Race of Biology

It is a basic misunderstanding of genetics and generally inaccurate to use racial labels for DNA lineages that cut across supposed racial groups. DNA identifies us by lineage and not by race—a very distinct difference. The default mistake that most of us make, is assume that common racial characteristics will link us closer in the DNA lineage. That’s just the society we’ve grown up to “think racially”. But DNA has the best reputation in racial thinking.

Using mitochondrial DNA (tracing the mothers, mothers, mothers) “we find in every classroom that some of the students’closest maternal relatives belong to a different race than they do. These lineages do not follow common racial categories—but in fact our mitochondrial lineage tells a different story that race is not a biological reality”—Thomas Murphy, PhD. Anthropology, Bioanthropolgy, Edmonds College

Our racial concepts are biased. They are based on our politics—our ways of excluding and discriminating against each other are ways that are not supported by biology. Yet we take superficial appearances and then dump people into categories based upon those when our biology is much more complex than that.

Race is a social construct, not supported by a close look at human biology. Our physical features such as skin color, facial structure, or hair texture, typically associated with race, are inherited independently and cut across populations just like DNA lineage.

When we actually look at the biology of skin color, it has nothing to do with arguments on morality, goodness, or evil. Us and them are ridiculous in a world of DNA. Skin color evolves in response to the environment and to assume skin color is even a separate race is a social construct. Biology is clear—we are all one race. We are all one people. The habit of breaking things into categories is as destructive as it is useful.

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Three Cases For a Single Consciousness

The brain as an appendix? Three pounds of useless fat…

Organisms come and go. Brains evolve into minor insignificant blobs—to bilateral synchronization, to the organic state of awareness. Being aware of being aware (the pinnacle of biological evolution) big brains have made humans the “chief mambas” of planet earth. But was this necessary? Is it even true?

In geologic timescale life is but an eye-blink. Upon death one constant remains—consciousness. It is in every thing. It is the background illuminating the foreground. “The entire universe is forever the same as the consciousness that dwells in every atom”—Yoga-Vasistha. When you are gone consciousness remains.

Does consciousness exists without the brain? In recent years that idea has regained traction from some unlikely sources—brain abnormalities and science.

#1. “A new research study contradicts the established view that so-called split-brain patients have a split consciousness. Instead, the researchers behind the study have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterized by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain”

Split brain is a lay term to describe the result of a corpus callosotomy, a surgical procedure first performed in the 1940s to alleviate severe epilepsy among patients. During this procedure, the corpus callosum (a bundle of neural fibres connecting the left and right cerebral hemispheres) is severed to prevent the spread of epileptic activity between the two brain halves. While mostly successful in relieving epilepsy, the procedure also virtually eliminates all communication between the cerebral hemispheres, thereby resulting in a ‘split brain’. Ref Article

Yet the patients still have one mind. The idea that consciousness originates in the brain has been sideswiped by evidence—that it’s not so clear as that. There’s more…

#2. More than 20 years ago the campus doctor at Sheffield University was treating a student of mathematics for a minor ailment. The student was bright, having an IQ of 126. The doctor noticed that the student’s head seemed a little larger than normal and he referred him to Dr Lorber for further examination.

Dr Lorber examined the boy’s head by cat scan to discover that the student had virtually no brain. The normal brain consists of two hemispheres that fill the cranial cavity, some 4.5cm deep. This student had a layer of cerebral tissue less than 1mm deep covering the top of his spinal column. Ref Article

#3. When a 44-year-old man from France started experiencing weakness in his leg, he went to the hospital. That’s when doctors told him he was missing most of his brain. The man’s skull was full of liquid, with just a thin layer of brain tissue left. Ref Article

With speech and motor coordination intact, normal societal living, average as well as above average intelligence, the above cases are good cases for consciousness existing outside the brain. Even the split brain is a single consciousness.

Where are his memories stored?

Where does thinking occur?

Where is speech and visual acuity learned and stored?

Where is the moral compass and reasoning developed?

Where does this place evolutions larger brain hypothesis to support greater intelligence?

How do the 12 cranial nerves function without a source organ?

I imagine the big brain has something to do with esthetics. A population of pinheads wouldn’t be a real eye catcher— or would it?

Hormones vs The Five Senses—And the Winner Is?

Clinging to faith is to test what we actually see, against sentiments we can only feel (or think we feel) It is to dismiss our five senses to put trust in a chemically induced emotional response. Then, step by step we carefully absorb what another has felt through his own chemical release—by the art of storytelling.

