacing them with new ones.  We can learn by ourselves or with others help, that what we once feared is not really fearful; that what was once so important to us is not really that important. These new understandings create new pathways, new axonal connections between neurons, so that our relationship to certain objects, activities and people can change over time. But it is important to note that an axonal pathway is initially created by our experience.  Once it is created, then the existing pathway can define our experience, but axons attach to neurons as a result of our experience and not the other way around.  In other words the way we experience something creates the wiring in our brains.  It is important to note that a lot of the wiring of the brain is put there to conduct the automatic biological operations that guarantee our existence and that we are not even aware of.  But the wiring that is connected to recording and defining our experience and the emotional content of that experience, and what is important and what is not; that wiring was initially put there by the way we first experienced things.  The wiring in our brains does define our experience, but that wiring was initially put there by our experience. And it is important to realize that we can change that wiring if we have the will and the desire to make that change. 

One final thing about brain structure.  I don't want to give the impression that we are the 'victims' of our earliest experiences and that these connections are made and built up solely by repetitive early experiences that we have no control over.  You may think of it this way, but I believe that we arrive here with a set of desires, of things that we want to accomplish or experience in this life; that we chose to be born to fulfill a destiny with a specific set of desires that we wanted to be realized.  These things may be negative or positive or a combination of both, but it is our desires, even in earliest infancy, that shapes the way that we experience, or define our earliest experiences.  A childhood of abuse leads one child to live a life of submission  and passivity, while leading another child to rage and rebellion, and another child to become a leader of others in the cause of social justice.  We arrive here with a mission.  We choose and make the commitment to the family and the setting and the genome that we are born into.  We want to live the life that we are living and to experience it the way that we are experiencing it; unless we decide that we no longer like the way that we are experiencing it and then we choose to change it.  Yet all of it, the serene, the constant and self-accepting life, or the turbulent, dramatic life of self struggle, are the scenarios that we chose when we decided to be born.  Why would anyone choose a truly difficult life when we could choose a truly comfortable one?  From the perspective of this life on earth being our entire existence it makes no sense at all, but from the perspective of eternal life it makes perfect sense.  When you go to an amusement park do you choose to ride the roller coaster or to sit in the lounge?  Neither of these choices makes sense if you had to choose one of them for your entire existence. The 'agony' of the roller coaster only makes sense when you know that it is short lived and you will come out the other end without permanent damage.  Then it becomes exciting.  Exactly the same thing is true with this life.  If you know that you will emerge from this experience with your consciousness not only in tact but expanded by this experience, then you will experience  the experiences of your life in a completely different context; with more courage, more inner serenity, more passion, more joy and less fear, anxiety and desperation.

Now let's talk about ideas.  Many, if not most, of the ideas we come upon are not original.  They come to us from others: from teachers, parents, friends, or we read about them in books or other media.  When we are young we often struggle to grasp an idea, but then finally "see the light." For instance, a teacher may be trying to introduce us to the idea of addition.  She may take an orange and say , "see, this is one orange."  Then she grabs another orange and puts it alongside the first and says, "and now we have two oranges" She may then try the same thing with one and then two books, one and then two pencils.  At some point we get the idea that one plus one equals two.  We see, although we may not be able at that young age to articulate it, that we don't need oranges or books or pencils; that the numbers are symbols for the amount of any object we choose.  In other words, we get it. At that moment of getting it,  an axon extends from one neuron to another and a new connection is made.  We have made an indelible record of this connection, of this idea.  What is important to realize is that we, not the brain, but we, made the connection.  The connections we had already made in the brain brought us to that point where we understood the words of the teacher, could count to two, and knew what oranges, books and pencils were.  But the new connection to what we already had wired and connected, was made by us.  We did it, and our brains recorded it.

