From the Beginning

The evidence shows that humans did not always view each other as enemies. So, the question we need to ask is "How did humans turn from brotherhood to animosity?" I found one ancient document that gives some insight into this issue. Unfortunately, it happens to be a source of irritation between humans. That source is the book of Genesis in the Hebrew and Christian Christians.

In Genesis 2 the Creator puts the first man, Adam, to sleep extracts a rib from his chest cavity and makes a woman out of the rib that He removed. When the woman is presented to Adam he declares (v. 23):
[quote]"This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man."[/quote]

That was a sign of identity, unity and brotherhood. But a few verses later, after "the Fall," Adam no longer thinks of her as being a part of him. Instead, when asked why he had eaten of the tree he had been told not to partake of he says, [quote]"The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it."[/quote]

This was quite a change. In the next chapter the story is repeated with different circumstances. In chapter four Adam and Eve produce two sons. Cain grows up to be a farmer who works the soil, and Abel becomes a shepherd. By the time the story ends one brother is dead (8)[quote]Now Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let's go out to the field." [d] And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.[/quote]

Somewhere in those two stories we should be able to determine what it is that changed humans from brothers into enemies and indicate how we can get back to where we were.

Understanding Global DNA

When we get past the double helix of the DNA molecule and the sequencing of the human genome, we are left to conclude that DNA is just information. Without that information the cells would not know what to do and nothing would happen in the body. There would be no life.

Global DNA is also information. In non-human species this information is a fixed quantity. This is why they all operate on instinct. Their behavior is genetically determined and they have the same responses to external stimuli regardless of whether they were here ten thousand years ago or live on earth today. Non-human species don't know everything but they know everything they need to know.

Humans are very different. When they arrived on this planet they did not know anything. This is strange because one would expect that if every species that appeared before humans knew everything they needed to know to ensure their survival that humans should also have the same level of information. Someone appears to have switched the script when humans arrived. But that ignorance is also the basis of what we call intelligence. Intelligence is actually managed ignorance.

In the place of full knowledge we came equipped with curiosity and creativity. This curiosity allowed us to learn from the non-human species around us, and to use what we learned from them to create new knowledge. We have done a great job of learning from these species. Each time we learned something our knowledge base increased and that only made more information available to us. In every instance we improved on what we learned from our environment, except one. Self-destructive behavior is the one thing that humans did not learn from the other species around. Before humans arrived the animals knew not to deplete their food stock or to overgraze their grazing grounds. Violence in nature was always inter-species rather than intra-species. It is logical that when humans arrived on earth they also lived together in peace among each other. Without that they would not have survived those early years of their existence.

How then did we abandon the information that told us that as members of the same species we are brothers and develop a new set of information that caused us to look on each other as potential enemies? This is the question for the ages. If we can address it adequately we may be close to understanding the anomaly the human race has become. We are in search of information.