QUANTUM ENGINEERING #35: THE EPILOGUE OF MY NEW BOOK

I decided to share Chapter one of my new book with you this AM.  I hope you enjoy it.  

All these thoughts in this book came about from starlight.

CHAPTER ONE  

"THE SILENCE"

Your family defines you and what you will become.

Mammals crawled out of their underground holes and heard the silence for the first time in their lives.  That is how the scene in this chapter begins.  

What is a chapter to you? In a novel, a chapter is defined as a section, or division, in a book, and it is usually separated by a chapter number or chapter title. Chapters often break the overall book topic into sections.

In reference books, chapters are still used in much the same way. They form part of an overall indexing and organizing system that makes the book more useful as a store of information. You can see how the last group of thoughts links to the present ideas getting presented so to speak.

However, in novels and narrative non-fiction, book chapters serve a different purpose.

Chapters and scenes are related, as they are both parts of a book, but they are not the same thing:

• A scene is a part of your narrative, where characters experience certain events in a particular time and place.
• A chapter is a division of your book, marked by a number or title.

In some novels, chapters contain one scene each. Sometimes that scene is so dramatic it seems like it dominates the rest of the book.  So it is with our family, the mammals.  How the began was non-descript.  They found an underground niche and because of that, they had to script a life that worked without sunlight for much of their life cycle.  As they evolved and found it safe in the world, they rapidly changed and became creates who could thrive without sunlight.

More often, each chapter of a book will contain several related scenes. In this case, the scenes are usually divided from one another by whitespace, by a typographic ornament, or by using a transition phrase in the text itself—but not by a number or title. In our family, the jump from our cousins, the chimps, to use is another stunning development in the narrative.  One that is so counterintuitive that when you hear about the process that drove it you are in stunned disbelief.  But in that disbelief, the story becomes compelling.  You can no longer look away from it.  And when you dive deep into, the details of this epoch on Earth has fueled my curiosity and kept me entertained for my entire life.  It really is why I became a brain surgeon.  I get to operate on two lobes in the front of our head which is the key difference between our species and the rest of our family.  Those two lobes are another chapter that just does not appear to fit into the story of life either.  They represent a quantum leap of change in our family and this very day, have confused most of the experts in science.  There is seemingly no good plausible explanation of how they came to be.

That story is defined by this paragraph. The living system in mammals, especially your frontal lobes are nests of abiotic carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, organized together with traces of a few other elements, yet of a complexity of structure that has hitherto resisted all attempts at complete analysis because our species of biological experts do not understand how light and water bind and weave the process of atoms in things.  This makes our protoplasm the most enduring and the most easily destroyed of substances we know; its molecules are constantly programmed electronically by light to break down constantly, yet reorganize under solar power to furnish the power for the manifestations of many vital phenomena.  Yet, through its remarkable property of assimilation of light, a power possessed by few other things on earth, it constantly builds up its substance anew from the surrounding medium and it avoids our perception of its recipe.

Well, I wrote that chapter down now on a bunch of napkins on a Delta flight coming home from Italy in 2003.  You can find the details on those napkins in the Quantum Engineering series of blogs on my Patreon series of blogs.  Recalling that story makes tears come to my eyes every time I think about it.  I have tears in my eyes just writing this.  The music I put above is playing as I type this.  You'll hear those tears in my podcast with Rick Rubin.  This chapter of my life changed me forever.  It is when I became fully decentralized.   It is where I rejected my past education and began my journey, to tell the truth about our species.

It is my favorite chapter of science I have ever written. Parts of this story have traveled with me for large segments of my life.  But how they were all tied together in the story of humans occurred for me close to 20 years ago at the foot of a statue in Florence when a few key elements in the environment came together to put the final touches of this silence reverberating in my head into a scene.  To date, that day has been the most impactful of my life.  I cannot wait to share that story with some of you with science subtracted out when my podcast with Mr. Rubin comes out.  Right now, I am unfolding the science in that scene in the chapter of my book with you now on Patreon.  It is spectacularly bold, not because of my ideas, but because of what happened to our family, the mammals.

For me, a chapter is an era of life.  I have recently realized that my own life is unfolding in the same way as the mammalian family.  Chapters that should have come earlier in my own story did not.  An asteroid interrupted my own life and caused its trajectory to change too.  I never gave it much thought until I started writing about how POMC sculpted everything that created a silly talking monkey with sunlight.  Much like the family of animals I come from, the mammals, the key chapters in my life seem to have come out of order too.  How is that for irony?  Mammals' time in the sun on Earth, was created by an extraterrestrial event.  An event so unlikely, that the collateral effects of that impact changed the plot of life forever in a moment.  When you understand where it is in the history of life it sticks out like a sore thumb.  When you dive into this chapter, it is stunning how different it is from the rest of the story of how life unfolded on Earth before it. Modern humans love stories about who we replaced as a family.  I think we like it because when we see the carnivore bones in museums of the T-Rex it gives our species a boost of confidence that we replaced them.  

That is a myopic viewpoint for sure, but it explains why we continue to see so many Jurrasic Park movies.  Hollywood scenes have tried to usurp this chapter of the book of life to boost our dopamine levels.  If silly talking monkeys were wise, they'd realize that those killing machines were taken out by something they never saw coming and the same thing is happening to us right now of our own design.  The dinosaurs, in that way, are superior to us.  They had no design flaws.  The natural environment took them out.  We come from a group of animals who seems to be an afterthought of Nature.  Her favorite mistake was designed on a rainy day when there was no sun.  Yet, in that darkness, came a recipe for future success.  It is as if this group of animals so non-discript got a boost from the heavens.  Almost like hitting the jackpot in a slot machine.  It is even more ironic when you considered who mammals replaced.  

A plot twist few in this biological novel would have ever thought of. We are a biological implausibility when you get down to the brass tacks.  And this one chapter in my life for me has always transfixed me.  No matter what other chapter I am in my life, or no matter what other chapter of life I am studying from the Novel Earth has written, is more compelling than this one.   I hope you someday find a chapter in your life that energizes you every day as this one has for me.  This song above seems to resonate with how mammals came to take over Earth.

Transformational change in mammals is a state of bold total annihilation or what we were to something Nature envisioned us to be without a ton of sunlight. Her original design was optimized for a lack of sunlight.  So what happens when your main nemesis gets taken out and sunlight returns to your life, but your family is designed for long stretches of darkness sans sunlight?  This chain event is a game changer for your cells.  The adaptation to this set of circumstances can not simply be a better version of the business-as-usual approach found in every other chapter of evolutionary history.  Yes, this chapter stands out like a sore thumb demanding an explanation.  That explanation will be your transformational learning moment; it will be a shift in your context of reality and your point of view about yourself…………of that I am sure.  Why?  It has changed my entire life already.  Now it is your turn.