If anyone wonders how having a thought can directly effect the material world without any other physical intervention, look no farther than the brain.  You make a connection, you grasp an idea, all of which takes place on a non-physical level, and an axon extends out from a neuron and attaches to another neuron to record that connection.  While we are on it, the brain is the interface between the self, which is non-physical, which is consciousness and which contains within it your desires and experience, and all the wiring which is activated and records that experience.  When you desire to actually do something and not just experience something, the precise hundreds of thousands or millions of neurons necessary to initiate that action will fire.  Whether it is a desire to scratch your nose, to get up and get a glass of water, or to invade Syria, the precise and multitudinous pattern of neurons necessary to initiate the first step of those actions that will bring you toward your goal, will be fired at the moment you decide to begin.  Again, a non-physical desire resulting in a non-physical decision,  automatically initiates the firing of the precise group of thousands or millions of neurons needed to carry out that decision in the material world.  And then there is memory.  When you remember something you try to locate within your brain, the precise neural connections where that memory is stored, and the moment you locate that particular group of neurons, they will fire, which results in you being able to instantly translate that pattern of firings into a conscious memory of the sights, sounds, tastes, touches and information that you experienced at that time in the past when you experienced that experience and your brain recorded it.  Exactly the same thing is true when you simply move your focus (which is really you and is non-physical) to your nose, to your arm, to your leg.  Simply by bringing your focus to an area and moving nothing at all (since focus is not a thing) then the neurons in that area will fire and you will be able to 'feel' your nose, your arm and your leg.  Further, it is never just the pattern of fired electrons that you experience, but it is your reaction to that firing, your translation of that firing, done not by any physical organ, but by you, non-physical consciousness, that allows you to recreate earlier experiences from neural firing patterns. If anyone questions the ability of spirit (by spirit I include everything which is non-physical) to initiate a physical event, then they are either unfamiliar with the workings of the brain, or have not really thought deeply on the subject.  The movement from non-physical to physical and back is the very essence of our existence at every moment.

What about the case of 'getting' a new idea, where you are not learning something that is communicated through the agency of another human intelligence, but where you are getting an insight that has never occurred, at least to the best of your knowledge, to anyone before? Here is a quote from an earlier post of mine called 'Through The Microscope':

"Yet, many of us have had unusual or abnormal experiences of consciousness, will and intelligence. These 'supernormal' experiences of consciousness, will and intelligence, are usually experienced as coming from without; as something received. Soldiers on the battlefield, fire fighters and police officers in critical situations, have had the sudden experience of an extra rush of energy, clarity and determination. No one is more surprised at their heroism than they are, and they describe that moment when that extra energy and determination overtook them with a kind of awe. They consider it something that came into them, something received. These are examples of being touched by the cosmic will that sustains us all at every moment, but usually works separately from our conscious will. Great writers, artists and scientists, as they labor at a problem, as they obsess on the same information, or the same scenario to no avail, pray for an inspiration (atheism does not diminish the artist's enthusiasm for prayer at this juncture). Inspiration literally means the intake of breath. They pray for a gift to be taken in, to be received. They certainly don't pray for an expiration, which means breathing out and is associated with death. Einstein wrote a fascinating account of how the idea, the insight, of the theory of relativity entered his body; how he could feel it coming up through his legs and into his brain, and then getting it. Archimedes, having received a thunderbolt of inspiration, lept from his tub shouting 'Eureka' as he ran wet and naked through the streets of ancient Syracuse. Horowitz, the great concert pianist, when asked what he does in the moments before an important performance, said that he just tries to relax and hope that the winds of inspiration blow through him that night. Moments of great insight, great heroism, great performing, are considered by the people that experience them to be, not their own, but gifts from without, some thing unseen, yet extremely tangible, in fact always among the most vivid experiences of their lives. And, of course, spiritual seekers, people in deep prayer, fasting, chanting and/or meditation, report being transported to a new level of consciousness, which led to a new sense of themselves. Not so much that something was received, but that a boundary, a sense of separation between their limited consciousness and the unlimited cosmic consciousness, was momentarily dissolved. They were still themselves, of course, but they had a much greater, more expanded sense of who they were; of being an inextricable part of something infinitely greater than their individual bodies and brains"



If new and revelatory ideas come not from within but are received from without, this should not imply passivity.  A human being must be in a position and must be ready to receive this new idea or inspiration.  No one thought longer or harder about the discrepancies between Newtonian theory and the latest findings of astrophysicists than Einstein.  No one worked more diligently in preparation for concerts than Horowitz.  When King Hiero II of ancient Syracuse suspected that the goldsmith who made his crown had substituted lesser metals in the crown for some of the gold which the king had supplied, he turned to Archimedes, the foremost mathematician and inventor of Syracuse to find a way to determine the purity of the crown.  The King sought out Archimedes because he was the one person who had dedicated his life to figuring out physical problems.  If there were a way to solve this problem, Archimedes was the person in the best position to receive this insight.  Under the pressure of this royal assignment, Archimedes obsessed on this problem night and day.  He knew that gold, being the heaviest metal known at that time, if he could determine the volume of the crown he could weight it against an equal volume of pure gold.  If the crown weighed any less he would know that the gold had been diluted with lesser metals by the unscrupulous goldsmith.  Yet, how to determine the volume of a shape as complex and unusual as an ornate crown without melting it down and thereby ruining it?  As he was stepping into his bath, he noticed that the water rose as it was displaced by his body.  He suddenly realized that he could measure the volume of the crown without damaging it in any way, simply by measuring the amount of water it displaced.  This bolt of insight which was the solution to a problem that he had been wrestling with for weeks, supplied the energy which lifted Archimedes out of his tub and sent him running through the streets of Syracuse yelling, "Eureka, I've got it!"

