Peace: Managing Change in Our DNA

Change happens. Life is a series of changes. But the changes that humans have experienced over the centuries go beyond the changes all life experiences. These changes have changed the cultural identity of humans as we have gained a better understanding of ourselves and our environment.

The problem with this set of changes is that, unlike our biological and physiological changes, it was not under the direct control of our DNA. When humans first arrived they had no way of knowing that, centuries later, man would leave the confines of his earthly home and walk on the moon. Our technological advances never crossed their minds. They did not realize that they were consciously completing the evolution of the species, so as to bring us to a perfect end.

Because they did not know the nature of the process of change they were involved in, they were not in a position to manage it. Our failure to recognize that we have gone through this process is the reason we have been unable to control it.
Several important ideas have been overlooked. First is the idea that the purpose of education is to complete the development of an organism. As a result we have consistently confused instruction with education. A related idea is the fact that the human race is an organism, nor an organization. Because of the tremendous achievements we have made because our ability for scientific enquiry we have overlooked the fact that instinctive action is the highest state of existence.

Intelligence allows us to come up with creative solutions to the problems and challenges we face. (We will talk about the difference I see between problems and challenges another time.) But when we arrive at a solution or a working method we switch into the instinctive mode because that is the only way progress can be made. In the process of coming up with new solutions we also gain new information. All of these new ideas become part of our cultural DNA and it is copied into each new human arrives.

The process of enlarging our cultural DNA carries with it the same risks that exist each time a cell divides to produce a new cell. No one cell contains all the information needed to make a body function. The knowledge needed to make a body function is the sum of the information found in all the cells of the body. So, there is no such thing as a human cell but a human cell of a particular kind. The zygote is the only cell that contains all the information needed for the human organism.

In the process of unraveling then recombining, mutations often occur in the DNA. This is the source of auto-immune diseases and cancers. As humans began to explore and to reproduce through division two things happened. The information needed to establish the identity of the human species began to increase and parts of this knowledge were necessarily distributed among various members of the species. Even the most intelligent human is ignorant as far as the entire catalog of human science is concerned. It is only collectively that our species is educated. But the process of dividing our cultural DNA has produced a severe mutation that has resulted in the cancer of humans placing pressure on other humans and the auto-immune disease of humans attacking other humans as if they were their enemies.

Next time I will share my ideas of how I think this happened.