“And the men of words carefully embellish the story to elicit excretions”

The problem with trusting the hormonal response? It is more powerful than anybody’s intention, resistance, or intuition. As proof we look to the hormone who has populated the earth to the tune of 7.8 Billion, against marathons of religious warning, driving countless souls to breed even when they knew the risk of hellfire, disease, or poverty.

“In the land of the blind, Enucleation is the corrective surgery”—Marshall McLuhan

Faith admonishes humanity to abandon the common senses for a less reliable one—feelings dispensed by acute events, driving each individual endocrine system and mental sensitivity (a night at the movies is the simplest observation) tugging your Jesus strings can be easily accomplished, even with known fiction.

Corrective lenses or hearing aids is a fairly easy fix for faulty sight and sound, but hormones simply require testimony and the right cadence with the right timing. Belief is supposed to heal the soul. But which of your other senses can be enhanced with repetitive persuasion? What truth anywhere requires a specific timing or carefully crafted event to become true? Catastrophe can also dispense the hormone. Then, as long as the men of words are there to tell us what it all means by god [sic] we can trust the gospel message as authentic—because dopamine always feels right, right?

Faith is believing the hormonal response is more valid than our primary audio-visual and tactile senses.

The fact is this; the expansion of the gospel required swordplay to achieve dominance, not its ideas. A great way to open a gland is to receive violence followed by salvation. That relief alone, whether from physical or emotional trauma, step by step bolsters faith by secretions.

Have you ever seen a touching scene in a movie, knowing full well it is fiction and felt that same feeling from a good sermon? What if the credits falsely labeled the movie “based on a true story?” Monotheism in a nutshell.

Hormones are a predictably unreliable benchmark for faith…in anything, and much too powerful to wield without understanding the emotion and conviction of faith are simply drip-fed in micrograms—or is it really the Holy Spirit?

Understanding even the basics of the endocrine system may be enough to keep you on the level—unless they got to you too early… The beautiful part about not feeling the emotion they try to elicit (through the storytelling) is now you’re under condemnation over failing to secrete when they say the magic words.

The Modern Lucy—Ancient Survival Manipulated

Peering carefully, cautiously behind every corner…slowly, quietly, intently approaching every closet, while maginations hide under every bed—every time, chills of air send pilos erect, pupils dilate, blood pressures rise. Skin sensitivity doubles…with caution…ready to flee, or to fight, only to hide in worry another night. After arranging the room carefully—so no objects come alive in their darkened states, can a moment of peace descend dreary into sleep.

Why is this acute imagery laying in wait, alive beround every corner? Where did all this ritual come from? Survival. Who is it that survived the ages to become us? Where did we arrive to this overdeveloped sense, particularly at night?

It is this inherent caution, this fear, that is easily manipulated by religion. Playing on millions of years of survival instinct, the preacher paints a picture of a loving father figure to protect you from evil. If you can only imagine…just a bit more

Since the industrial revolution and the formation of modern survival, we have leaped beyond our multi-generational evolution. Changes that took 100’s of thousands of years are now shoehorned into a century. The preachers gold is our lumbering evolution. Fear is still a best seller…

LUCA—the Progenote

Finding the origins of life on earth is a collaboration of geneticists from around the globe. LUCA, or Last Universal Common Ancestor was a Progenote—2.9 Billion years ago. Massimo Di Guilio of the Institute of Genetics and Biophysics in Naples, Italy states “Progenotes can make proteins using genes as a template, but the process is so error-prone that the proteins can be quite unlike what the gene specified. The crucial point is that LUCA was a progenote, with poor control over the proteins that it made”.

Not to overwhelm with details, but imagine a single-celled organism capable of reproducing, but the shotgun blast of loosely controlled variations eventually filled the oceans in a cooperative sense creating a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet’s oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.

Like a Gish-Gallup of bullshit points in religion (a mythical and destructive form of progenote) starting as a single idea and having no control over the outcomes, spread through the world like a bacteria, or virus. After 3 Billion years we see the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree, and genetically speaking, religion has lost its way but continues to grow in the outermost regions of third world poverty.

While progenote survived by non-competitive cooperation, religion has survived by destroying all noncompliant life in its path.

“One must not let oneself be misled: they say ‘Judge not!’ but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way”—Nietzsche