Ideas that are new and revelatory to humans, are not new to the universe.  They already exist.  Every discovery, every new idea of computer technology already exists in stunningly complex applications within living bodies.  Every discovery regarding nuclear energy and the functioning of atoms, and every discovery of modern astrophysicists, was a revelation of ideas that already existed in the cosmic consciousness; that existed prior to the creation of Big Bang explosions, atoms, stars, planets and galaxies. Focussing on a problem, obsessing on a problem, looking at all the known facts related to that problem, prepares the inventor, the scientist, the seeker, for that insight that is the solution to that problem or that explains that disparity.  But the idea is already there and is revealed to the seeker.  He did not 'create' the idea, and his 'brain' certainly did not create the idea.

It is the nature of these blog posts, that I am forced to repeat things mentioned in other posts to clarify a new idea (revelation).  The speed of light, as Einstein determined, is the fastest speed that an object or a wave can move and still be an object or a wave.  If you think, though, of the speed of light not as a cosmic speed limit, but as a cosmic threshold, then waves and particles that pass that threshold stop being 'things' and enter the world of spirit, of cosmic consciousness.  This is a world beyond space and time.  Once past the speed of light, there is no 'thingness' to inhibit speed and infinite speed is achieved. At infinite speed everything is impossibly fast and completely still at the same time, since it takes no time, traveling at infinite speed, to traverse the entire universe and return to the same spot.  And there is no space, because space is measured by the division between one thing and another, and since there is no 'thingness' to separate things, it is all a unity, or one-ness.  Also, and most important to this discussion, if in space-time (or in the world of yin and yang, or Shiva and Shakti, or where the force of Heaven interplays with the force of Earth, all of which are better and more encompassing ways of saying the same thing as the fabric of space-time) information can move no faster than the speed of light; then out of space-time, out of the world of matter and in the world of spirit, information moves at infinite speed, which means that all information exists and is accessible at every point in the world of spirit, or cosmic consciousness or the Godhead.

Consciousness is not really divisible.  Living bodies and brains are a way of creating a seeming separation of consciousness.  When we commit to being born we commit to experiencing the world through the 'limitation' of a particular body, a particular set of sense organs and a particular brain.  A brain is a way of organizing a limited amount of information in the service of a particular point of view. God is not a human type being with a gigantic brain.  God does not need a brain and does not have a body.  God is the infinite ocean of spirit that contains all ideas and all information which is instantly accessible at every point.

We participate in this physical world but we are not of this physical world.  We are consciousness, we are one aspect, one perspective of an infinite number of perspectives of the divine.  But we are not that which we perceive, but the perceiver.  Prayer, meditation, chanting, various spiritual practices, separates us from our own perspective, our own point of view, and gives us an experience of our true selves,  a glimpse of the boundless, limitless consciousness which is our true home and identity.

Getting back to Frances Crick, all the information for the construction of a living body begins not in the nucleus, but in the Cosmic Consciousness, as all information for the construction or creation of anything begins in the Cosmic Consciousness.  How that information is applied in the shaping of cells, and organs and organelles, and whole bodies themselves, is yet to be determined.  But we live in an ocean of intelligence, we are surrounded by intelligence and the proof of it is the utter brilliance with which everything, animate and inanimate, is created and functions in harmony and balance with everything else.  In addition to supplying the recipes for proteins, the genes may act as receptors to attract from the Cosmic Consciousness all the information necessary, information that I enumerated above, to the growing embryo; but it is ludicrous to imagine that a string of nucleic acids, by themselves, supplies all that information.  Crick had wanted to rescind the name of the Central Dogma.  He should have rescinded the whole idea.

You're comments are always welcome.

