Children of the genome
What Knowing We Evolved
Can Tell Us About
Ourselves
Contents 

Introduction	1
One world out of another	3
The world of life	5
Evolution	8
Assessing the genome	10
Minds	13
How evolution works	17
Thinking and consciousness	20
STORY: Becoming children of the genome	25
    Other works by Shaun Johnston	35






Introduction

Every once in a very long while, how we think goes through a revolution. Ancient paganism gave way to Christianity. Christianity gave way to modern science. 
   Modern science! That revolution happened 400 years ago! Aren’t we due for another?
   The premise of this book is, yes, we’re due for another revolution in how we think, and here it is. Or, if you’re not yet ready for a revolution, you might at least welcome another way of thinking to compare with how you think now. We get better at something when we have more than one way of thinking about it.
   What I’ve come up with is an account of everything, starting out with the universe itself, told in a new way. What we’ve learned from the modern physical sciences stays—physical matter and the deterministic laws of physics. But starting from there I go on to explain what the physical sciences can’t—life, mind, creativity and consciousness. 
   What qualifies me to be your guide? I’ve had one professional career as a science and medical writer, another as a graphic designer. I’ve written two novels, a play, and created several videos. I’ve two patents to my name. I’ve published a survey of evolutionary theory as it applies to mind (“Mind in Evolution as Assessed Through Reviews of Major Texts,” available at Amazon). I’m a creature of both worlds, the sciences and the humanities. I can think scientifically and creatively. That could be what you need to come up with a new origin story like this.
   I’ve tried to keep things simple, though in case you want more detail I do every so often include a more technical note in a different typeface. And when I get to the end I tell you everything all over again but in the form of a story about people in the future becoming children of the genome. 
   Ready? Let’s play the revolution game. 
   
   

Chapter 1 
One world out of another
   
There’s just one stuff in the universe. What happens is, over time, out of that original stuff emerge successive worlds, each with its own properties and processes. It’s the same stuff, just coming with different properties and processes.
   One is the quantum world. Stuff in the quantum world consists of particles and fields. They come with properties such as uncertainty, and processes such as quantum entanglement. All very mysterious and hard to comprehend.
   Out of that in turn emerges the physical world. We’re more familiar with that. Its stuff comes as chemical elements. Its properties include things like mass and electricity. Its processes, such as gravity and volcanoes erupting, happen deterministically. Whatever happens depends on what’s happened before as determined by the laws of physics, so in a purely physical world there can’t be any real novelty. We know all about this from the scientific revolution starting four centuries ago.
   Out of the physical world in turn emerges a world of life. How different is that from the physical world? You can get a sense of that by comparing the two planets, Mars and Earth. Mars is grimly brown, lifeless, unchanging over billions of years. Earth is a lively blue, because of its oceans, but also green. The green is a sign of change, of vitality, of life. It’s life that makes the Earth so different from Mars. 
   All these worlds consist of the same basic stuff so they can interact with one another. What happens in each world will happen in the others as well, but through different processes. Choose to raise your arm to demonstrate you have free will and in the physical world physical matter corresponding to your arm moves deterministically due to the laws of physics. This in turn overwhelms uncertainty to cause change in the quantum world. It’s all the same stuff, it just changes in properties and processes. 
   Next we’ll look at the world of life, and the properties and processes special to that.
   
   
   
   
Chapter 2
The world of life

We already know what the stuff of the living world is like, it’s mostly living creatures like us. So I’ll go on to list life’s properties and processes. 
   How I describe them may not be what you’re used to. Remember, we’re starting a revolution.
   
