Genetic Memory Quotes

Note: 'family' does NOT only mean a biological unit composed of people who share genetic markers or legal bonds, headed by a heterosexual-mated pair. Family is much, much more than that.

I don’t know where dreams come from. Sometimes I wonder if they’re genetic memories, or messages from something divine. Warnings perhaps. Maybe we do come with an instruction booklet but we’re too dense to read it, because we’ve dismissed it as the irrational waste product of the ‘rational’ mind. Sometimes I think all the answers we need are buried in our slumbering subconscious, int he dreaming. The booklet right there, and ever night when we lay our heads down on the pillow it flips open. The wise read it, heed it. The rest of us try as hard as we can upon awakening to forget any disturbing revelations we might have found there.

Myths have a very long memory.

We are often given pills or fluids to help remedy illness, yet little has been taught to us about the power of smell to do the exact same thing. It is known that the scent of fresh rosemary increases memory, but this cure for memory loss is not divulged by doctors to help the elderly. I also know that the most effective use of the blue lotus flower is not from its dilution with wine or tea – but from its scent. To really maximize the positive effects of the blue lily (or the pink lotus), it must be sniffed within minutes of plucking. This is why it is frequently shown being sniffed by my ancient ancestors on the walls of temples and on papyrus. Even countries across the Orient share the same imagery. The sacred lotus not only creates a relaxing sensation of euphoria, and increases vibrations of the heart, but also triggers genetic memory - and good memory with an awakened heart ushers wisdom.

I don't know where dreams come from. Sometimes I wonder if they're genetic memories, or messages from something divine. Warnings perhaps. Maybe we do come with an instruction booklet but we're too dense to read it, because we've dismissed it as the irrational waste product of the "rational" mind. Sometimes I think all the answers we need are buried in our slumbering subconscious, in the dreaming. The booklet's right there, and every night when we lay our heads down on the pillow it flips open. The wise read it, heed it. The rest of us try as hard as we can upon awakening to forget any disturbing revelations we might have found there.

We have this extraordinary conceit in the West that while we've been hard at work in the creation of technological wizardry and innovation, somehow the other cultures of the world have been intellectually idle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor is this difference due to some sort of inherent Western superiority. We now know to be true biologically what we've always dreamed to be true philosophically, and that is that we are all brothers and sisters. We are all, by definition, cut from the same genetic cloth. That means every single human society and culture, by definition, shares the same raw mental activity, the same intellectual capacity. And whether that raw genius is placed in service of technological wizardry or unraveling the complex thread of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation.

Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

All human beings are descendants of tribal people who were spiritually alive, intimately in love with the natural world, children of Mother Earth. When we were tribal people, we knew who we were, we knew where we were, and we knew our purpose. This sacred perception of reality remains alive and well in our genetic memory. We carry it inside of us, usually in a dusty box in the mind's attic, but it is accessible.

I let myself drift, as to the depth of an ocean, to the depths of a dismal neighborhood of had and opaque but rather light houses, to the inner gaze of memory, for the matter of memory is porous

The mind swims laps, memory is cantilevered over genetic turmoil, and the writing goes on as if from unseen instruction, silencing, cleaving, and destabilizing words and thoughts, while the “hum” in me, the human, pushes fragments into the semblance of story.

but perhaps issued from genetic memories installed by whatever DNA billions of archaea have carried with them when he inhaled them in

I let myself drift, as to the depth of an ocean, to the depths of a dismal neighborhood of hard and opaque but rather light houses, to the inner gaze of memory, for the matter of memory is porous.

Is it possible to have some kind of genetic memory of a place where you've never lived, but your ancestors have? Or am I just a sentimental fool, my judgement fuddled by nostalgia, Guinness, and the romance of the diaspora?

These are maybe the most exciting stars, those just above where sky meets land and ocean, because we so seldom see them, blocked as they usually are by atmosphere…and, as I grow more and more accustomed to the dark, I realize that what I thought were still clouds straight overhead aren’t clearing and aren’t going to clear, because these are clouds of stars, the Milky Way come to join me. There’s the primal recognition, my soul saying, yes, I remember.

My feeling is that an observer needs to see four hundred and fifty stars to get that feeling of infinitude, and be swept away…and I didn’t make that number up arbitrarily, that’s the number of stars that are available once you get dimmer than third magnitude. So in the city, you see a dozen stars, a handful, and it’s attractive to no one. And if there’s a hundred stars in the sky it still doesn’t do it. There’s a certain tipping point where people will look and there will be that planetarium view. And now you’re touching that ancient core, whether it’s collective memories or genetic memories, or something else form way back before we were even human…astronomer Bob Berman quoted in The End of Night

If we cannot think beyond how we emotionally feel, then we are living according to what the environment dictates to our body. Rather than truly thinking, innovating, and creating, we merely fire the synaptic memories in other areas of our brain from our genetic or personal past; we instigate the same repetitive chemical reactions that have us living in survival mode.

As he ascends, he understands that these dreams were shaped not out of the ordinary experiences of life, but perhaps issued from genetic memories installed by whatever DNA billions of archaea have carried with them when he inhaled them in Springville, Utah.

The emerging and vital truth isn’t who is more Neanderthal than whom. It’s that all peoples, everywhere, enjoyed archaic human lovers whenever they could. These DNA memories are buried deeper inside us than even our ids, and they remind us that the grand saga of how humans spread across the globe will need some personal, private, all-too-human amendments and annotations—rendezvous here, elopements there, and the commingling of genes most everywhere.

Within our very cells we carry genetic memories of ancestral incarnations. If we awaken these atavisms to conscious life, we can take on their attributes and qualities. These atavistic powers have been known for millennia as: animal totems, helping spirits, maybe even the Gods and Goddesses themselves!

During intake, you open your hand and hold forth, a memory stone laid in the riverbed of your past, a sort of memorial to, or witness of, fear.

The sensation was an explosion of feelings, leaving in its place a pleasured memory of that moment. That, thought Seth, was pure heaven

Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our genomes has negotiated a fragile balance between counterpoised forces, pairing strand with opposite strand, mixing past and future, pitting memory against desire. It is the most human of all things that we possess. Its stewardship may be the ultimate test of knowledge and discernment of our species.

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are?

Blood memory is described as our ancestral (genetic) connection to our language, songs, spirituality, and teachings. It is the good feeling that we experience when we are near these things.

A few words which he wanted to emphasize were put into brackets or set off by quotation marks. My first impulse was to point out to him that it was ridiculous to put slang words and expressions between quotation marks, for that prevents them from entering the language. But I decided not to. When I received his letters, his parentheses made me shudder. At first, it was a shudder of slight shame, disagreeable. Later (and now, when I reread them) the shudder was the same, but I know, by some indefinable, imperceptible change, that it is a shudder of love- it is both poignant and delightful, perhaps because of the memory of the word shame that accompanied it in the beginning. Those parentheses and quotation marks are the flaw on the hip, the beauty mark on the thigh whereby my friend showed that he was himself, irreplaceable, and that he was wounded.

What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?

The nuclear arms race is over, but the ethical problems raised by nonmilitary technology remain. The ethical problems arise from three "new ages" flooding over human society like tsunamis. First is the Information Age, already arrived and here to stay, driven by computers and digital memory. Second is the Biotechnology Age, due to arrive in full force early in the next century, driven by DNA sequencing and genetic engineering. Third is the Neurotechnology Age, likely to arrive later in the next century, driven by neural sensors and exposing the inner workings of human emotion and personality to manipulation.

