The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [84]
While Darwinian theory specifies that the purpose of life’s struggles is survival, it does not specify a means that should be used in securing that end. Apparently, “anything goes” in the perceived struggle because the goal is simply survival—by any means. Rather than framing the character of our lives by the laws of morality, the neo-Darwinism of Mayr suggests that we live our lives by the law of the jungle. Neo-Darwinism essentially concludes that those who have more deserve it. In the West, we have accepted the inevitability of a civilization that is characterized by the “haves” and the “have-nots.” We don’t want to deal with the fact that everything in this world has a price. Unfortunately this includes, along with the ailing planet, the homeless, as well as the child laborers who sew our designer jeans … they are the losers in this struggle.
We Are Made in the Image of the Universe
On that early morning in the Caribbean, I realized that even the “winners” in our Darwinian world are losers because we are one with a bigger Universe/God. The cell engages in behavior when its brain, the membrane, responds to environmental signals. In fact, every functional protein in our body is made as a complementary “image” of an environmental signal. If a protein did not have a complementary signal to couple with, it would not function. This means, as I concluded in that “aha!” moment, that every protein in our bodies is a physical/electromagnetic complement to something in the environment. Because we are machines made out of protein, by definition we are made in the image of the environment, that environment being the Universe, or to many, God.
Back to the winners and losers. Because humans evolved as complements of their surrounding environment, if we change the environment too much, we will no longer be complementary to it … we won’t “fit.” At the moment, humans are altering the planet so dramatically that we are threatening our own survival as well as the survival of other, rapidly disappearing organisms. That threat encompasses Hummer drivers and fast food moguls with lots of money, the “winners,” along with poverty-stricken laborers, the “losers,” in this competition for survival. There are two ways out of this dilemma: to die or mutate. I think you should seriously ponder this as the need to sell Big Macs leads us to decimate the rain forests, as the staggering numbers of gas-guzzling vehicles foul the air, or as petrochemical industries erode the Earth and pollute the water. We were designed by nature to fit an environment but not the environment we are now making.
I learned from cells that we are part of a whole and that we forget this at our peril. But I also recognized that each one of us has a unique, biological identity. Why? What makes each person’s cellular community unique? On the surface of our cells is a family of identity receptors, which distinguish one individual from another.
A well-studied subset of these receptors, called self-receptors, or human leukocytic antigens (HLA), are related to the functions of the immune system. If your self-receptors were to be removed, your cells would no longer reflect your identity. These self-receptor-less cells would still be human cells, but without an identity they would simply be generic human cells. Put your personal set of self-receptors back on the cells and they again reflect your identity.
When you donate an organ, the closer your set of self-receptors matches the receptors of the person who is to receive the organ, the less aggressive the rejection reaction launched by the recipient’s immune system. For example, let’s say that a set of 100 different self-receptors on the surface of each cell is used to identify you as an individual. You are in need of an organ graft to survive. When my set of 100 self-receptors is compared to your self-receptors, it turns out that we have only 10 receptors that match. I would not be a great organ donor for you. The very dissimilar nature of our self-receptors reveals that our identities are very different. The vast difference