SCROOGE McDUCK, FOLDING NUCLEOTIDES AND 'JUNK DNA'

Here is a quote from a post that I wrote more than five years ago,

"At the moment, the great majority of the three billion nucleotides that make up the DNA in each and every one of the one hundred trillion cells of your body, is considered to be 'junk' DNA, because scientists have not, as yet, found a use for it.  It is considered to probably be a vestige of centuries and centuries of evolutionary mistakes.  Knowing that God is neither wasteful nor frivolous, and that there were really no evolutionary mistakes, (we humans, just celebrating our perhaps one hundred thousandth birthday on this planet, have the audacity to consider the dinosaur, who thrived here for one hundred sixty million years, to be an evolutionary mistake); that, in some way, the quality of our existence today, is built on the knowledge gained, the materials created and the progeny produced by all that preceded us; I suggest that there is a yet to be discovered purpose to each and every one of those three billion nucleotides and to the manner in which they are folded into the nucleus of each of our one hundred trillion cells."

What follows is an article from the New York Times that I came upon last week:

Bits of Mystery DNA, Far From ‘Junk,’ Play Crucial Role

By Gina Kolata

Published: September 5, 2012

Among the many mysteries of human biology is why complex diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and psychiatric disorders are so difficult to predict and, often, to treat. An equally perplexing puzzle is why one individual gets a disease like cancer or depression, while an identical twin remains perfectly healthy.Now scientists have discovered a vital clue to unraveling these riddles. The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave. The discovery, considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health because many complex diseases appear to be caused by tiny changes in hundreds of gene switches.

The findings, which are the fruit of an immense federal project involving 440 scientists from 32 laboratories around the world, will have immediate applications for understanding how alterations in the non-gene parts of DNA contribute to human diseases, which may in turn lead to new drugs. They can also help explain how the environment can affect disease risk. In the case of identical twins, small changes in environmental exposure can slightly alter gene switches, with the result that one twin gets a disease and the other does not.

As scientists delved into the “junk” — parts of the DNA that are not actual genes containing instructions for proteins — they discovered a complex system that controls genes. At least 80 percent of this DNA is active and needed. The result of the work is an annotated road map of much of this DNA, noting what it is doing and how. It includes the system of switches that, acting like dimmer switches for lights, control which genes are used in a cell and when they are used, and determine, for instance, whether a cell becomes a liver cell or a neuron.

“It’s Google Maps,” said Eric Lander, president of the Broad Institute, a joint research endeavor of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In contrast, the project’s predecessor, the Human Genome Project, which determined the entire sequence of human DNA, “was like getting a picture of Earth from space,” he said. “It doesn’t tell you where the roads are, it doesn’t tell you what traffic is like at what time of the day, it doesn’t tell you where the good restaurants are, or the hospitals or the cities or the rivers.”

The new result “is a stunning resource,” said Dr. Lander, who was not involved in the research that produced it but was a leader in the Human Genome Project. “My head explodes at the amount of data.”

The discoveries were published on Wednesday in six papers in the journal Nature and in 24 papers in Genome Research and Genome Biology. In addition, The Journal of Biological Chemistry is publishing six review articles, and Science is publishing yet another article.

Human DNA is “a lot more active than we expected, and there are a lot more things happening than we expected,” said Ewan Birney of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute, a lead researcher on the project.

In one of the Nature papers, researchers link the gene switches to a range of human diseases — multiple sclerosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, celiac disease — and even to traits like height. In large studies over the past decade, scientists found that minor changes in human DNA sequences increase the risk that a person will get those diseases. But those changes were in the junk, now often referred to as the dark matter — they were not changes in genes — and their significance was not clear. The new analysis reveals that a great many of those changes alter gene switches and are highly significant.

“Most of the changes that affect disease don’t lie in the genes themselves; they lie in the switches,” said Michael Snyder, a Stanford University researcher for the project, called Encode, for Encyclopedia of DNA Elements.

And that, said Dr. Bradley Bernstein, an Encode researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, “is a really big deal.” He added, “I don’t think anyone predicted that would be the case.”

The discoveries also can reveal which genetic changes are important in cancer, and why. As they began determining the DNA sequences of cancer cells, researchers realized that most of the thousands of DNA changes in cancer cells were not in genes; they were in the dark matter. The challenge is to figure out which of those changes are driving the cancer’s growth.

“These papers are very significant,” said Dr. Mark A. Rubin, a prostate cancer genomics researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Rubin, who was not part of the Encode project, added, “They will definitely have an impact on our medical research on cancer.”