When you feel the need to escape your problems, to escape from this world, don't make the mistake of resorting to suicide Don't do it! You will hear the empty advice of many scholars in the matter of life and death, who will tell you, "just do it" there is nothing after this, you will only extinguish the light that surrounds you and become part of nothingness itself, so when you hear these words remember this brief review of suicide: When you leave this body after committing one of the worst acts of cowardice that a human being can carry out, you turn off the light, the sound and the sense of reality, you become nothing waiting for the programmers of this game to pick you up from the darkness, subtly erase your memories and enable your return and I emphasize the word subtle because sometimes the intelligence behind this maneuver or automated mechanism is wrong and send human beings wrongly reset to such an extent, that when they fall to earth and are born again, they begin to experience memories of previous lives, in many cases they perceive themselves of the opposite sex, and science attributes this unexplainable phenomenon to genetic and hormonal factors, but you and I know better! And we quickly identified this trigger as a glitch in the Matrix. Then we said! That a higher intelligence or more advanced civilization throws you back into this game for the purpose of experimenting, growing and developing as an advanced consciousness and due to your toxic and destructive behavior you come back again but in another body and another life, but you are still you, then you will carry with you that mark of suicide and cowardice, until you learn not to leave this experience without having learned the lesson of life, without having experienced and surprised by death naturally or by design of destiny. About this first experience you will find very little material associated with this event on the internet, it seems that the public is more reserved, because they perceive themselves and call themselves "awakened" And that is because the system has total control over the algorithm of fame and fortune even over life and death. Now, according to religion and childish fears, which are part of the system's business to keep you asleep, eyes glued to the cellular device all day, it says the following: If you commit this act of sin, you turn off light, sound and sense of reality, and from that moment you begin to experience pain, fear and suffering on alarming scales, and that means they will come for you, a couple of demons and take you to the center of the earth where the weeping and gnashing of teeth is forever, and in that hell tormented by demons you will spend eternity. About this last experience we will find hundreds of millions of people who claim to have escaped from there! And let me tell you that all were captivated by the same deity, one of dubious origin, that feeds on prayers and energetic events, because it is not of our nature, because it knows very well that we are beings of energy, then this deity or empire of darkness receives from the system its food and the system receives from them power, to rule, to administer, to control, to control, to kill, to exclude, to inhibit, to classify, to imprison, to silence, to infect, to contaminate, to depersonalize. So now that you know the two sides of the same coin, which one will your intelligence lean towards! You decide... Heads or tails? From the book Avatars, the system's masterpiece.

A shared genetic past does not negate eons of separate evolution. While plants and humans maintain parallel abilities to sense and be aware of the physical world, the independent paths of evolution have led to a uniquely human capacity, beyond intelligence, that plants don't have: the ability to care. So the next time you find yourself on a stroll through a park, take a second to ask yourself: What does the dandelion in the lawn see? What does the grass smell? Touch the leaves of an oak, knowing that the tree will remember it was touched. But it won't remember you. You, on the other hand, can remember this particular tree and carry the memory of it with you forever.

Bruce has wrestled with his moods, and a psyche genetically prone to extremes, for most of his adult life. Decades of psychotherapy helped reveal and cast light on some of his most primal traumas and conflicts, but his raw moods, and occasional descents into full-blown depression, never quite went away. "You go through periods of being good, then something stimulates it," he says. "The clock, some memory. You never know. The mind wants to link all your feelings to a cause. I'm feeling that because I'm doing this, or because that happened." Eventually Bruce realized that his worst moods had nothing to do with what was actually taking place in his life. Awful, stressful things could happen - conflicts, stress, disappointments, death - and he'd be unflappable. Then things would be peaceful and easy and he'd find himself on his knees. "You're going along fine, and then boom, it hits you. Things that just come from way down in the well. Completely noncasual, but it's part of your DNA, part of the way your body cycles." Bruce knows his particular brain chemistry will never leave him completely in the clear. "You manage it, you learn and evolve, but another recognition you gotta have is that these are the cards you were dealt," he says. "These things are never going to be out of your life. You gotta be constantly vigilant and realistic about these things.

A new belief in the present, however, can cause changes in the past on a neuronal level. You must understand that basically time is simultaneous. Present beliefs can indeed alter the past. In some cases of healing, in the spontaneous disappearance of cancer, for instance, or of any other disease, certain alterations are made that affect cellular memory, genetic codes, or neuronal patterns in the past.

He wondered if other Shifters had the same homing instinct for a teleportation departure point. It never lasted long, maybe a couple of hours, a half day at most, like a subconscious computer memory. It baffled scientists years after they had first examined Lock’s abilities. Nobody had come up with an answer for that ability and Lock was unaware of how he did it. It simply existed, like his other skills.

There is no Chomskyan person, for whom language is pure syntax, pure form insulated from and independent of all meaning, context, perception, emotion, memory, attention, action, and the dynamic nature of communication. Moreover, human language is not a totally genetic innovation. Rather, central aspects of language arise evolutionarily from sensory, motor, and other neural systems that are present in "lower" animals.

Let’s imagine that many years ago, way way back in history, someone observed a particular characteristic or oddity – maybe soldiers who claimed that their whole life passed before their eyes in times of extreme danger, or perhaps people who simply walked out on work they hated, or those who when they loved someone it was with every ounce of their being, and who never apologised for who they were. People who were different. People who the fairies and goblins recognised. And just imagine that the person observing these Scamps decided to do something about it, such as start a cult with a weird set of beliefs and practices that aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human race, breeding people with the desirable heritable characteristics in order to improve future generations. Just suppose this eugenically based cult was based on those with a childlike curiosity, on those who loved to be around people who lit them up, and only those with the most powerful experiences were chosen. Over a number of generations this careful and choosy breeding may have created a community who were without question so free that their very survival on earth was an act of insurgency. Think about it! What if you and I are simply a subdivision, if you like, of that groove of humanity?

When we focus on thoughts about bitter past memories or imagined dreadful futures to the exclusion of everything else, we prevent the body from regaining homeostasis. In truth, we’re capable of turning on the stress response by thought alone. If we turn it on and then can’t turn it off, we’re surely headed for some type of illness or disease—be it a cold or cancer—as more and more genes get downregulated in a domino effect, until we eventually arrive at our genetic destiny. For

The greatest of human inventions is the library, a vast repository of collective memory far larger than any single mind can hold. Written memory becomes fixed in time, regardless of the distortion it contains, and the adventures we recount on paper are there to be reexperienced by those who are not oneself, the writer. So long as one's narrative survives, one's ideas and versions of history are passed along, like genetic code, to ensuing generations. Control what goes into the library, what becomes the available record, and you control what the future thinks.

Just because I look like a human being doesn’t mean I am. This body has more genetic material that’s not strictly human than it does material that is human. And it heavily integrates machines as well. My blood is actually a bunch of nanobots in a fluid. I am and every other CDF soldier is a genetically-modified cyborg.” “But you’re still you, right?” Lowen asked. “You’re still the same person you were when you left Earth. Still the same consciousness.” “That’s a question of some contention among us soldiers,” Wilson said, setting his arm back down. “When you transfer over to the new body, the machine that does the transfer makes it at least seem like for an instant you’re in two bodies at once. It feels like you as a person make the transfer. But I think it’s equally possible that what happens is that memories are transferred over to a brain specially prepared for them, it wakes up, and there’s just enough cross talk between the two separate brains to give the illusion of a transfer before the old one shuts down.” “In which case, you’re actually dead,” Lowen said. “The real you. And this you is a fake.” “Right.” Wilson took another sip of his drink. “Mind you, the CDF could show you graphs and charts that show that actual consciousness transfer happens. But I think this is one of those things you can’t really model from the outside. I have to accept the possibility that I could be a fake Harry Wilson.” “And this doesn’t bother you,” Lowen said. “In a metaphysical sense, sure,” Wilson said. “But in a day-to-day sense, I don’t think about it much. On the inside, it sure feels like I’ve been around for ninety years, and ultimately this version of me likes being alive. So.

The clarity offered by software as metaphor - and the empowerment allegedly offered to us who know software - should make us pause, because software also engenders a sense of profound ignorance. Software is extremely difficult to comprehend. Who really knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? Who completely understands what one’s computer is actually doing at any given moment? Software as a metaphor for metaphor troubles the usual functioning of metaphor, that is, the clarification of an unknown concept through a known one. For, if software illuminates an unknown, it does so through an unknowable (software). This paradox - this drive to grasp what we do not know through what we do not entirely understand… does not undermine, but rather grounds software’s appeal. Its combination of what can be seen and not seen, can be known and no known - it’s separation of interface from algorithm, of software from hardware - makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture. Every use entails an act of faith.

