In 1859 Charles Darwin wrote in his book “The Origins of Species” that a person’s traits were passed from parents to their children. He suggested that something physical was passed from the parent to the child and these “hereditary traits” controlled the characteristics of an individual’s life.
From this “belief” scientist set off on a mission to find what this physical mechanism was that controlled our lives. What controls our strengths, our intellectual, artistic and physical abilities and what determines our weaknesses such as cancer, cardiovascular disease or depression. As Dr. Bruce Lipton explains in his book “The Biology of Belief”
“That bit of insight set scientists off on a frenzied attempt to dissect life down to its molecular nuts and bolts, for they thought that within the structure of the human cells was to be found the heredity mechanism that controls life”
1953 Headline news “Secret of Life Discovered”
One hundred years on from Darwin in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick hypothesised that the DNA molecule in each of our cells, containing the genes was this governing mechanism that controlled the potential of our lives.
Think of the DNA molecule in our cells as a vast cookbook full of recipes. The recipes in the cookbook are the genes. To read the recipes/genes you need a cook. Bring in the cook, and brother of the DNA molecule, the RNA molecule. The cook/RNA molecule reads the recipes/genes and forms the ingredients together. The ingredients are proteins and the proteins make our cells. Our human bodies are made of a community of approximately fifty to one hundred trillion cells.
Figure 1.1 The deterministic genetic program for the human body.
From Watson and Cricks hypothesis the “central dogma” of biology was born. It was said that it was our genes that controlled our lives:
If you got a “fat” gene or a “happy gene” a “depressed gene” or an “alcoholic gene” “a homosexual gene” or a genius gene, then that is what you would become. Your strengths, weaknesses, abilities and potentials were all believed to be pre programmed by the genes. Great if you got a good set but pretty bleak if you got a bad set. Genes were seen as king of the castle as the search for what controlled life was over. This was known as “Genetic Determinism.”
Now here’s the kicker, this was never a scientific fact, but a hypothesis that became an unquestioned belief!
This is one of the most dis-empowering beliefs there are. It leads us to belief that we are pre programmed fixed physical machines that were “just born that way.” It can lead to a subconscious victim mentality with no understanding that we are in charge of our own destiny and have massive potential to change. There is no room here for the power of the mind.
Fortunately the current understanding at the leading edge of a science shows us a completely different picture of how life works. We now understand that the environment and specifically our beliefs about the environment directly control the activity of our DNA and genes. This is known as epigenetic control, “epi” meaning above; control above the genes. Our beliefs, attitudes and overall mindset to life are the all governing factor to what happens in our body and inevitably our lives. Thankfully, reductionist, deterministic science is losing steam in the sciences.
As Dr.Bruce Lipton continues;
“We are living in exciting times, for science is in the process of shattering old myths and rewriting a fundamental belief of human civilisation. The belief that we are frail bio chemical machines controlled by genes is giving away to an understanding that we are powerful creators of our lives and the world in which we live”
Our genes have little if anything to do with our traits, personality, characteristics, abilities and potentials. On the nature versus nurture debate nurture is the king. Our early programming and the way we update and program our minds is the determining factor to the quality and success of our lives.
In 2008 Madonna adopted a baby from a peasant family in Malawi, Africa, just imagine the difference to this babies life now living in the luxurious West with all the best care, nutrition and education, compared to a peasants village life where her parents could not read or write and resources were very scarce. The abilities and outcome to this child’s life is not controlled by the genes of the parents but by nurture and environmental programming.
Dr. Carl Ratner from the Institute for Cultural Research and Education in California says:
“Genes may directly determine simple physical characteristics such as eye colour. However they do not directly determine psychological phenomena….”
Figure 1.2: Our beliefs control our perceptions of the environment, which then influences the functions of our cells and even of our DNA. (Image used with the kind permission of Dr Bruce Lipton)
It’s not only our personalities that are shaped by our environment and beliefs, however. Our bodies and health are, too.
Dr Andrew Weil, professor and pioneer of alternative and complementary medicine, reports that ‘a study of nearly 1,000 older adults followed for nine years concluded that people with high levels of optimism had a 23% lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease and a 55% lower risk of death from other causes compared to their pessimistic peers’. (2) Their physiology was not slavishly following the orders of their genes, but was deeply influenced by their state of mind and personality traits. Dr Lipton concurs, saying;
‘There are some genetic defects called birth defects, but over 95% of the people on this planet arrived into this world with a healthy set of genes. It has also been shown that over 95% of cancer has no genetic linkage. It is the individual’s experience of life based on their perceptions. If you change the beliefs and perceptions, you can change the presence of the cancer’.
The bottom line is that our destiny does not lie in our genes, but in our beliefs and that is powerful !