Properties of life
Living stuff comes as whole persons.
In the physical world, as things grow they stay the same kind of stuff, they just gets bigger. For example a crystal grows simply by the addition of more of the same molecules. Its shape continues to reflect the shape of those molecules. It’s organized by its molecules, from the bottom up. It has the same structure throughout, it’s homogeneous.
   Stuff in the living world is very different. First, it’s organized differently at every scale. And it organizes itself from the top down, from the whole body level right down to the molecules at the bottom; what happens at the molecular level is driven by what the whole body is doing. For example, when we exercise we drive changes in muscles and bones right down at the molecular level. 
   Being organized like this from the top down means the living world comes as whole living creatures, collections of living tissues contained within some kind of outer skin. 
   Not only that, but each living whole is different from all the others, even among similar creatures of the same kind. What you learn about one you can’t necessarily apply to another. So rather than thinking of living creatures as objects it’s better to think of them as quite separate persons.
   Summary: the living world comes as living creatures: stuff gathered together into wholes separated from other stuff by some kind of protective skin. Because each one is organized from the top down, what a whole creature decides drives what happens to all of it, at all levels. And because each one is unique they’re best thought of as persons.
   
Living stuff comes as messages 
Physical stuff can consist of many different chemical elements. Living stuff consists of just a few, mostly oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen. What’s more important to life than the kinds of atoms it’s made of is that those atoms mostly come arranged as more complex molecules consisting of hundreds, thousands, even billions of atoms strung together. It’s as if these molecules were written messages. And they are. Written into them are ways of satisfying a living creature’s needs. 

Living stuff brings change
Physical matter doesn’t change much over time. Whatever happens to it is determined by the invariable laws of physics. But living stuff changes all the time, resulting in streams of novelties such as the world has never seen before. That’s because life’s processes aren’t deterministic, they allow for new kinds of change. 
   Those are some key ways properties of the living world are different from properties of the physical world. Now for life’s processes.
   
Processes of life
Growth and repair
A basic process of life is growth. It loves to grow. For example a human embryo, a single cell, can grow into an adult made up of trillions of cells, of hundreds of different types, all organized into different kinds of tissues. 
   Yet it’s all under tight control: while we’re still supported in the womb like a fish in water, muscles attach themselves to bones just where they’ll be needed to exert just the right leverage so when we leave the womb they’ll hold us up against gravity and help us walk and run. 
   We also come able to repair ourselves if something goes wrong. Often that’s different from how it grew in the first place. For example, when fish lose the lens of an eye the replacement lens may grow out of a different tissue from the tissue it grew from originally, involving a different set of instructions. 
   We each come richly equipped to change, with massive resources for growth and repair built into us.
   
Needs + solutions = provisions
Any challenge a living creature faces poses a need. Special to the living world is, needs induce satisfactions. The need of bees for food for their young induced the satisfaction of that need by them being able to make honey. 
   You could say creatures’ needs getting satisfied is the essence of life’s stuff. Where the physical world consists of matter responding to forces, you could say the world of life consists of living creatures getting equipped to satisfy their needs. 
   What makes that happen? For that we need concepts we haven’t got to yet. 
   
Evolution
Something else distinctive about the living world is, over time living creatures come as various kinds, each kind first appearing when and where the kind most like it already lives. Different kinds of living creatures seem to emerge from one another, to evolve out of one another. 
   That’s what the next chapter is about.
   
   
   