In prostate cancer, for example, his group found mutations in important genes that are not readily attacked by drugs. But Encode, by showing which regions of the dark matter control those genes, gives another way to attack them: target those controlling switches.

Dr. Rubin, who also used the Google Maps analogy, explained: “Now you can follow the roads and see the traffic circulation. That’s exactly the same way we will use these data in cancer research.” Encode provides a road map with traffic patterns for alternate ways to go after cancer genes, he said.

Dr. Bernstein said, “This is a resource, like the human genome, that will drive science forward.”

The system, though, is stunningly complex, with many redundancies. Just the idea of so many switches was almost incomprehensible, Dr. Bernstein said.

There also is a sort of DNA wiring system that is almost inconceivably intricate.

“It is like opening a wiring closet and seeing a hairball of wires,” said Mark Gerstein, an Encode researcher from Yale. “We tried to unravel this hairball and make it interpretable.”

There is another sort of hairball as well: the complex three-dimensional structure of DNA. Human DNA is such a long strand — about 10 feet of DNA stuffed into a microscopic nucleus of a cell — that it fits only because it is tightly wound and coiled around itself. When they looked at the three-dimensional structure — the hairball — Encode researchers discovered that small segments of dark-matter DNA are often quite close to genes they control. In the past, when they analyzed only the uncoiled length of DNA, those controlling regions appeared to be far from the genes they affect.

The project began in 2003, as researchers began to appreciate how little they knew about human DNA. In recent years, some began to find switches in the 99 percent of human DNA that is not genes, but they could not fully characterize or explain what a vast majority of it was doing.

The thought before the start of the project, said Thomas Gingeras, an Encode researcher from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, was that only 5 to 10 percent of the DNA in a human being was actually being used.

The big surprise was not only that almost all of the DNA is used but also that a large proportion of it is gene switches. Before Encode, said Dr. John Stamatoyannopoulos, a University of Washington scientist who was part of the project, “if you had said half of the genome and probably more has instructions for turning genes on and off, I don’t think people would have believed you.”

By the time the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, embarked on Encode, major advances in DNA sequencing and computational biology had made it conceivable to try to understand the dark matter of human DNA. Even so, the analysis was daunting — the researchers generated 15 trillion bytes of raw data. Analyzing the data required the equivalent of more than 300 years of computer time.

Just organizing the researchers and coordinating the work was a huge undertaking. Dr. Gerstein, one of the project’s leaders, has produced a diagram of the authors with their connections to one another. It looks nearly as complicated as the wiring diagram for the human DNA switches. Now that part of the work is done, and the hundreds of authors have written their papers.

“There is literally a flotilla of papers,” Dr. Gerstein said. But, he added, more work has yet to be done — there are still parts of the genome that have not been figured out.

That, though, is for the next stage of Encode.

This article is written from the perspective of research

scientists and it has an emotionally mixed message.  On 

the one hand there is a certain excitement that this huge 

new source of possibly helpful information is now 

available, and on the other hand there is a sense of 

frustration.  It's like they thought they almost had their 

arms around this monster (the human genome) and now 

they find the problem is thousands, perhaps millions, of 

times more complicated than they had originally thought.


I remember reading a comic when I was a kid which 

featured Scrooge McDuck.  If you don't remember, Scrooge

was Donald Duck's impossibly rich and incredibly stingy 

uncle.  One day Scrooge heard some noise from the street 

in front of his mansion.  A parade was in progress hailing 

some sultan as 'the richest man in the world."  After the 

parade,  they installed a large marble statue of the sultan in 

the town park on a pedestal on which was carved "the 

richest man in the world."  Now Scrooge took great offense 

at this (although why he should have, being a duck, did not 

occur to me at the time I first read it), so Scrooge quickly

built a much larger statue right near the sultan's proclaiming 

Scrooge McDuck as "the richest man in the world." Of

course the sultan responded with an even larger statue; 

McDuck built a silver statue; the sultan built a gold statue;

McDuck, a platinum statue, and so on, and so forth.  In the 

end the poor sultan dressed solely in a barrel (if you are too

young to remember, wearing only a barrel was a symbol of 

abject poverty dating back to the Depression Era), the 

sultan came knocking on Scrooge McDuck's door and was 

let in to a huge vault, the size of an Olympic swimming 

pool, that had merely a few piles of coins lying about.  

"Ah, ha," exclaimed the sultan, leaping for joy, "so you're 

broke, too!" "Don't be ridiculous," responded Scrooge 

McDuck, "this is only my petty cash vault," and he led the 

sultan through another door at the far end of this vault 

into a chamber the size of a football stadium where there 

were literally acres of cash and gold coins piled to the 

ceiling.


