I am, therefore I think, I believe.
“Speaking words of wisdom, 11B” ~Weilland Huttner
What makes us human is a question that people have been grappling with for centuries. And everyone has a different take on what angle to explore the question from. Some take the relationship with others approach and look to our capacity to altruism and kindness, or cruelty. Some take the artistic path; our ability to create music, poetry, or other forms of artistic expression. There is also the mythological view- that humans are more special than any other creature on earth, being fully formed- like Athena born from the forehead of Zeus. And finally there are the scientists searching for the first human- giving us such ancestors as “Lucy”, Neanderthals, and Homo erectus, among others. But what makes us so different than other apes? Maybe, as my students say, it’s our big brain.
In a very interesting study, the answer of how we got our big brain begins with a bit of gene that was copied too many times, (I bet there isn’t a teacher reading this that hasn’t done that) and had one nucleotide go rogue, or as the professionals say, mutate (Ghose, 2015). This gene, called 11B, is responsible for the folds in the brain, for the increase in stem cells and neurons in the brain. That copy-paste-mutate gave us our big brains.
Here is where I should tell you that I consider myself a Christian. I fully expect the church to be around to finish out my “match-em, hatch-em, dispatch-em” journey. But I am also a biology nerd. I LOVE learning new things about life. Finding new ways to look at faith stories is especially exciting to me (one of my favorite magazines is Biblical Archeology). An organization called BioLogos (https://biologos.org/about-us) explains it better than I can, that Adam and Eve may have been a group, rather than individuals that received a special revelation. Faith and science are not mutually exclusive. I believe that finding natural explanations for miracles doesn’t devalue them. On the contrary, the first time I head the whole sequence of events for the plagues of Egypt due to a volcanic explosion- I felt it made the story more miraculous. How a bunch of goat-herders revolted against a powerful national, how a random guy could predict this to the pharaoh- miraculous. So learning that our big brain might have been a fluke of nature makes our story more miraculous.
.png "Adam and Eve by Wilson Bigaud , 1953")
[Adam and Eve, 1953 Wilson Bigaud]
Maybe the story of the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil , thus 'becoming like god' was a way to pass on the information that our 11B gene mutated to allow increased intelligence. Trying to explain genetics to a group whose whole life revolved around survival is like trying to explain genetics to 5 year olds. Their brains aren’t ready for it, and they will fall asleep or wonder off before you are finished with the basics.
So, we have these big brains, we have knowledge of good and evil- what will we do with all this brain power? May I offer the same advice a traveling preacher did in his letter to a group in ancient Ephesus, “Be kind and compassionate to one another…”
For further reading of Faith & Science or the story of our big brains, I offer these links
https://time.com/5561441/passover-10-plagues-real-history/
https://biologos.org/articles/what-genetics-say-about-adam-and-eve
https://bahaiteachings.org/were-adam-and-eve-black/
https://humanorigins.si.edu/human-characteristics/brains
Accidentally Intelligent? The small step to a big brain https://youtu.be/MzJSO5RdCNc
References:
Ghose, Tia. “‘Big Brain’ Gene Allowed for Evolutionary Expansion of Human Neocortex.” Scientific American, 27 Feb. 2015, www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-brain-gene-allowed-for-evolutionary-expansion-of-human-neocortex/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2022.
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