How long will the Gilgamesh Project – the quest for immortality – take to complete? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A thousand years? When we recall how little we knew about the human body in 1900, and how much knowledge we have gained in a single century, there is cause for optimism. Genetic engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of Caenorhabditis elegans worms.12 Could they do the same for Homo sapiens? Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.13 A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely). Whether or not Project Gilgamesh succeeds, from a historical perspective it is fascinating to see that most late-modern religions and ideologies have already taken death and the afterlife out of the equation. Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. Beginning in the eighteenth century, religions and ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife. What, exactly, happens to a Communist after he or she dies? What happens to a capitalist? What happens to a feminist? It is pointless to look for the answer in the writings of Marx, Adam Smith or Simone de Beauvoir. The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will for ever live in its collective memory. Yet this promise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do not really know what to make of it. The

We will not find the enemy.8 Because the enemy does not exist in space, but in time: four thousand years ago. We are about to destroy each other, and the world, because of profound mistakes made in Bronze Age patriarchal ontology—mistakes about the nature of being, about the nature of human being in the world. Evolution itself is a time-process, seemingly a relentlessly linear unfolding. But biology also dreams, and in its dreams and waking visions it outleaps time, as well as space. It experiences prevision, clairvoyance, telepathy, synchronicity. Thus we have what has been called a magical capacity built into our genes. It is built into the physical universe. Synchronicity is a quantum phenomenon. The tachyon is consciousness, which can move faster than light. So, built into our biological-physical selves evolving linearly through time and space, is an authentically magical capacity to move spirally, synchronously, multi-sensorially, simultaneously back and forth, up and down, in and out through all time and space. In our DNA is a genetic memory going back through time to the first cell, and beyond; back through space to the big bang (the cosmic egg), and before that. To evolve then—to save ourselves from species extinction—we can activate our genetic capacity for magic. We can go back in time to our prepatriarchal consciousness of human oneness with the earth. This memory is in our genes, we have lived it, it is ours. This

But what *is* "natural"? I wonder. On one hand: variation, mutation, change, inconstancy, divisibility, flux. And on the other: constancy, permanence, indivisibility, fidelity. Bhed. Abhed. It should hardly surprise us that DNA, the molecule of contradictions, encodes an organism of contradictions. We seek constancy in heredity—and find its opposite: variation. Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our genome has negotiated a fragile balance between counterpoised forces, pairing strand with opposing strand, mixing past and future, pitting memory against desire. It is the most human of all things that we possess. Its stewardship may be the ultimate test of knowledge and discernment for our species. 

Even as we live and breathe and move and celebrate life, we can meditate on the occupation of death as it resides in us as a reminder to be alive, to be open, and to live in fullness, and also to know that those who have died are contained within us. We occupy them—not just family, genetically, ancestry, but also in the relationships we have. We occupy them in our stories, in our narratives, in our customs, in our memories, all of that is within us, and we occupy them in us. And then when we die, those who remain are living testament to our lives. And our lives are now living testament to those who lived before us. So, I guess my prayer today is to meditate on the occupation of death... and until that day live fully, in fullness of hope and joy.

I wish I could have shown you that engineheart- the system of pieces and parts that moved us forward, that moves us forward still. One day, a few weeks after my son’s death, I took the bolt off the casing and opened it up. Just to see how it worked. Opening that heart was like the opening the first page of a book- there were characters (me, the Memory of My Father), there was rhythm and chronology, I saw, in the images, old roads I’d forgotten- and scenes from stories where the VW was just a newborn. I do know that it held a true translation: miles to words, words to notes, notes to time. It was the HEART that converted the pedestrian song of Northampton to something meaningful, and it did so via some sort of fusion: the turtle that howls a bluegrass tune at the edge of Bow Lake becomes a warning in the VW heart…and that’s just the beginning- the first heart layer. It will take years and years of study, and the energy of every single living thing, to understand the tiny minds and roads in the subsequent layers, the mechanics at work to make every single heartmoment turn together… The point is, this WAS always the way it was supposed to be. Even I could see that the Volkswagen heart was wired for travel-genetically coded. His pages were already written-as are mine and yours. Yes, yours too! I am looking into your eyes right now and I am reading your life, and I am excited/sorry for what the road holds for you. It’s going to be amazing/really difficult. You’ll love/loathe every minute of it!

It seemed to me as if it were somewhat in the manner of floating, painted dreams, whereas I in my hole, like a larva, went on with a restful nocturnal existence, and at times I had the feeling I was sinking slowly, as into sleep or a lake or a maternal breast or even a state of incest, to the spiritual center of the earth. My periods of happiness were never luminously happy, my peace never what men of letters and theologians call a “celestial peace.” That's as it should be, for I would be horrified if I were pointed at by God, singled out by Him; I know very well that if I were sick, and were cured by a miracle, I would not survive it. Miracles are unclean; the peace I used to seek in the outhouse, the one I am going to seek in the memory of it, is a reassuring and soothing peace.

Multi-generational sexual child abuse is such a common cause of the proliferation of pedophilia that Hitler/Himmler research focused on this genetic trait for mind control purposes. While I personally could not relate to the idea of sex with a child, I had parents and brothers and sisters who did. I still believe that George Bush revealed today’s causation of the rapid rise in pedophilia through justifications I heard him state. The rape of a child renders them compliant and receptive to being led without question. This, Bush claims, would cause them to intellectually evolve at a rate rapid enough to “bring them up to speed” to grasp the artificial intelligence emanating from DARPA. He believed that this generation conditioned with photographic memory through abuse was necessary for a future he foresaw controlled by technology.

A note of caution: epigenetics is also on the verge of transforming into a dangerous idea. Epigenetic modifications of genes can potentially superpose historical and environmental information on cells and genomes—but this capacity is speculative, limited, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable: a parent with an experience of starvation produces children with obesity and overnourishment, while a father with the experience of tuberculosis, say, does not produce a child with an altered response to tuberculosis. Most epigenetic “memories” are the consequence of ancient evolutionary pathways, and cannot be confused with our longing to affix desirable legacies on our children. As with genetics in the early twentieth century, epigenetics is now being used to justify junk science and enforce stifling definitions of normalcy. Diets, exposures, memories, and therapies that purport to alter heredity are eerily reminiscent of Lysenko’s attempt to “reeducate” wheat using shock therapy. Mothers are being asked to minimize anxiety during their pregnancy—lest they taint all their children, and their children, with traumatized mitochondria. Lamarck is being rehabilitated into the new Mendel. These glib notions about epigenetics should invite skepticism. Environmental information can certainly be etched on the genome. But most of these imprints are recorded as “genetic memories” in the cells and genomes of individual organisms—not carried forward across generations. A man who loses a leg in an accident bears the imprint of that accident in his cells, wounds, and scars—but does not bear children with shortened legs. Nor has the uprooted life of my family seem to have burdened me, or my children, with any wrenching sense of estrangement. Despite Menelaus’s admonitions, the blood of our fathers is lost in us—and so, fortunately, are their foibles and sins. It is an arrangement that we should celebrate more than rue. Genomes and epigenomes exist to record and transmit likeness, legacy, memory, and history across cells and generations. Mutations, the reassortment of genes, and the erasure of memories counterbalance these forces, enabling unlikeness, variation, monstrosity, genius, and reinvention—and the refulgent possibility of new beginnings, generation upon generation.

On the Larch Scape humans had never managed to extend a sizeable population across entire continents, so much of the megafauna considered to be a distant Pleistocene memory on other Scapes had lingered. The mammoths, giant sloths and woolly rhinoceroses were extinct, but there were hyenas, fanged cats and amphicyonids hunting bison, omnivorous deer, glyptodons, great boars, and wild horses too large for men to ride south of the Laurentian Sea, in what was called Illinois on Malone’s Scape. The island of Manhattan was not an island due to the lower sea level, and it was uninhabited by men, an impenetrable mass of old growth larch trees ruled by creatures thought to be related to the raccoon. The Larch ‘raccoon’ was frequently said to be too intelligent to domesticate; in groups they would destroy shelters and eat the faces of sleeping humans. The atrox cat had been genetically sequenced in cooperation with Austral scientists years ago and determined to be more closely related to the lion than the cougar, and it had enjoyed a range extending north of the Laurentian Sea up to the glaciers until very recently. It was a dark creature with a thick mane in both genders; besides the elements, their prides were the deadliest things to encounter in the far north.

[...]Telecomputer Man is assigned to an apparatus, just as the apparatus is assigned to him, by virtue of an involution of each into the other, a refraction of each by the other. The machine does what the human wants it to do, but by the same token the human puts into execution only what the machine has been programmed to do. The operator is working with virtuality: only apparently is the aim to obtain information or to communicate; the real purpose is to explore all the possibilities of a program, rather as a gambler seeks to exhaust the permutations in a game of chance. Consider the way the camera is used now. Its possibilities are no longer those of a subject who ' 'reflects' the world according to his personal vision; rather, they are the possibilities of the lens, as exploited by the object. The camera is thus a machine that vitiates all will, erases all intentionality and leaves nothing but the pure reflex needed to take pictures. Looking itself disappears without trace, replaced by a lens now in collusion with the object - and hence with an inversion of vision. The magic lies precisely in the subject's retroversion to a camera obscura - the reduction of his vision to the impersonal vision of a mechanical device. In a mirror, it is the subject who gives free rein to the realm of the imaginary. In the camera lens, and on-screen in general, it is the object, potentially, that unburdens itself - to the benefit of all media and telecommunications techniques. This is why images of anything are now a possibility. This is why everything is translatable into computer terms, commutable into digital form, just as each individual is commutable into his own particular genetic code. (The whole object, in fact, is to exhaust all the virtualities of such analogues of the genetic code: this is one of artificial intelligence's most fundamental aspects.) What this means on a more concrete level is that there is no longer any such thing as an act or event which is not refracted into a technical image or onto a screen, any such thing as an action which does not in some sense want to be photographed, filmed or tape-recorded, does not desire to be stored in memory so as to become reproducible for all eternity. No such thing as an action which does not aspire to self-transcendence into a virtual eternity - not, now, the durable eternity that follows death, but rather the ephemeral eternity of ever-ramifying artificial memory. The compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist in potentia on all screens, to be embedded in all programs, and it acquires a magical force: the Siren call of the black box.