The sultan was dressed down for his arrogance in thinking 

that he had more money than any one in the world, when 

he had merely a fraction of McDuck's fortune.  What of the 

arrogance of evolutionary theorists who are constantly 

trying to 'simplify' the creation of life and the  

transcendent complexity of living organisms so that it can 

fit into their sad little theory of life being the outcome of 

a linear series of random replication 'mistakes?'  Darwin, 

without any modern optic technology available to him, 

thought that a cell, and therefore a single celled creature, 

which he considered to be the beginning of life, was an 

undifferentiated sac of albumen. 


Are you aware of the complexity of a living cell? Of a single 

celled creature, which has a genetic system and

which transcribes, translates its genetic code and which 

folds and manufactures and delivers the resultant proteins 

with the same precision that we do ours? Which senses its 

environment, has a way of distinguishing what is to be 

approached and eaten from what is to be avoided? Which

digests food, eliminates wastes, has a complete metabolic 

system that makes all these processes possible, replicates, 

and grows, and has a gene sharing system which is 

available to it when necessary and is so wondrously 

complex that it rivals anything that we humans accomplish 

biologically today (please read my posts 'Wonder' and 

'Evolution'), and which has, within its membranes,

thousands upon thousands of protein molecules, molecules

which this cell manufactured itself, each and every one of

which is, itself, a high tech, biological machine whose 

precisely engineered shape, precise pattern of charges, 

and precisely arranged chemical components allows it to 

do an absolutely specific task necessary to the survival of 

the cell.


And this, according to all geological evidence, was the very 

'simple' beginning of life, that Darwinists refer to, and 

occurred at the moment that the surface of the planet was

cool enough (below the temperature of boiling water) to 

sustain microbial life. There is no evidence whatsoever of 

so-called pre-biotic pools of organic matter slowly 

accumulating over millions of years to form such a cell. 

How could organic matter accumulate into this 

synchronized complexity?  In fact, there are no traces  of 

organic matter at all prior to these four billion year old 

traces of microbes. How could there be? In the boiling 

hot, meteor bombarded, tornado infested environment of early earth,

organic material would last no longer than it would take to

boil an egg (a raw egg, by the way, is precisely that, 

unprotected organic matter).  Even in our much more stable 

environment, organic matter of all life is protected from the 

elements by membranes and systems to control internal 

temperature and nutrient and water levels.


This is the same community that celebrated when it was 

discovered that only three thousand stretches of nucleotides 

were actual genes and which was eager to pronounce the

rest, close to three billion nucleotides, 'junk.'  Their theory is 

laughably inadequate to explain the complexity of life as we

know it, and much more inadequate to explain the 

complexity of life as 'they' know it.  This is why, I believe,

this amazing complexity is not taught in basic biology 

classes.  It is not hard to understand.  You can get it simply 

by knowing the number of molecules, and the precision of 

these processes, without having to memorize all the 

thousands of names that researchers have assigned to 

every chemical and organelle involved. The problem is not

that it is difficult to grasp, but that  it is wondrous, and 

evolutionary biologists who are committed to the idea that

everything about living organisms including their origin is

explainable by simple scientific laws and by the slow but 

random accumulation of accidents, do not want students to

feel overwhelmed, wondrous or awestruck by the 

transendent complexity of their own bodies......Too bad!

It was this community that announced with glee that they 

had found God and God was the genetic code; that the 

code consisted of only three thousands strands of 

nucleotides among the three billion found in each cell, and 

that as soon as they had figured out the sequencing of the 

human genome, they would complete their understanding of

the mechanics of life.  Sorry, my neo-Darwinist friends, you

thought you had found God, but you had only found his 

petty cash drawer.  Yes, the genetic system is magnificently

complex and magnificently coordinated; but the timing

system of the firing of those genes is exponentially more

so. Every different organ of your body, every different

organelle within each cell, every stage of development from

a fertilized ovum to an adult, is dependent on this firing 

system; not just on the genes, but on which genes are fired 

and when they are fired.


