From www.mcgeepost.com .Copyright © 2013 Michael H. McGee. All rights reserved. Please feel free to share or re-post all or part non-commercially, hopefully with attribution.
In Part One of this series we followed the life-cycle of a simple insect, the Luna Moth, through one complete cycle, paying attention to the details of the process. We demonstrated the role of DNA and the genome in the replication of each stage in the life of the moth. In Part Two we demonstrated scientifically that death is not present in Luna Moths who complete their life-cycle and generate another life-cycle. Unending life is the gift of nature to this moth and all the other crawling creatures.
The complexity of the organization of each life-cycle of a moth or any other creature, including man, is staggering, and is managed almost exclusively by the living DNA which is passed forward to the next generation. This concluding Part Three will make a lot more sense if you take the time to read Parts One and Two before going further.
We quoted from accepted science at the beginning of this series: “Life is specified by genomes. Every organism, including humans, has a genome that contains all of the biological information needed to build and maintain a living example of that organism. The biological information contained in a genome is encoded in its deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/About/primer/genetics_genome.html (2004).
I have been leading you to an acceptable scientific conclusion which is difficult to comprehend. Unending life is not only a demonstrated characteristic of insects; it is also a scientifically demonstrated characteristic of human beings, including you and me. The life-cycle of a human being is really not very different from that of the moth. Sexual reproduction through the transfer of living DNA from one generation to another is the same. Unending life is the gift of nature to man as well as to moth.
The life-force passed on from one human being to another through sexual reproduction thus is scientifically demonstrated to come down to a single point. One microscopic strand of living DNA in a single sperm cell meets with another single microscopic strand of living DNA residing in the nucleus of one human egg cell.
“Whenever the state of a biological system is not determined solely by present conditions but depends on its past history, we can say that the system has memory.” Casadesús, J. and D’Ari, R. (2002). Bioessays, 24: 512–518.
It’s clear that the information inside these microscopic strands of DNA is from the past, since the actual “being” does not exist at the time of conception except as a single cell penetrating another single cell. The past memory stored in each microscopic strand represents a memory capacity billions of times greater than the human brain. This memory may include things other than building instructions, such as somatic and unconscious memories from the long unbroken line of the vital life-force from which your life and my life has emerged.
Each of these single microscopic strands of DNA, when joined, has in its memory all that is necessary to produce and maintain, without further direction, a complete and complex zygote, fetus and child; and an adult human being composed of about 50 trillion individual cells. Each of these cells is structurally and geometrically ordered in exactly the right manner for the human being to function much the same way as each other of the seven billion people on the planet.
With regard to the enormity of this task of memory and management, I can only give a comical example. Give an aeronautical engineer all the instruction books necessary to produce a Boeing 747 Dreamliner. Let him read them, take them away, and then put him in an empty aircraft construction building. Ask him to build from memory an entire working Boeing 747 aircraft, there inside the building, with no help from the outside, except he can ask for rough unprocessed raw materials to be brought in.
Let’s exaggerate and say there are ten million mechanical parts in a 747. Well, there are about 50 trillion cells in an adult human body, and they all have to coordinate together every microsecond of every day. This is the memory capacity of one microscopic strand of DNA.
I find it useful to describe this process of the unending continuation of life as “immortality,” even though it does have a theoretical beginning and end, which is contrary to the meaning of the word. We don’t know when or where this life-force began, and we can’t possibly know when or where the life-force will end. All we have is observation of the present behavior of the life-force and historical examples from the recent few thousand years.
The place where the unending continuation of life occurs in humans is in the passage of living sperm across an open space during reproduction, to join together with the living egg. The traverse across the open space is the singular similarity applicable to insects and humans and all creatures who reproduce sexually.
During sexual intercourse human sperm is left out in the open at the end of the vagina, at the head of the cervix of the female. The sperm must then find their way, unaided and alone, over a lengthy and dark open area, through the narrow cervix of the female and far into her uterus. Each of these individual sperm is a living being, containing all the DNA which defines a human being. Each has also been provided with DNA memory to know which direction to travel after being unceremoniously deposited in an unknown squishy dark place in a splat. How incredible is that?