Ultimately, one goal of this research is to create a “smart pill” that could boost concentration, improve memory, and maybe increase our intelligence. Pharmaceutical companies have experimented with several drugs, such as MEM 1003 and MEM 1414, that do seem to enhance mental function. Scientists have found that in animal studies, long-term memories are made possible by the interaction of enzymes and genes. Learning takes place when certain neural pathways are reinforced as specific genes are activated, such as the CREB gene, which in turn emits a corresponding protein. Basically, the more CREB proteins circulating in the brain, the faster long-term memories are formed. This has been verified in studies on sea mollusks, fruit flies, and mice. The key property of MEM 1414 is that it accelerates the production of the CREB proteins. In lab tests, aged animals given MEM 1414 were able to form long-term memories significantly faster than a control group. Scientists are also beginning to isolate the precise biochemistry required in the formation of long-term memories, at both the genetic and the molecular level. Once the process of memory formation is completely understood, therapies will be devised to accelerate and strengthen this key process. Not only the aged and Alzheimer’s patients but eventually the average person may well benefit from this “brain boost.

Multi-generational sexual child abuse is such a common cause of the proliferation of pedophilia that Hitler/Himmler research focused on this genetic trait for mind control purposes. While I personally could not relate to the idea of sex with a child, I had parents and brothers and sisters who did. I still believe that George Bush revealed today’s causation of the rapid rise in pedophilia through justifications I heard him state. The rape of a child renders them compliant and receptive to being led without question. This, Bush claims, would cause them to intellectually evolve at a rate rapid enough to “bring them up to speed” to grasp the artificial intelligence emanating from DARPA. He believed that this generation conditioned with photographic memory through abuse was necessary for a future he foresaw controlled by technology. Since sexual abuse enhanced photographic memory while decreasing critical analysis and free thought, there would ultimately be no free will soul expression controlling behavior. In which case, social engineering was underway to create apathy while stifling spiritual evolution. Nevertheless, to short sighted flat thinking individuals such as Bush, spiritual evolution was not a consideration anyway. Instead, controlling behavior in a population diminished by global genocide of ‘undesirables’ would result in Hitler’s ‘superior race’ surviving to claim the earth. Perceptual justifications such as these that were discussed at the Bohemian Grove certainly did not provide me with the complete big picture. It did, however, provide a view beyond the stereotyped child molester in a trench coat that helped in understanding the vast crimes and cover-ups being discussed at this seminar in Houston.

Washington University found that adding a single extra gene dramatically boosted a mouse’s memory and ability. These “smart mice” could navigate mazes faster, remember events better, and outperform other mice in a wide variety of tests. They were dubbed “Doogie mice,” after the precocious character on the TV show Doogie Howser, M.D. Dr. Tsien began by analyzing the gene NR2B, which acts like a switch controlling the brain’s ability to associate one event with another. (Scientists know this because when the gene is silenced or rendered inactive, mice lose this ability.) All learning depends on NR2B, because it controls the communication between memory cells of the hippocampus. First Dr. Tsien created a strain of mice that lacked NR2B, and they showed impaired memory and learning disabilities. Then he created a strain of mice that had more copies of NR2B than normal, and found that the new mice had superior mental capabilities. Placed in a shallow pan of water and forced to swim, normal mice would swim randomly about. They had forgotten from just a few days before that there was a hidden underwater platform. The smart mice, however, went straight to the hidden platform on the first try. Since then, researchers have been able to confirm these results in other labs and create even smarter strains of mice. In 2009, Dr. Tsien published a paper announcing yet another strain of smart mice, dubbed “Hobbie-J” (named after a character in Chinese cartoons). Hobbie-J was able to remember novel facts (such as the location of toys) three times longer than the genetically modified strain of mouse previously thought to be the smartest. “This adds to the notion that NR2B is a universal switch for memory formation,” remarked Dr. Tsien. “It’s like taking Michael Jordon and making him a super Michael Jordan,” said graduate student Deheng Wang. There are limits, however, even to this new mice strain. When these mice were given a choice to take a left or right turn to get a chocolate reward, Hobbie-J was able to remember the correct path for much longer than the normal mice, but after five minutes he, too, forgot. “We can never turn it into a mathematician. They are rats, after all,” says Dr. Tsien. It should also be pointed out that some of the strains of smart mice were exceptionally timid compared to normal mice. Some suspect that, if your memory becomes too great, you also remember all the failures and hurts as well, perhaps making you hesitant. So there is also a potential downside to remembering too much.

Scientists have found that there are two important genes, the CREB activator (which stimulates the formation of new connections between neurons) and the CREB repressor (which suppresses the formation of new memories). Dr. Jerry Yin and Timothy Tully of Cold Spring Harbor have been doing interesting experiments with fruit flies. Normally it takes ten trials for them to learn a certain task (e.g., detecting an odor, avoiding a shock). Fruit flies with an extra CREB repressor gene could not form lasting memories at all, but the real surprise came when they tested fruit flies with an extra CREB activator gene. They learned the task in just one session. “This implies these flies have a photographic memory,” says Dr. Tully. He said they are just like students “who could read a chapter of a book once, see it in their mind, and tell you that the answer is in paragraph three of page two seventy-four.” This effect is not just restricted to fruit flies. Dr. Alcino Silva, also at Cold Spring Harbor, has been experimenting with mice. He found that mice with a defect in their CREB activator gene were virtually incapable of forming long-term memories. They were amnesiac mice. But even these forgetful mice could learn a bit if they had short lessons with rest in between. Scientists theorize that we have a fixed amount of CREB activator in the brain that can limit the amount we can learn in any specific time. If we try to cram before a test, it means that we quickly exhaust the amount of CREB activators, and hence we cannot learn any more—at least until we take a break to replenish the CREB activators. “We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn’t work,” says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the material becomes part of your long-term memory. This may also explain why emotionally charged memories are so vivid and can last for decades. The CREB repressor gene is like a filter, cleaning out useless information. But if a memory is associated with a strong emotion, it can either remove the CREB repressor gene or increase levels of the CREB activator gene. In the future, we can expect more breakthroughs in understanding the genetic basis of memory. Not just one but a sophisticated combination of genes is probably required to shape the enormous capabilities of the brain. These genes, in turn, have counterparts in the human genome, so it is a distinct possibility that we can also enhance our memory and mental skills genetically. However, don’t think that you will be able to get a brain boost anytime soon. Many hurdles still remain. First, it is not clear if these results apply to humans.

The key point is that these patterns, while mostly stable, are not permanent: certain environmental experiences can add or subtract methyls and acetyls, changing those patterns. In effect this etches a memory of what the organism was doing or experiencing into its cells—a crucial first step for any Lamarck-like inheritance. Unfortunately, bad experiences can be etched into cells as easily as good experiences. Intense emotional pain can sometimes flood the mammal brain with neurochemicals that tack methyl groups where they shouldn’t be. Mice that are (however contradictory this sounds) bullied by other mice when they’re pups often have these funny methyl patterns in their brains. As do baby mice (both foster and biological) raised by neglectful mothers, mothers who refuse to lick and cuddle and nurse. These neglected mice fall apart in stressful situations as adults, and their meltdowns can’t be the result of poor genes, since biological and foster children end up equally histrionic. Instead the aberrant methyl patterns were imprinted early on, and as neurons kept dividing and the brain kept growing, these patterns perpetuated themselves. The events of September 11, 2001, might have scarred the brains of unborn humans in similar ways. Some pregnant women in Manhattan developed post-traumatic stress disorder, which can epigenetically activate and deactivate at least a dozen genes, including brain genes. These women, especially the ones affected during the third trimester, ended up having children who felt more anxiety and acute distress than other children when confronted with strange stimuli. Notice that these DNA changes aren’t genetic, because the A-C-G-T string remains the same throughout. But epigenetic changes are de facto mutations; genes might as well not function. And just like mutations, epigenetic changes live on in cells and their descendants. Indeed, each of us accumulates more and more unique epigenetic changes as we age. This explains why the personalities and even physiognomies of identical twins, despite identical DNA, grow more distinct each year. It also means that that detective-story trope of one twin committing a murder and both getting away with it—because DNA tests can’t tell them apart—might not hold up forever. Their epigenomes could condemn them. Of course, all this evidence proves only that body cells can record environmental cues and pass them on to other body cells, a limited form of inheritance. Normally when sperm and egg unite, embryos erase this epigenetic information—allowing you to become you, unencumbered by what your parents did. But other evidence suggests that some epigenetic changes, through mistakes or subterfuge, sometimes get smuggled along to new generations of pups, cubs, chicks, or children—close enough to bona fide Lamarckism to make Cuvier and Darwin grind their molars.

