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On Human Evolution and Evolvement
Shiv Talwar, Founding President, Spiritual Heritage Education Network Inc, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2026.
Introduction
Living beings exist because of a long, self-replicating and responsive molecule called DNA. THE DNA of the first single-celled organism was primitive. Humans have the most evolved DNA; it took almost 3.8 billion years to evolve.
An organism comes to life with its DNA structure, and it dies as its DNA breaks down. Prolonging and sustaining the self is thus a built-in imperative of the DNA of all living organisms; so is self-replication. These three imperatives can’t exist without a sense of self and non-self. Thus, the behaviour of all organisms, including humans, is driven by a sense of self apart from others, self-survival, self-sustenance, and self-reproduction.
Responsiveness is behaviour, and the mind is an interior force that drives the exterior body's behaviour; survival, sustenance, reproduction, and ego-identity are essential mental instincts that all organisms inherit from their genes, which are part of their DNA.
Responsiveness begins with perceiving a stimulus and ends with a response. Perception and action, stimulus and response- the responsiveness primitive DNA was driven autonomously by chemical reactions. There were no neurons to feel, emote, and generate an action response, and there was little free oxygen in the atmosphere to power the energy-hungry neurons. For almost two billion years, life remained single-celled, evolving anaerobically, autonomously, and without awareness.
From Autonomic Evolution to Neural Involvement
The Great Oxidation Event, beginning 2.46- 2.43 billion years ago and ending around 2.06 billion years ago, led to a significant rise in free oxygen in the atmosphere. Oxygen’s high reactivity caused the extinction of much of previously anaerobic life through oxidative damage. At the same time, it enabled high-energy aerobic metabolism, which drove the evolution of multicellular life with specialized cells such as neurons that could feel, emote, and generate action responses, shifting evolution, at least in humans, away from autonomic patterns.
From Unconscious Evolution to Conscious Evolvement
Here is my understanding of how humans can shift their personal, familial, societal and global evolution away from autonomic patterns. When we talk of conscious evolvement, consciousness may be personal or others, including family and community.
Gene Expression: Genes define us, but we design them
- Our gene expression shapes our biochemistry, bodies, minds, brains and behaviour. And our life experience, in turn, shapes our biochemistry, bodies, minds, brains and gene expression.
- Gene expression has two components: a fixed gene sequence and variable epigenetic embedding of our life experience.
- Both components of gene expression are inheritable.
- Our gene expression is our mind
Survival Instincts, Instinctive Emotions and the Speed of Life
- Our genetically inherited mental instincts of survival, sustenance, reproduction, and ego-identity run our life at high speeds like a programmed automatic machine.
- When we develop some neurons, brain cells, that enable feeling, our survival instincts morph into instinctive emotions such as fear of death; likes, wants, desires, habits, etc.; dislikes, avoidance, aversions, hatreds, etc.; and ego identity leading to us-versus-them fragmentation of humanity.
- The development of neurons also adds intentionality to our hitherto chemically run, autonomous lives. Intentionality can slow the otherwise high speed of life.
Life in the Womb
- From conception as a single-celled organism through the fastest-growing gestation period to our birth, our mothers run our lives and fuel our evolution by delivering food, oxygen and their personal biochemistry to us. Their gene expression shapes their biochemistry during this period.
- During gestation, we are totally unaware; our lives run autonomously. Our autonomous life calibrates our evolution through the rest of our lives.
- The way our mothers deliver oxygen to us during the gestation period determines our vulnerability to oxidative and neural stress, the cause and consequence of most physical, mental and social ailments. Oxidative stress is the hidden substrate of neural stress.
Early Childhood: The Crucial Evolvement Period
- During our postnatal development period, our parents, families, societies, and cultures help or hinder our evolution by shaping our intentionality through social, cultural, and educational institutions.
- Ordinarily, it takes the first 25 years of our lives for our ventral nervous system, especially our prefrontal cortex, to fully develop, making us capable of independent thought and our own intentionality. At least until then and even afterwards, most of us keep living by our instinctive emotions at high speeds of life and let them shape our intentionality.
- he way to evolve is to shape our intentionality to slow our speed of life when our lives are not threatened. The earlier we do that, the better. Much depends upon our social and cultural institutions shaping our intentionality.
Rethinking Our Sociocultural and Educational Infrastructure
- The current familial, social, cultural, and educational infrastructure must be redesigned, recognizing that the period of prefrontal neural development between conception and 25 years is critical to protect generations from emotional hijacking of intentionality.
- Prenatally, fetuses indirectly learn from mothers how to regulate breath and oxygen delivery; newborns indirectly learn slow breathing from parents and caregivers through body contact, and a two-year-old can directly learn intentional body and breath movements and attention training to slow the speed of life.
- No stage of life offers opportunities for conscious evolution such as this. Today, we are largely missing this opportunity.
- The cost of missing this opportunity is unimaginable.
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