Humans are the most sophisticated, intelligent species on the planet today, perched atop Darwin’s ‘Tree of Life’. We have beaten all odds, prevailed over countless existential threats to conquer and colonize earth. We have proved ourselves the ‘fittest’ in the game of survival by taming nature to serve us.
The current era of epigenetics has revealed a much more sophisticated and complex system of nature at play. Borrowing a charming and simple analogy from the website epigenetics.com, epigenetics can be described as the director of a movie where DNA is the script, and the cells are actors. The DNA sequence would be the words of the script, and certain combinations of these words would be the genes.
Why is there disease and poverty, conflict and violence? Why is there greed and evil, bigotry and terrorism? Why the town- drowning tsunamis, the city-leveling earthquakes, the country- effacing wars? We don’t seem to be getting any good answers at all. In fact, the most easy argument for atheism has become, “If there is a just, loving God, how can he allow suffering and evil?”.
Human life is the epitome of uncertainty, we do not have the capacity to understand what is absolutely, equivocally, good or bad for us! Heck, we don’t absolutely understand how in a long chain of unconnected events we came to acquire our personalities and our bearings in life, do we?
I ask once again; what do you think is the goal of your life? For a moment I want to you to think differently. Humour me, for a minute. Assume my position first, and you could end up getting convinced. Let us reorient the goal of human life. Epigenetics has shown us that a species or a class of species can, and does have a purpose other than survival and procreation, within a larger eco-system.