All creation is patterned according to an inner blueprint or arrangement that carries within it a genetic memory of everything that ever happens.

As the body and mind deteriorate, the dying are not less themselves. Dementia steals the faculties for expressing the self—language, memory, personality—but the self remains, albeit largely inaccessible to others. The experience of actually being with the demented and dying is one of watching someone move farther and farther away, out of earshot and eventually out of sight. It’s wrong to think, “Because I cannot access something, it does not exist.” Being with someone who is near death undermines such nonsense. If people are as much themselves when there is no chance of further accomplishment, activity, or self-expression, then the fact that the unborn may grow up to great accomplishment, activity, or self-expression is irrelevant. That a precious child with Down syndrome may some day compete in the Special Olympics is irrelevant. Another precious child with a different genetic abnormality will spend all his days in a state that most of us will inhabit only at the end of our lives, if ever: incapable of communication, incontinent, compromised in language, memory, intellect, and personality. The compassion we show to the dying is not earned by the things they “used to be” any more than it should be earned by the things that the unborn might become. We will all end up in a state of total incapacity and inaccessibility, some for a long time and some only briefly.

I’m not leaving the bathroom. Nothing out there is as sexy as in here.” “Hell yeah,” he groaned. “Don’t tease though. I’m this close to turning the water to cold.” “Or you could fix your problem.” Cooper squinted at me. “Really?” Pulling off my shirt, I lowered my bra. Standing closer to the shower door, I stretched. “Here’s your visual inspiration. I could lick my lips a lot if you think it’d help?” “Fucking A,” he said, stroking himself. “Say my name.” “Cooper,” I moaned softly, rolling my nipples between my thumbs and index fingers like he always did. “Oh, Cooper, I’m yours. I need you. I wish you were inside me, Cooper.” His gaze held mine as I teased myself and he stroked his cock. I eventually just looked at where he worked himself closer to relief. Soon, I licked my lips while thinking about making him feel good using my hand. While I didn’t know how long Cooper had been in a state of heat, it didn’t take him long to find relief. I doubted it would take him long to need more relief. To prolong his comfort, I immediately dressed and left the bathroom. Cooper appeared buck naked a few minutes later and I wondered if lunch should wait. Somehow, I’d gotten myself into a state of heat. “Some of it’s genetics,” he teased, retrieving boxers from his dresser. “The rest is hard work.” “I have a response, but I don’t want you getting worked up again.” “Give it five minutes and the memory of you touching yourself and… Fuck it, I didn’t need five minutes.

The cytoplasm of an egg is incredibly efficient at reversing the epigenetic memory on our genes, acting as a giant molecular eraser.

My God!” Sophia sat back, her eyes wide with horror. “It’s a drug! He’s drugging her and she doesn’t even know it.” Here we go. “It’s common knowledge that we’re genetic traders—the fact that we have more than one means to attract a mate of an entirely different species should come as no surprise,” he pointed out. “You…you cold blooded bastard.” Sophia shook her head. “Poor Liv—she has no idea what he’s doing to her.” “It wouldn’t matter even if she did,” Sylvan explained patiently, ignoring her insults. “The mating scent is too strong to fight, even with advanced warning. Stronger species than yours have tried and they have all failed. With very few exceptions.” He closed his eyes briefly thinking of Feenah, of her pure white hair and pale crystal eyes. I’m sorry, Sylvan… “It’s not right. You’re not fighting fair.” Sophia’s words pushed back the painful memory and Sylvan opened his eyes again to see the look of despair and anger on her lovely face. She looked almost on the brink of tears. Wonderful—she was even more upset and irrational than he had thought she would be. He supposed he ought to feel irritated. Instead, the illogical urge to hold and comfort her came over him so strongly that he had to sit back and cross his arms over his chest to keep from reaching for her. “I believe you humans have a saying that covers this—‘All’s fair in love and war.’ Is that right?” he said softly. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean—” Sylvan leaned forward again and took her soft, small hands between his own larger ones. “You must understand, Sophia—Baird isn’t trying to trick your sister into anything. He’s simply using every power at his disposal to keep her. Because he needs her—he loves her. She is the only woman in the entire universe for him and the bond that will form between them will be one of undying love and devotion.” “Maybe for him.” She looked down as though mesmerized by the sight of her own small hands being engulfed in his much larger ones. “But not for Liv. He’s going to trick her into having bonding sex with him —whatever that is—and then she’ll spend the rest of her life hating him once she finds out how he did it.” She looked up at Sylvan. “You don’t know her like I do—she hates being lied to. Her last boyfriend cheated on her and then lied about it and she dumped him and never looked back. If she knew what Baird was doing to her…” “It’s not as though it’s a conscious choice on his part,” Sylvan tried to explain. “It’s the way our bodies react chemically to our chosen mates. We can’t turn it off, even if we try. Sometimes it comes even when it’s not wanted. We have a saying for it—‘The blood knows what the mind does not wish to see.’” Lifting a hand, he cupped her cheek and brushed away the single tear that had escaped her wide green eyes with his thumb. “It cannot be helped.” Sophia

So as soon as you think a new thought, you become changed—neurologically, chemically, and genetically. In fact, you can gain thousands of new connections in a matter of seconds from novel learning, new ways of thinking, and fresh experiences. This means that by thought alone, you can personally activate new genes right away. It happens just by changing your mind; it’s mind over matter. Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, M.D., showed that when new memories are formed, the number of synaptic connections in the sensory neurons that are stimulated doubles, to 2,600. However, unless the original learning experience is repeated over and over again, the number of new connections falls back to the original 1,300 in a matter of only three weeks. Therefore,

The first view, solidly anchored in popular linguistic theory, holds that language is a uniquely human phenomenon, distinct from the adaptations of all other organisms on the planet. Species as diverse as eagles and mosquitoes fly, whales and minnows swim, but we are the only species that communicates like we do. Not only does language differentiate us from all other animal life; it also exists separate from other cognitive abilities like memory, perception, and event he act of speech itself. Researchers in this tradition have searched for a "language organ," a part of the brain devoted solely to linguistic skills. They have sought the roots of language in the fine grain of the human genome, maintaining, in some cases, that certain genes may exist for the sole purpose of encoding grammar. One evolutionary scenario in this view maintains that modern language exploded onto the planet with a big genetic bang, the result of a fortuitous mutation that blessed the Cro-Magnon with the gift of tongues.

When I met with Dr. Treffet in his hometown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, he told me that these innate skills are, in his words, "factory-installed software", or "genetic" memory. ...... Why the brain suppresses these remarkable abilities is still a mystery, but sometimes, when the brain is diseased or damaged, it relents and unleashes the inner genius.

You okay?” he asked quietly. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?” “Brad. I know you were crushing on him, and now he’s packed it up and moved next door. I wanted to make sure you weren’t having trouble dealing with it.” “I can’t believe Allie told you about my crush.” “Give me a break, Kate. I’ve known since family weekend. When was the last time you wanted to take a picture of me? Document my freshman year? What? Do I have clueless tattooed across my forehead?” Narrowing my eyes, I leaned toward him. “Yeah, I think maybe you do.” Even in the shadows I could see him grin. This was so totally weird. Sitting out here, having an almost normal conversation with my brother. “He’s not your type, Kate.” I scoffed. “How do you know my type? I don’t even know my type.” “Trust me, when you do figure your type out, you’re gonna realize it’s not Brad. I mean, I like him, and he’s a great roommate, but what I want in a friend and what you need in a boyfriend aren’t the same. He’d just end up hurting you. Then I’d have to beat the crap out of him.” I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. “Would you really do that for me, Sam?” “You know I would.” His voice was totally serious. And I realized that he was so not joking. His revelation stunned me almost as much as Joe’s kiss. No, wait, nothing would ever throw me off balance as much as that kiss. “You do know that, don’t you, Kate?” Sam asked. “You’re my sister and I . . .” He waved his hand. “That L-word. You know.” “Love?” I asked. “Don’t make me say it, okay? Just know it’s true. I know I give you a hard time, but hey, that’s what brothers do. It’s part of our genetic makeup, a little chip inside our brains that gets activated when our parents shove a screaming baby sister in our face.” “Like you’d have a memory of that moment. You were only fifteen months old.” “Whatever. Look, I’m out here right now because I’ve been a little worried about you, and I haven’t really been able to get you alone to talk.” “You’ve been able to get Allie alone.” And for a lot more than conversation. He grimaced. “Yeah, she told me you know about us. Are you okay with that?” “What if I’m not?” “Then tough. Get over it.” “Some understanding brother you are.” “I’ve got my limits.” “So you really like her, huh?” “Yeah, I have for a long time, but geez, she’s my sister’s best friend. How weird is that?” “Totally weird. When she described the way you kiss—” “What?” Horror echoed his voice. His eyes were wide, his mouth open. “Payback for the snowball,” I said snidely. “I already paid you back for that.” “So? Maybe there’s a little chip inside a girl’s brain that gets activated when her brother is a jerk and erases paybacks as soon as they happen so we need a steady stream of them.” “You’re definitely not playing nice, Kate.” I heard him heave a sigh. “You know, that’s part of the reason I’ve steered clear of Allie. I don’t want her discussing my . . . moves with my sister.” “Yeah, like you’ve got moves.” He gave me a cocky look. “Hey, I’ve got moves.” I held up a hand. “Definitely don’t want to hear about them.” “Definitely don’t want you to hear about them.

