Human Nature

The past few years in genetics has been pretty awesome. I doubt any of the generations previous to us have had the privilege of being witness to a literal explosion of information regarding human. Nowadays, discovering which gene influences us to do what has become so prevalent that sometimes we are now led to question how much of our actions are actually dictated by free will, if it even exists.

Perhaps the most amazing thing is that in our quest for knowledge, the closer we get to the truth of human nature, the more the human aspect disappears and the more the nature aspect becomes prevalent.

As recent as two hundred years ago, everybody believed in the soul. That we are creations of God made in His Likeness, our actions only guided by our ability to follow divine rules that will judge us after we depart this earth.

Advances in evolution have told us that we were not made by an Omnipotent being from scratch. We were humans that evolved from lower life forms over the course of millions of years.

Not too long after discovering that, advances in genetics told us that we are in fact a few genes different from the great apes, and only a significant genes shy away from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Advances in behavioral sciences have also started chipping away at the idea of higher thinking, that in the end most of our actions are still dictated by hormonal surges and preprogrammed synaptic reactions to stimuli. Altruism is a trick played on us to perform communally in the interest of the species. Mob mentality is just herd mentality for humans. Love is just a reproductive impulse processed by our neural networks and sugarcoated to work around our Freudan egos.

Genetic isolation have given us the "aggressiveness" gene, the "docility" gene, and more recently, the "slave" gene and "master" gene, giving out the possible uneventual conclusions that wars, peace, and even the pervasive pyramid has a primeval, basic, biological origin.

And perhaps it's the biggest irony, that we have to rise to the levels of obtaining divine knowledge about our constitution only to discover that we are in fact, above anything else, animals.

It took a while for us to know.

Knowing is one thing, and of course, acceptance is another.