Sapien Evolution of What We Are; Hiking and Exploring the Fossils of the Burgess Shales near Field BC. 2015-08-02 Jorma Jyrkkanen

Sapien Evolution of What We Are Jorma A. Jyrkkanen 18 January 2016 I am going to take you on a journey that will possibly change your ideas about what we are. It is a journey of discovery that I took myself back in time and space in a vehicle called science. Navigating this journey took all of my intellectual skill and the wisdom and guidance of many of the brightest minds amongst humanity. It wasn’t without difficulties. I had to challenge my basic beliefs to get from one precipice to the next. DSCN7690 (2) The Author at Burgess Shales quarry in Yoho Park looking at the Cambrian assemblage. Lets start with physical evolution. I am going to give you forensic evidence that we are one with the cosmos. All 7 x 10^27 of our atoms are made form basic ingredients called quarks held together by a strong force called gluons. These atomic nuclei are further surrounded by charge balancing electrons and that is what makes them atoms. If you stack gluons together they form quarks. Higgs particles can also decompose into quarks and another particle may also. These quarks and gluons are incredibly old as is the electron. They were there at the birth of our universe in a thing called the big bang. We know a Big Bang happened because of a red shift in the light coming from other galaxies in the universe. This means everything is moving away from everything else which tells us that they all came from a central point at one time and that time has been discovered to be 13.72 billion years before present. That by the way is how old the nuclei and the electrons our atoms are made of are and that is how old we are in our deepest core. We are Cosmos it would seem at our very core. But its clear that we are more. We are light atoms and heavy atoms and in between atoms. We are 65% Oxygen. 18% Carbon, 10% Hydrogen, 3% Nitrogen, 1.5% Calcium, 1% Phosphorus, 0.35% Potassium and lesser amounts of Sulfur, Sodium, Magnesium, Cu, Zn, Se, Mo, Fl, Cl, lithium, Mn, Co, Fe, Li, Sr, Al, Si, Pb, Va, As, Br. Where did all these atoms come from? They were made inside stars, supernovas to be more precise and also in normal stars but the ones heavier than iron owe their existence to the massive explosions of heavy stars that go nova and blast their ingredients into space. They were made through nuclear fusion kin those stars which coalesces the lighter atoms into heavier ones and later altered through fission and radioactive breakdown and by emitting gamma rays, beta rays and alpha particles. These atoms are not like billiard balls. They are made up of energy and Einstein showed us how much with his famous equation E= mc^2. One 70 kg person has enough energy locked in their atoms to power the United states for 16 years if we could release it all. We are not just Cosmos it would seem, quarks and gluons and electrons, we are also at root pure energy and as Carl Sagan put it we are Stardust. We are physically bundled packages of the universe’s own ingredients temporarily mobile under our own will. How then did we get our own will? That leads us to the next chapter of this remarkable science journey. Organic or Biological Evolution Supernova elements transform to Goldilocks molecules on rocky water worlds. Proto-­‐life organic chemicals grow in complexity through chemical bonding to enable biochemistry. Amino acids are the building blocks of life. They can come to earth on meteorites (Tagish Meteorite had them) and also be made here on earth by natural means from water and the atmospheric ingredients of early earth. Urey and Miller created them in a test tube by running a spark in a sealed chamber with CH4, NH3, H2O, CO2. If you add HCN and H2S and a metal catalyst you get 18S R NA precursor the ingredients of early genes (John Sutherlands UK lab 2014). If you react acetylene and formaldehyde with a metal catalyst you end up with fatty acids and pyrimidines (cytosine and thymine), ingredients of DNA. It is postulated that there was an RNA world for a long time before DNA was accidentally invented and RNA still plays a huge role in translating the genetic code of life into proteins. So that explains the ingredients. How did it start replicating? Given enough time and opportunity the least likely incident becomes certitude and that is how life got started. !   Life begins, chance, time, raw materials unite and complexity grows.