At the same time, it is important to remember that nostalgia for lower-tech times is based on fake memories. This is as true in the small scale of centuries as it is in the vast scale of life. Every genetic feature of you, from the crook of the corner of your eye to much of the way your body moves when you listen to music, was framed and formed by the negative spaces carved out by the pre-reproductive deaths of your would-be ancestors over hundreds of millions years. You are the reverse image of inconceivable epochs of heartbreak and cruelty. Your would-be ancestors in their many species, reaching back into the phylogenetic tree, were eaten, often by diseases, or sexually rejected before they could contribute genes to your legacy. The genetic, natural part of you is the sum of the leftovers of billions of years of extreme violence and poverty. Modernity is precisely the way individuals arose out of the ravages of evolutionary selection.

(wherein Jews do not need to accept Jesus as Messiah) espoused by some surprisingly well-known modern evangelical preachers. Yet those aged voices that called out to us recently from our fading boxes of memories also reminded that while it’s easy today to get an

Learning to read forms specialized brain networks that influence our psychology across several different domains, including memory, visual processing, and facial recognition. Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code. A society in which 95 percent of adults are highly literate would have, on average, thicker corpus callosa and worse facial recognition than a society in which only 5 percent of people are highly literate. These biological differences between populations will emerge even if the two groups were genetically indistinguishable. Literacy thus provides an example of how culture can change people biologically independent of any genetic differences.

Benzer went to a meeting in India. Wandering in the street markets looking for exotica—he had acquired a taste for strange foods as well as strange hours—Benzer saw a soothsayer with a bird. Passersby would ask the soothsayer a question. Then the man would ask the bird. The bird would go into the cage, peck among the scraps of paper on the floor, and bring out an answer. Benzer asked, “Is the genetic code universal?” The bird gave the answer “The news from home is good.

Through genetic memory, the dead inform the behavior of the living.

Having a child has become a prodigiously artificial thing. It no longer has anything of the passionately accidental event about it; it has become the parthenogenetic fruit of a calculation of biological, dietary and psychosocial data and you wonder to what extent dream, desire or fatality are still involved. But perhaps the race is losing its interest in sexuality, preferring instead a sort of protozoan transplantation. Leaving out of account that what has been conceived by artificial insemination is very likely to continue its life in artificial intelligence and to die of built-in obsolescence. After the mechanical bride, the mechanical widow. Now every human being is the product of a sexual act, a sexual pact or else we should not be the human race. It takes a sexual copulation successfully to produce a human being, just as, among the Hindus, it takes a copulation between the word and silence for a sacrifice to be successfully carried out. In a sense the child is indeed the continuation of the species. But in another, he or she is a biological vestige of it. The further we go with change, genetic innovations and fashion, the more unreal it becomes, with each new generation, to put our trust in the processes of childbirth and organic growth. The simplicity and slowness of those things are entirely outside the range of our contemporary experience. How can we claim to exercise judgement if we have lost a sense of punishment? How can we claim to judge anything at all if we no longer accept being judged? And if we are no longer able either to judge or be judged, then we lose all hope of being absolved or condemned in the past or the future. Now, what can no longer be reflected in the past or the future takes place in a single instant with all its consequences. The Last Judgement becomes an immediate reality. We have right here before us the unchecked proliferation in epidemic proportions of all processes, the multiplication of all cancers on an epidemic scale.

Against all our historically-minded culture (out of compassion for our present state), the only excitement is to be found in anticipation (out of impertinence towards our future state). Infinite spaces (Pascal would have nothing to fear today) have become advertising spaces. It is advertising which will fuel all the sidereal infrastructure of communication. No more silent stars or astrological signs. It is advertising which will fuel the no-osphere. The more we colonize virgin space, the more we enter the blackmail space of the fully developed advertising form. Embryos frozen, unfrozen and then reimplanted in the mother's womb. What becomes of frozen embryos whose parents have died accidentally? Orphans of artificial insemination? Billionaire foetuses? Fortunately there is a committee for embryo-genetic control and a commission for the ethics of human reproduction. But the orphans of the concept? What becomes of a frozen concept whose parents have died accidentally?

They say other species have stopped short, and that only the human species, the humanoid branch, has made its definitive breakthrough. In fact while all the others persevered in their specific forms and ended up disappearing genetically, thus leaving evolution to run its course, only the human species succeeded in surpassing itself in the simulacrum of itself - in disappearing genetically to resuscitate artificially. By perpetuating itself in a world of clones and electronic prostheses (perfect in so far as they will have eliminated every potential species, including humanity), man will thus, in a definitive act, have wiped out the natural genesis of things. Contact with the men who wield power and authority still leaves an intang ible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to faecal matter, the faecal embodiment of something unmentionable and you wonder what it is made of and where it acquired its historically sacred character. Why this feeling of loathing for the politician? Is it the impression of being artificially subjected to a will that is even more stupid than your own and which, by its very function, has to be crude? How can the decision-making function be performed without simplifying the mechanisms of thought? Political charisma is precisely not that gracious charisma which emanates from the irresistible power of a pure object, such as the power of a woman, but an ungracious will which derives its power and its glory from voluntary servitude. This is true of all institutions, the military, the clerical, the medical, and more recently the psychoanalytic, but it is particularly so in politics which remains the most striking hallucination of all the weaknesses of the will.

The best thing would perhaps be to remove consciousness surgically in utero, together with irony, criticism and intelligence - all those qualities that are so fragile and so dangerous to existence in general. One might take advantage of this (all in a specialized Psycho-Genetic Institute, akin to the Institute of Zodiacal Semiurgy, where the surgical removal of star signs is practised) to be rid of the Unconscious, the extraction of which, like the extraction of all the irregularities of the genome, would be a great relief for future generations.

The time when perfection was of the order of crime is over, when beneath perfect beauty something criminal lay hidden. With the cloning and recycling of the species in conformity with an ideal norm, it will no longer even be a crime to be perfect. The exactitude of the creature will shine in the genetic firmament. There will be a universal presumption of innocence and a total excommunication of evil. This technical redemption of all the taints of the species will render any new divine intervention useless. There will no longer be any Last Judgement. Reality for us is a little like the ground for trapeze artists, who work with a net without knowing that beneath it the ground has disappeared. In this way, screens allowed the real to slip away. In this way, icons allowed God to slip quietly away.

Rushton (2000) has shown that if we compare the ‘Big 3’ races – blacks, whites and Northeast Asians – there are clear and consistent differences, with East Asians at one end of spectrum and black people at the other. As these differences already show up in childhood, stand robust against environmental interventions, and as personality is at least 50% genetic and intelligence about 80% so, they are genetic differences. Northeast Asians score the highest in intelligence tests (105), blacks score the lowest (85), while whites are intermediate (100) but closer to Northeast Asians. Within these tests, whites have better verbal intelligence than Northeast Asians but much worse mathematical intelligence, meaning that Northeast Asians come out with higher ‘general intelligence’ overall. Real predictions about ‘character’ can be made from this, as intelligence is associated with emotional intelligence, cooperativeness, low self-esteem, a trusting nature, future-orientation, law-abidingness, intellectual curiosity, creativity, leadership ability, having a sense of humour, having a good memory, and even talking speed (see Jensen, 1998).

Culture contradicts all genetic capital. It is the touch of magic, the special touch which contradicts biology, heredity, etc. and condenses a whole dynasty into one generation. What cannot be obtained in a single generation is ease and courage. Mutants are cowards.

