“The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” – William Faulkner

Can you imagine all the memories branded into our DNA? It’s a bit like asking someone to tell infinity’s story. It gives infinity a face/a character i.e. to anthropomorphize infinity, though plants and animals shape the story as well. It assumes you believe it possible that memories are the precursor to instinct or something less known than instinct. A story told from the totality of each life’s experience from infinities past to present.

According to leading specialized researchers, such as the young but impressive Dr. Spencer Wells, and based on what we’re able to trace today, our mtDNA, our ancient Mother, is over 150,000 years old; and our Y-chromosome ancient Father, is over 60,000 years old – both probably lived in South East Africa, in the region of Tanzania.

Older still, fossils in Kenya offer clues, potassium-argon dating, suggesting the first hominids lived over 900,000 years ago. We’ve lived and evolved over a long time — nothing new there, if you believe in evolution.

Paradoxically, large groups of people, mostly creationists, don’t accept the aforementioned evidence. The Mormons still believe that the American Indians are the lost tribe of Israel.

But the truer story is we all have African origin, and in regards to the American Indians, they’re more recently (if you can call 12,000 years ago recent) migrated from Central Asia. At our core we are immigrants, all of us; again, if you believe in a more science based versus a religious school of thought.

I am on the side of logic and reason, in as much as human nature allows. But am cynical of science as much as I believe there is something yet to explore and discover. I believe religion is as valuable as ancient myth or fine literature, something to be studied across cultures, valued, respected. And prayer is equal in many ways to meditation. But the “big questions” and/or omnipresent unknowns will likely and always confound us. Therefore it is my opinion that there is not a reasonable, sustainable or rather harmonious argument on either side of the absolutist debate, so I’ll continue with my agnostic theme song.

Here’s the newer part of the evidence — our scientific story.

It’s been nine years since Craig Venter, a renegade scientist and others such as the academic figurehead George Church began decoding the human genome, our “script of life.” Discovering it to be loaded with genes that govern the workings of each and every human cell. Although what they found is still in the making, limited in scope of the greater objective, it is massive in potential.

Watson, Crick et al discovered the basic structure of DNA in 1953. In over 50 years and even after the last decade of profound breakthroughs, we still only understand about 1% of our “book of life.” Scientists suspect the other 99% — which in the past was called “junk DNA” and which overlaps in almost identical ways between us, is important.

The work continues. It should be said that some developments scare the pants off of me. The idea behind much research is; “if you can read the script, you can write the script”. Implications galore! Much of the scientific community working to understand our DNA are going in the direction of the consumer market aka medicine and agricultural commerce, and have already made an impact.

In the non-commercial sphere it is now happening that funds, though relatively little, are being invested to read our “script of life” to better, what I would call, our social understanding. The Genographic Project, lead by Dr. Spencer Wells, is doing interesting work in that field of evolutionary biology (of which I have participated via a DNA test).

But, I suspect there is another angle yet to be explored that is untapped. This is where DNA Memory comes in.

XXX

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Credit:
Intelligent Life / The Economist (Summer 2009)
Newsweek (July 6-July 13 2009)