The Amazing Human.
The amazing animal, the Human, has the highest developed brain of all other animals. They are capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection, and problem solving. This mental capability, combined with an erect body carriage that frees the hands for manipulating objects, has allowed the human to make far greater use of tools than any other living species on Earth. The other defining features of the human is a higher-level of thought process, such as self-awareness, rationality and sapience.
Humans are noted for their desire to understand and influence their environment, seeking to explain and manipulate phenomena through science, philosophy, mythology and religion. This natural curiosity has led to the development of advanced tools and skills, which are passed down culturally; humans are the only species known to build fires, cook their food, clothe themselves, and use numerous other technologies.
The Human is the only animal that can tame, manipulate and use other animals for their own purposes. Around 4,000 BC the Horse was tamed and trained by the Humans, for the use of carrying heavy materials around. It did not take long before the Horse was being used as a mode of transport for the Human.
Transport has become a key feature of the Human, from horse and cart to space shuttle.
It is truly amazing how the Human has used tools, created and manipulated, so they can progress and grow quicker and with greater ease. Is there no boundaries to what this amazing animal can do?
In such a short space of time the Human has not only covered the globe by vehicles created by them. They have strived to progress the way they do this. If you could tell someone from 1930 that we could travel faster than sound, they would have laughed at you. Well not only did they break the sound barrier in flight.
The Human did it by car as well.
So what’s next for the Human? Well if they have enough time, anything is possible.
Religion.
One of the many differences between the Human to all other animals is the ability to philosophize. To look deep into their history and try to answer questions about how and why they came about. Religion is a key factor to the ever-growing and expanding knowledge of how Humans interact with one another, other animals and their surroundings. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism are followed, believed by 90.73% of the world’s population. That is 6.17 billion people who follow 4 of the worlds largest religions. All these religions have a common bond, they all look to the skies for enlightenment. Romans, Egyptians and even Pagans all looked to the sky above for their Gods. The Egyptians went as far as building huge pyramids so that their dead leaders would be closer to the heavens.
Does the sky above us really hold the key to how we came to being?
Over 20,000 years ago the Human used cave drawing to tell stories and depict their history. Even with their primitive resources and underdeveloped knowledge, brains, the Human gave us an insight into their beliefs that the skies above us hold the key. Later day artists also wanted to convey their beliefs through painting strange-looking objects in the heavens above.
So the Human beginnings seem to be deeply embedded in the heavens. How else can the knowledge of flight be brought about by an animal that could not even conceive the idea of a bicycle? I know it kind of points towards being visited by aliens from another planet, but I find that hard to believe for reasons I shall give later. So what were these people trying to tell us? When we look to the skies above do we find God, or does God find us?
DNA.
So we have looked at the time scale of the evolution of Dinosaurs and Humans. We have looked at the deep thought process it takes in religion. So let’s look a little bit closer at the Human. DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) is found in all living things and with the technology we have now, we can look closely at the make-up of a species and determine whether it is related to another. Scientists have studied the genome of Human and Chimpanzee, for decades now. Although they once believed that chimpanzees are 98.5% identical to the human, the scientists have only ever fully mapped the Human DNA. So with even better technology and DNA mapping what did science find out.
A technology known as “Perlegen’s micro array” shows us that the differences between Chimpanzee and Human genome are a lot more than previously thought.
Researchers at a company called “Perlegen Sciences” in Mountain View, California, used a powerful biological computer chip that can scan the entire genetic makeup of an organism. The result was astonishing. Chimps and Humans are a whole lot more different.
Researchers have circled areas of the genome that have been rearranged over time.
“The study shows the richness and texture of these differences we have with our close neighbours in the evolutionary tree,” said Richard Gibbs, director of the Human Genome Sequencing Centre at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who was not involved in the Perlegen study.
“(This study) provides a valuable starting point from which to improve our understanding of what makes human beings unique,” said Dr. David Cox, Perlegen’s chief scientific officer and co-author of the study, in a statement.
With technologies like Perlegen’s “high-density array” — a chip that allows scientists to look at whole genomes — researchers can not only see missing base pairs, but also rearrangements of the base pairs in the genomes.
“It’s a good reminder that sometimes the differences between things that are already very similar provide the most insight,” Gibbs said.
So what was added to the mix that brought about Human life? The Ape is so alike to the Human but DNA shows how different they actually are. There seems to be a missing ingredient, that caused the massive leap from lowly animal into the super power, that is Human. Maybe DNA research, cloning and other genetic sciences will give us the key to how and why we made this transition. If science can create new life then maybe God can and did. But why? and we still don’t know what God is.
Cloning.
DNA and genetic research has come a long way in the last 20 years. The process of cloning helps us understand how genetic codes can be manipulated and changed so as to produce a new entity.
Dolly, a Finn-Dorset ewe, was the first mammal to have been successfully cloned from an adult cell. She was cloned at the Roslin Institute in Scotland and lived there from her birth in 1996 until her death in 2003 when she was six.
Dolly was publicly significant because the effort showed that the genetic material from a specific adult cell, programmed to express only a distinct subset of its genes, can be reprogrammed to grow an entirely new organism. Before this demonstration, it had been shown by John Gurdon that nuclei from differentiated cells could give rise to an entire organism after transplantation into an e nucleated egg.
Cloning in stem cell research shows us that science can create human embryos. Somatic cell nuclear transfer, known as SCNT, can be used to create embryos for research or therapeutic purposes. The most likely purpose for this is to produce embryos for use in stem cell research. This process is also called “research cloning” or “therapeutic cloning.” The goal is not to create cloned human beings (called “reproductive cloning“), but rather to harvest stem cells that can be used to study human development and to potentially treat disease.
Since Dolly, researchers have cloned a number of large and small animals including sheep, goats, cows, mice, pigs, cats, rabbits, and a gaur. All these clones were created using nuclear transfer technology.
So what can be learned from the cloning process? If the scientists of today can create life, then maybe the same sort of technology was used by God. If the science of today has the ability to manipulate genes and create an embryo, then what would a more advanced science be able to do?
When Man Plays God! 