Each sperm, independently of all the other 200 million or more sperm released each time, has a mind of its own sufficient to sort out the completely dark and unfamiliar space (the interior of the vagina); and on the spot develops a geometry which gets it going along the right path to where it needs to be. In addition each sperm has an active means of locomotion, a tail, which is entirely up to the task of moving the sperm in the exact direction it knows to go. Do we need any further scientific proof of life in this transfer across an open space?
The Luna Moth sperm doesn’t have to be so versatile. It’s deposited in one spot and sits there until the eggs come in contact with it. All it has to do is recognize the eggs and jump onto them. But then the human being has always been much more complex than an insect: even though the insect itself is staggeringly complex.
Don’t forget that science has shown that each of the trillions of cells of the human body has exactly the same strand of DNA in its nucleus. When I say exactly the same, I mean that each strand of DNA in every cell of an individual human body is identical in every way. Each strand carries the same memories as each other, and has its parts arranged identically. So for our purposes, there is only one configuration of DNA which can be carried by these sperm. The genome in each of these lively and eager travelers is the same. And it is full of life.
The goal of each sperm is to swim across the open space inside the female body until it reaches the egg. There is no question that the egg is a living part of the female at the time one sperm penetrates and causes that egg to begin to divide and become another human being. This is the meaning of the statement that the human being remains alive for generation after generation without the interruption of death.
This is also the meaning of the statement that those seeking life after death have been looking for life in all the wrong places. Life continues and persists in a human being at the life-cycle stage of reproduction, not at the stage of death.
People die before producing offspring and of old age. All but one of the millions of sperm dies without becoming a part of the life-cycle. All of this death is irrelevant in the human life-cycle. Life is in the genome, and the living genome carries on, generation after generation. This is scientific fact.
DNA is living human tissue. Each strand of DNA by definition has within itself all the elements of human life. When sexual reproduction occurs, a single strand of living human tissue joins with a single strand of living human tissue from another human being. There is never a time during human sexual reproduction when the living tissues of the parent contributions to the new human being cease to be living tissue. There is no new life, only a continuation of the existing living tissue in a slightly different format.
These living attributes may include either dominant or recessive traits, and when the attributes are stitched together at conception there is a new and different living strand of DNA. Yet this new strand can contain only what is present in one of the two halves, with dominant and recessive traits jockeying for position. Through the process of recombination, progeny derive a combination of these two specific sets of genes, which is yet really not so different from the parental genes. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/About/primer/genetics_genome.html (2004).
The new combination is without question a continuation of the living tissue of the two donors. Certain traits within the genome may have a half-life, or be entirely eliminated during the joining of the two halves of the genome. Yet the living human tissue of the strand of DNA remains alive and fully functioning throughout all these changes. If the DNA strand was not alive, it could not retain the memory of how to build the new person.
This scientifically self-evident continuation of life is passed from one human generation to the next through the narrow portal of sexual reproduction. The next question is: what is the nature of the life which is forwarded on through hundreds of such portals for several thousand years?
DNA carries the past history of each human organism in its lineage and brings that history through the portal into the present activity of every person. Thus the current “state,” or circumstance of being, of each and every human is determined by its past history, carried by DNA, along with a few recombination changes. Thus the “system” known as a human being has a “memory” which is encoded in the DNA of each cell of the body. It may be said that everything we are is a memory.
For the DNA, which carries the memories of the life of the past physical being into the present, it may be said that the human urge toward reproduction is not voluntary. Nor is the human urge to nurture their young until old enough to reproduce. These urges are prescribed by the DNA in much the same way as the passage of the sperm across the open space is prescribed by the DNA.
In the end there is no death for those who successfully navigate the entirety of the human life-cycle. The DNA, which contains all that you are, perpetuates life unending for millennia. You are likely three thousand years old or more, and are definitely a lot more complicated than a Luna Moth.
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