When scientists study the firing of genes they look at an

adult organism and study all the stimuli that are responded 

to by gene firing which leads to enzyme production.  We eat

something, or we do a physically demanding task, or we 

experience a big drop or rise in temperature.  These stimuli 

trigger a whole series of reactions which lead to a 'trigger' 

molecule bonding with a nucleic acid molecule within the

nucleus of the cell leading to transcription, translation,

protein folding,and protein delivery.  A system that is very

complex, absolutely precise and brilliantly constructed.  But 

all this pales compared to the firing of genes involved in the 

development of an organism from fertilized egg to new born.  

In this process billions of genes are fired every day in 

absolutely precise and coordinated sequences.  It is so 

impossibly complex that researchers dare not even 

approach it. 



So let's look again at the information uncovered in this 

article. There are three billion nucleotides folded, or coiled in 

each cell in the body.  There are one hundred trillion cells.

When the DNA strand of each single cell is unspooled that 

will yield an impossibly thin string (only a few atoms wide) 

that is, according to the above article, ten feet long.  I had 

previously heard that the strand was about a meter long. In 

that same article it said that if all the strands from every cell 

in a human body, in your body, were arranged end to end,

 that would create a strand that would stretch to the sun (not 

the moon) and back.  If, indeed, each individual cellular 

segment is ten feet rather than a meter, that would make

the accumulated length long enough to stretch to the sun

and back three times. That would be 558 million miles of

nucleotides, or, going in the other direction, a strand that

would stretch past Jupiter and half way to Saturn.

Understand, I am not talking about the accumulated DNA of 

humanity, which would be seven billion times as long (or 

slightly less than seven hundred thousand light years), but

just the DNA strands in your own individual body.  


Now I knew that the strands were coiled differently in

different cells. Why?  The protein 'trigger' molecule must 

find the right nucleotide to bind to in order to begin the 

process of transcription.  The ten foot strand of three billion

nucleotides have to be coiled so tightly that  there is still

room within the nucleus for the trigger molecules to float

around in the nuclear fluid. However, because of the 

tightness of the coil, only a small percentage of the genes 

and their triggers are accessible.  In, for instance, cells of 

the adrenal glands, the genes that carry the code for 

adrenal cortical hormone must be easily accessed.  In 

salivary glands, the genes for salivary enzyme must be 

accessible.  Each type of cell has its own special function

and manufactures a particular set of proteins unique to that

type; so the DNA must be folded in a way that makes all 

the genes and all the trigger nucleotides for the genes that

are commonly manufactured by that cell easily accessible

to the trigger protein molecules for those genes. There are

over two thousand types of cells; therefore there are at 

least two thousand different folding patterns.  Further

research may discover that the folding patterns may be

more specialized than that, and may be related not just to 

the specific type of cell, but to it's location in the body and 

the unique genetic demands that are made on that particular 

cell.


What I didn't realize, that I learned from this article, is that 

the triggers for certain genes may be thousands or even 

millions of nucleotides away from the actual gene, but 

because of the way the strand is folded, that trigger winds

up, although on a different portion of the strand, right next

to, or even abutting the gene.  That means that these, at 

least two thousand different folding patterns of, I remind 

you, three billion nucleotides, is so specific that the triggers

found perhaps several feet from the gene, wind up, after 

the coiling, right next to or abutting the gene; and they must 

abut the gene or the whole transcription process could not 

move forward.


What kind of a task would that be, to precisely fold one 

hundred trillion sets of three billion nucleotides?  If we 

assigned every person on the planet, say seven billion 

people, to work on this task, and we blew up the nucleotide 

strand several thousand times so that it was a size that

people could see, say the thickness of a pearl necklace 

with each nucleotide being a pearl, and since there are four 

different types of nucleotides that make up DNA, let's say

the pearls come in four different colors, white, black, pink 

and grey; then each person on the earth  would be given 

fifteen thousand necklaces (their one seven billionth share 

of the one hundred trillion strands found in each of the one 

hundred trillion cells of your body) each three billion pearls 

long.  Do you think that each person ,if there were room on 

the surface of the earth for all these enormous pearl 

strands, which there would not be (if the pearls measured 

fifty pearls per foot, then each of the fifteen thousand 

strands for each of the seven billion people on earth would

be over eleven thousand miles long!), do you think that

anyone would be able to fold fifteen thousand three billion 

pearl necklaces in an absolutely precise folding pattern if 

they devoted their entire lives to the endeavor?  Of course 

not.  They would have to fold one entire three billion pearl

necklace, an eleven thousand mile strand, each day for

forty-five years. I don't see how they could accomplish the 

precise folding of one necklace in a lifetime. And I remind 

you that these fifteen thousand strands, each eleven 

thousand miles long for every one of the seven billion people 

on this planet, represents the DNA folding, not for all of 

humanity, but just for one person, for you.