We are biological beings, shaped by genetic inheritance and the organization and health of our neurological structures. We have rich inner lives of diverse dispositions, motivations, cognitive abilities and processes, intrapsychic dynamics, and reinforcement histories. We are also social creatures, affected by our social and cultural environments. Together these elements help us understand normal phenomena (like memory construction, neurological function, and social attraction) and abnormal psychological occurrences (such as pseudo-memories, Alzheimer’s disease, and dysfunctional relationships). Unfortunately, much of the work on the

The common language was latent within you, a component of genetic memory, given to you by the Cunabula.

My heart warmed. Life wasn’t just about genetics and birth and loss. But that’s where my ability to express it ran out. Verbalizing the connectedness I felt, of molecules intermixing and creating something new and beautiful, was beyond my ability to explain even all these years later.

She palpated the edges of the wound. “So, I’m like you…werewolf—no, lycan? Am I some sort of science experiment?” He became utterly still, giving her a chance to see he wasn’t lying when he said this. “You’re not human. You have to remember this. I don’t know how one of us could ever believe otherwise, even if we lost our memory. Maybe if someone hypnotized you into believing yourself human, I could buy you not remembering. Knowing what you are is as basic as knowing how to walk. We are lycanthropes. Lycans.” No one said anything for several long moments of silence. Even Flynn seemed to have stopped breathing from wherever he stood behind them. Flynn was probably looking at her again. Why did that make him want to punch his brother, whom he trusted with his life? Skepticism laced her tone. “Can I change into a dog or something?” “No. That’s a human urban myth. We do change to become stronger when necessary, like I did in the hangar. In our feral form, we can do many superhuman things, but it’s not an ugly creature covered in hair like in the movies. You almost did the shift at the club. It’s why I distracted you both times. You can’t do that in public.” “You’re lycan, too, Flynn?” she asked. “Does that mean you both got bitten at the same time?” “What?” Flynn shot a shocked glance at Roman. “Bitten? What the actual hell?” “Chill. She’s got no clue,” Roman said in a calm tone. “Of course I’m lycan.” At her skeptical eyebrow raise, Flynn groaned theatrically and rolled his eyes. “It’s genetic, not something like in the movies where a bite will turn you. I was born this way. My parents were 100 percent lycan, as were theirs. And yours. It’s a different species than humans.” She asked, “Why do I believe so strongly I’m a person, that I’m human?” Roman shrugged
“Superspeed healing?” She touched her side.
“The older we get, the more rapidly we heal. That speed means you must be at least fifty, maybe older.” “How old are you?” “A lot older.” “You think I’m fifty? I look maybe early twenties.” She nibbled her lower lip. “How long do you…we live?” Roman shrugged. “Centuries. I don’t know any that died of natural causes.” “What about that spooky guy named Antonio? Is he like us?” Both Roman and Flynn exchanged glances. “You didn’t know what he was?” Flynn asked. Roman said, “He’s a vampire, not exactly a friend of our species.” They had yet to pin down if Antonio was involved with the dealer who peddled black magic artifacts like the vial. But every time they found something deadly like it, he lurked about. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t like him. Probably good I didn’t act on one of the five ways I envisioned he could die.” He was staring at her.
“Yeah, probably smart,” he muttered.

The idea of a Kwisatz Haderach had been the Sisterhood’s dream for thousands upon thousands of years, conceived in dark underground meetings even before the victory of the Jihad. The Bene Gesserit had many breeding programs aimed at selecting and enhancing various characteristics of humanity, and no one understood them all. But the genetic lines of the messiah project had been the most carefully guarded secret for much of the Imperium’s recorded history, so secret in fact that even the voices in Other Memory refused to divulge the details.

Processing Feelings with The “Script” In the name of Jesus Christ...Spirit, Super-Conscious, Subconscious, Conscious, Higher Self, Heart, Mind, Will, Nervous System-Brain, Original Intelligence, RNA, DNA, & every genetic anomaly out of alignment with my pattern of perfection, please locate the origin of my conscious & sub-conscious destructive cellular memories which caused the incorrect perceptions that created feelings/thought/beliefs of (feelings/thoughts/belief). Take each and every level, layer, area, and aspect of my Being to these origins. Analyze and resolve them perfectly with God the Father’s truth. Come forward through all generations of time and eternity, healing every event and its appendages based on the origins. Please do it according to God the Father’s will until I’m at the present—filled with light and truth, God’s Immanence, peace and love, benevolence, forgiveness of my self for my imperfect perceptions, having compassion for every person, place, circumstance and event which contributed to any of these destructive cellular memories, feelings, thoughts, or belief. With total forgiveness and unconditional love, I ask that my  physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual memory of perfection, resonate throughout my Being. I Choose Being (insert postitive feeling/s, etc...). I Feel (same truth). I AM (same truth). (Replace previous feelings/thoughts/beliefs with the same desired truth on each line.) It is done. It is healed. It is accomplished now!

Things I know about Project Moonlark I’m the moonlark—which means I get to have lots of people trying to kill me. Calla came up with the name for the project because of the way moonlarks treat their eggs. She also helped the Black Swan figure out my genetics, which are mostly based off alicorn DNA. That’s why I have brown eyes and can teleport. (And yeah, it’s hard not to feel like “the horse girl.”) They chose a lot of the abilities they gave me because they were hoping I’d be able to use them to heal broken minds (since the Black Swan knew some of their members might endure memory breaks—like poor Prentice). I grew up with humans, partly to make sure no one found me. But mostly so I’d understand humans differently from how other elves understand them. And I guess I do, but… I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that information. It’s possible I may end up manifesting another special ability (or more than one—anything’s possible at this point). But I hope not. Five is seriously enough! My biological mother is Councillor Oralie, which means she lied to me every time she saw me for years (and signed me up for a genetic experiment and then totally abandoned me). I also can’t tell anyone who she is, because then she’d have to resign from the Council, and that would create so much chaos that it could give the Neverseen the opportunity to take control. So, lucky me—I get to be unmatchable! The Black Swan loves to tell me I have a choice in all of this, and I guess I do for certain things. But it’s not like I can change my genetics. Or everything I’ve gone through. Or the fact that everyone’s expecting me to be this big important THING, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do or how I’m supposed to do it. Sometimes I wonder if the real reason the Black Swan won’t tell me what they’re planning is because they don’t actually have a PLAN. They just made their little moonlark and are expecting me to figure out the rest. Which, you know, would be pretty terrifying if I’m right. But at the same time… I kinda think it might be better—because if they do have a PLAN, then wouldn’t that mean they also knew exactly what the Neverseen were going to do and could’ve prevented it all from happening in the first place?

The skeptical and frequently hostile reactions to prions from many precincts of the scientific community reflected resistance to a profound change in thinking. Prions were seen as an anomaly: they reproduce and infect but contain no genetic material—neither DNA nor RNA; thus they constitute a disruptive transition in our understanding of the biological world.

One thing seems certain: a huge step forward was also an enormous step back. As Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan point out in their brilliant book Microcosmos, multicelled organisms lost the rapid-fire external information exchange, quick-paced inventiveness, and global data sharing of bacteria. With their newly developed nervous systems and brains, multicellular creatures made awesome contributions to the elaboration of cell-to-cell communication. And with the elaborate facilities in their nuclei, they giant-stepped the powers of genetic memory. But their data was now stuck inside the body. Most of it would take a billion years to get back out again.

Think of genetics as the hardware and epigenetics as the software in your computer.

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

In his summary of these heroic efforts on the part of the behavioral geneticists to meet this frequent objection of the environmentalists [that identical (MZ) twins develop similarly because they are treated more similarly than fraternal (DZ) twins], [Kenneth] Kendler made no mention of the complete substantiation these studies have received from the Minnesota and Swedish reared-apart twin studies, which lack the potential pitfall of different MZ-DZ upbringings in the same home. He laboriously showed that the one complaint has no basis in fact. It would seem to put to rest once and for all this one complaint and force the critics to find different ones. This was not to be the case. For more than ten years after Kendler’s paper, opponents continued to cite the possibility of different upbringings given identicals as opposed to fraternals as invalidating twin studies. As late as 1994, the objection was raised in the pages of Scientific American. Sometimes the criticism is not alluded to directly. When other critics referred darkly to the “seriously flawed” nature of twin studies that compared monozygotic with dizygotic twins, more often than not the unnamed flaw turned out to be the one Kendler and others had refuted a decade earlier. And there is no possibility the critics who keep resurrecting this charge are unaware of the refutation. Each time the flaw is cited in print, a weary behavioral geneticist will write a letter to the editor pointing out the research that obviates the complaint, but the critics continue to make it year after year. As an outsider, I came into this field believing scientists were simply truth seekers, men and women dedicated to discovering the functioning of the world around them, to understanding the givens. I saw them as driven by profound curiosity. It was, therefore, disheartening for me to learn that many scientists with broad reputations do not place truth at the top of their agendas and react in sadly unscientific ways when confronted with evidence they feel threatens their ideological positions. Aware of the scientific rules, they first attempt to discredit with counterarguments, but when these are shown empirically to be invalid, they simply pretend that the evidence they were unable to shoot down doesn’t exist. Such selective memory permeates the behavioral genetics debate. In the nonscientific world we have a word for such behavior: dishonesty.