And that is just the physical impossibility of the task.  What 

of the precision?  Don't forget, the three billion pearl strand

has to wind up with exactly the right sequences on the 

outside of the coil to provide access to the right genes and

the right trigger molecules.  The folding must be absolutely 

precise, otherwise, when the strand gets folded over and 

over again the necessary sequences of gene pearls and

trigger pearls will wind up in the wrong place.  So no human 

could undertake such an endeavor without a plan, a design,

to follow; and you could imagine how complicated a plan for

folding a strand of three billion pearls, or nucleotides, or 

anything, would be.  So where is this plan?  It must be 

there.  Three billion nucleotides don't just fall into the exactly

right patterns of folds and turns randomly; and what over 

arching level of organization is there that distributes at least 

two thousand different folding patterns among the one 

hundred trillion developing cells?   There must be a 

guidance and that guidance must originate in a non-physical

idea and then materialize either directly into these different 

patterns, or into an intermediate, or astral, body of just 

positive and negative, or yin and yang energies, which 

guides the strands into place.


How could a spiritual idea simply manifest into something

physical? I can't explain it but I can point to a corresponding 

process where a spiritual, or non-physical idea or desire 

manifests into something physical. Every time you want to 

do something, that wanting, which is a non-physical, non-

measurable experience, the precise  thousands upon 

thousands of neurons  are fired, which begin a cascade of 

processes that winds up with you actually doing what you 

wanted to do. In the same way that human behavior and 

human creativity begin with a desire or an idea which is then

materialized; living beings, themselves, are the 

materialization of an idea which comes from a transcendent 

intelligence.


We all begin, at least all our equipment, our biological

apparatus, begins, from that one fertilized ovum.  The DNA 

in that ovum is folded in only one way.  As the genes 

mitotically divide so that that one egg becomes hundreds,

then thousands, then millions of different cells, what is the

governing principle behind the two thousand different 

foldings of the DNA?  Could the DNA, itself, be governing 

this?  Of course not.  DNA has to do with material, not 

shape.  Basically the same material that is in your arm

bone, is also in your  ribs and the bones of your big toes. 

How are the shapes of the 206 different bones of your body

determined?  It's the same material, made not only from 

the same genome, but from the same specific genes of that

genome.  The whole genetic system including the 

unfathomably complex firing system is the system by which

all the building materials get to exactly where they need to

be at the time they are needed during the development of 

the embryo.  How all that material is shaped into the bones

and eyes and hearts and livers and organelles within the 

cells, and blood vessels, and neurons and villi and sweat

glands, etc., etc., etc., is beyond the province of the genes.

So, by the way, is the amazing pattern of foldings, 

involutions, convolutions, twists and turns of the entire 

embryonic mass as it begins to develop.  Yes, each species 

goes through its own particular set of embryonic 

gymnastics, so that an ovum with a human genome will go 

through its own special set of acrobatics, and a chicken egg 

will go through its very different set.  These acrobatics then,

crucial to the entire shaping of the adult body, are related 

to the particular genome, but how could anyone say they 

were caused by that genome?


Isn't the fact that the genome is folded into two thousand 

utterly precise and different patterns in each of the one 

hundred trillion cells of our bodies, clear proof that there is a

higher level of organization to the human body, or any living 

body, than the genes themselves?  Isn't it so clear from this 

that the material of a living body does not cause the shape 

of that body; anymore than the shape of the body causes 

the material within it?  Isn't it obvious that both the shape

and the material originate and are caused by an idea, an

idea that comes from the cosmic consciousness, from the 

Godhead, from the mind of God, or from whatever you want

to call it; but from something that transcends both material 

and shapes, something that is spiritual and that far, far 

surpasses in its ability to conceive and create, both human

intelligence and human technology?


I wish ENCODE the best of luck.  I hope they make 

discoveries that will cure a thousand diseases.  I hope they 

all win Nobel Prizes and make billions of dollars for their

respective pharmaceutical companies.  For me, what is

most wonderful about these discoveries, is how it reveals 

the utterly amazing biological equipment that we all share, 

the transcendent brilliance and technological mastery of the 

creator of this equipment, and the increasing clarity with 

each new discovery of modern research, of how laughably 

inadequate our pathetic little evolutionary theory of 

sequences of random replication errors is to explain the 

true majesty and brilliance of living organisms.



Please comment!