A different narrative structure is needed, and a new language. Piqued by their humiliation, scientists went on to furnish us with a vocabulary of flu – with concepts such as immune memory, genetic susceptibility and post viral fatigue. Couched in this new language – not a poetic language, perhaps, but one that allowed tou to make predictions, and to test them against the historical reports – disparate events began to appear connected, with other, once obvious links atrophied and died (no, it wasn’t the punishment of an angry god; yes, it was at least partly responsible for the subsequent wave of melancholy). The pandemic took on a radically new shape: the one we recognize today.

A large part of people who manage to stay young, in spite of their chronological age, relates to synaptic plasticity - the ability of the brain to make and form new connections. As we've seen, plasticity is influenced by your genetic makeup, your lifetime of experiences, and the culture in which you live. It is also influenced by your daily routines, especially as you get older. Astrocytes, a type of brain cell, serve as suppliers of that energy. A mounting body of evidence shows that physical activity increases the effectiveness of astrocytes and thereby enhances synaptic plasticity, memory, and overall cognition.

When we focus on thoughts about bitter past memories or imagined dreadful futures to the exclusion of everything else, we prevent the body from regaining homeostasis. In truth, we’re capable of turning on the stress response by thought alone. If we turn it on and then can’t turn it off, we’re surely headed for some type of illness or disease—be it a cold or cancer—as more and more genes get downregulated in a domino effect, until we eventually arrive at our genetic destiny.

What we have lost by mowing down the forests around the world...is far more than big trees. We've squandered the genetic fitness of future forests. With humans high grading, cutting down the best trees time and again, the great irreplaceable trove of DNA that had been shaped and strengthened over millennia by surviving drought, disease, pestilence, heat, and cold -- the genetic memory--was also gone. The DNA that may be best suited for the tree's journey into an uncertain future on a warming planet has all but vanished, just when we need it most.

Unfortunately, we live on a planet with many limitations — genetic, mental, physical, etc — and on top of that, we have our memory erased at birth, which I believe to be a very diabolical thing, even though many spiritualists see it as a positive thing. So in a way, being delusional does provide more comfort, which is why many people want it. Why think about growing old when I can just play video games and forget about it? And why not waste my time with as many distractions as possible?

The plastic world has colonized us. When we climb into the car, airplane, board ships, when we purchase contemporary cuisines, get involved in the television world, from the studio and materials up the image of the world, we enter the world of artificial chemical universes, those of the cinema and their advertisements, of what we should buy and acquire. It is like this with the café-bars and discos, in other words the pleasure of children, and the same with the food that we consume, and the hospitals and schools, the hotels, all chemicals, a substitute. The ventilation of hotels without windows, the doors without keys, similarly the walls and doors and beds and baths, the water, the carpet and the floors. Everything a sham, paradises for allergies. One can say the same of the tones and music, and the attack on clothing cannot be overlooked, as well as the attitude of men resulting from it. The computers are made of this material and therewith our thought, our memory, the simulation of life. And thus life in genetic research begins and ends as a plastic creation and plastic death. Already the announcement has come to us that the museum bring the entire program closer to us on video screens, enlarged, interpreted, free and democratic and individually accessible. We will live in Leonardo’s world. The ground is prepared, now begins the attack on the blood. Much strength will be necessary to survive it.

Many seed savers see themselves as stewards, not only of their own family memories but of the shared stories and genetic codes contained within these plants. This kind of recollection works against collective forgetting and the widespread disappearance of so many agricultural plants and animals. Old localized, traditional varieties of plants and animals fell (or were pushed) out of everyday use as agriculture became increasingly large scale, industrialized, and standardized, relying on ever fewer varieties in order to achieve the high levels of uniformity and predictability expected not only by stockholders but also by grocery store shoppers. The loss of biodiversity also means a broader form of forgetting.

They’re telling us is that this is their planet - which they’ve been ruling for a hundred and eighty million years, maybe more. They’re telling us they’ve got genetic memory, the magnetic field is their compass, and they’re everywhere where there’s water. They want us to know that we’re in the here and now, whereas they’re everywhere and for ever. Those are the facts. It’s all in the message, and it says a lot.

But the growing body of evidence makes clear that the memory inside our heads is the product of an extraordinarily complex natural process that is, at every instant, exquisitely tuned to the unique environment in which each of us lives and the unique pattern of experiences that each of us goes through. The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, they seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips. Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electrical, and genetic, every aspect of human memory—the way it’s formed, maintained, connected, recalled—has almost infinite gradations. Computer memory exists as simple binary bits—ones and zeros—that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be either open or closed but nothing in between.

I've always held myself in high esteem. No one needed to tell me I was good at writing: All I would have to do was sit down and the words would come. I knew like you knew you'd be capable of killing a person in battle. Give me the knife. I'll kill you. If it comes down to you versus me, know I will emerge victorious whatever the fight. Maybe my dad's words are what led me to believe I could handle anything. Anything at all. No, they were my words that I used on myself when my vision was clear. Sometimes I'd fantasize about war just to know how it felt to be invincible. Presumably a result of my genetic predisposition to delusions of grandeur which blossoms every now and then. I've always known I can write as though it were a matter of life or death.

Aaron, in preparation for the event, had been initiated by Lolly in the ways of the Kerry dances and had proved a pupil of stunning receptivity. Lolly suspected some genetic memory but wondered as well if her husband was yet another example of that breed that had flourished among the Danes and the Normans who, once arrived on Irish shores, became more Irish than the Irish—a historical phenomenon from which the English had exempted themselves in a somewhat ornery fashion.

The mid-sixth century (close to 550) was the time when bubonic plague entered Britain, along trade routes from the Mediterranean. Significantly, it would have been Britain (the west and centre of the island) which it hit, rather than England (the south-east), because only Britain maintained trade links with the empire. And it would be less likely to spread to the Saxons since they did not consort with Britons and, living outside the established Roman towns and cities, may have lived at a lower density. It would have been virtually simultaneous with the mortālitās magna that hit Ireland, according to the Annals of Ulster, devastating the aristocracy (and no doubt every other class). Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd in Wales, also died of plague in 547 or 549, according to the Annales Cambriae. A folk memory of this dreadful disease, and the depopulation it caused, would remain in the Arthurian legend of the Waste Land, combining famine with military defeat, and a mysterious wound (to the king) in the groin area—one of the characteristics of bubonic plague. There is even a little genetic evidence that strikingly bears this out. Comparing the pattern of Y-chromosome DNA from samples in a line across from Anglesey to Friesland, a recent study found that the Welshmen were to this day clearly distinct from those in central England, but that the English and Frisian samples were so similar that they pointed to a common origin of 50–100 per cent of the (male) population; this could have resulted from a mass migration from Friesland.50 On the usual assumption that the Roman-period population of the island had reached 3 to 4 million, it seems hardly possible that anything other than an epidemic could have so eliminated the Britons from the ancestry of central England. So English supervened.

We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle. It pervades the sciences from top to bottom, transforming every branch of knowledge. Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing. What English speakers call “computer science” Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik. Now even biology has become an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out. Life spreads by networking. The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level—an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being. “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life,’ ” declares the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. “It is information, words, instructions.… If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.

You've got your alien abduction. Bigfoot abduction. Men in black. Genie wish gone awry. Interdimensional portal. Cursed Mesopotamian tablet. Sewer monster. Lake monster. Sea monster. Swamp monster. Killer clowns. Time paradox. Cults—you've got death cults, demon cults, occult cults, new age cults, basically any kind of cult. Witches. The giant Pacific octopus. Trapped on a ghost ship. Possessed. Possessed by a ghost ship—could happen. Knocked unconscious by genetically engineered mushroom spores. Genetically modified insect swarm. Genetically modified alligator. Lots of potential in the genetically modified space overall, really. Fell in a vat of invisible paint. Stolen by time thieves. Shrink ray on the highest setting. Unexpected wicker man festival. Psychically scrubbed from memory so you forget them as soon as you aren't looking at them. Mole men. Lizard men. Giant carnivorous pitcher plant. Giant carnivorous catfish. Bears. Got lost in Finland. Went hiking. Trapped in a TV show. Trapped in a haunted painting. Trapped in a mirror. Trapped in a snow globe. Trees. Not sure how they'd be involved but I always feel like we underestimate them. Moth man. Time loop. Wild hunt. Tax fraud. I could keep going.