   
CHAPTER 3. 
Evolution

How life began
To get some idea of how the living world emerges from the physical world I’m going to run the process of evolution backwards. I’m going to run it back from us to a creature perhaps half as “evolved” as we are, perhaps halfway back to life’s emergence. 
   Hydra is a simple creature about an eighth of an inch long that lives in pond water. It’s a simple tube closed at one end with an opening at the other (its mouth) surrounded by tentacles. Scattered over its body is a network of nerve cells. With the help of these nerve cells the hydra can contract and extend its body and its tentacles to feed and to move, even in such complex ways as by somersaulting its body. 
   To us, how a hydra feeds and moves looks purposive, as if it wants to survive. Yet it evolved way before we did. As satisfactions of its needs for food and movement it has that simple network of nerves. Satisfactions of its needs got written into the very stuff it’s made of. 
   To visualize life emerging from matter, just imagine evolution running back down from the hydra to creatures consisting of a single cell, and from there down to where life first succeeded in getting its needs written into matter.
Tech note: Imagine, on the early Earth, a pond in shadow but lit with a vertical shaft of sunlight. The sun’s energy is dispersed into the surrounding coolness by convection currents in the water, that at the pond edge cool, sink and are eventually drawn back to the shaft of light. 
That shaft of energy will drive any process capable of dispersing it. Take for example, adenosine tri-phosphate, ATP, that in our bodies act to transfer energy from where it’s produced to where it’s needed around the cell. Or how ammonia transfers energy in refrigerators, absorbing heat as it turns from liquid to gas, giving it off as it turns back from gas to a liquid. Such a chemical could do the dispersing in our pond. 
Then suppose there’s another chemical that can act as a catalyst to speed up the process. It might be made even more efficient by the two chemicals being sequestered inside a lipid film, then by processes that deposit more of these chemicals in the lipid capsule, and other processes that make these capsules divide and regrow. The shaft of sunlight will have written into matter a solution for its “need” to be dispersed. 
This could mark the first step in life’s evolution. Another would be something that could duplicate and broadcast these capsules. 
Life progressing
Now let’s return to the hydra and plot the path of evolution in the other direction, going forwards in time. 
   Living creatures’ most pressing needs are for stuff to feed on and to grow. Evolution’s very creative, there’s no end to its ingenuity in coming up with ways to satisfy those needs. Along the hydra’s tentacles, for example, there’s another kind of cell that the hydra can use to stun its prey. It comes with a small hair trigger. When prey touches one of those triggers a tiny harpoon shoots out injecting poison into the prey. Another example, this time a plant. The Venus flytrap comes equipped with muscles in its leaves and trigger hairs so when insects set off those triggers the leaf closes around them and slowly digests them. That’s two more examples of satisfactions for creatures’ needs getting created and built into them.
   More complex living creatures like us come packed with clever provisions like that.
   
   
    

CHAPTER 4
Assessing the Genome

In the nucleus of every cell in our bodies there’s a long molecule or set of molecules made up of small molecules, joined together end to end, of a type referred to as DNA or RNA. The order those small molecules come in acts like writing. That writing spells out almost all the provisions needed for making a creature grow and maintaining it alive. All those provisions come written along that long molecule. It’s the creature’s genome.
   Genomes may come locked away in the nuclei of cells, but they act like independent living creatures. As cells divide their genomes divide too, one copy being allocated to each new cell. Each creature gets its genome from its parents, so genomes pass down through the generations. Since life began four billion years ago genomes have never stopped spreading, from cell to cell and from generation to generation. 
   You’d think for something to be copied all the time it would have to be simple. Yet genomes are by far the most complex molecules we know about, much more complex than any molecule in our brains. Our genome consists of three billion of those smaller molecules. Translate that into a necklace, strung eight beads to an inch, one bead for each of those three billion smaller molecules, and that necklace, three billion beads long, would stretch from New York to Tokyo. 6000 miles. We’ve nothing to compare that to, to tell us what it could be capable of.
   It's a vast amount of information, corresponding to a huge satisfaction of needs. Writing for 20,000 proteins takes up less than a fiftieth of our genome. And all of it must be necessary; any we didn’t need we’d have lost as happens to free-living creatures when they become parasites: their genomes lose the code for free-living those creatures no longer need. 
   What is all that information needed for? Almost everything. Take how fur lies on the head of a cat. Cats need unobstructed vision both into the distance to hunt and close up to eat their prey. To ensure that their vision is unobstructed, hairs around their eyes are short and lie flat against the skin, all pointing away from each eye like petals of a flower. Hairs thin out in front of their ears, are absent inside the ear, are short and lie flat on the back. Hairs are absent on the cat’s nose, and they’re short around the mouth, except for a few long whiskers. So the cat genome codes precisely for all the hairs covering the cat’s face: the length, lie, density, and stiffness of every one. 
   Now bear in mind that this precision and complexity of form applies to everything about the cat’s body—its eyes, its sense of smell and taste, its heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, digestive enzymes, claw production, muscle attachments to bones and so on. That could be more information than you’d need to send a rocket to Mars, yet it’s all there, written in the cat’s genome.
   It's genomes that carry scripts for elaborate devices such as the hydra’s stinging cells and the insect-trapping leaves of the plant I described above. In our genomes come written the complex instructions needed for constructing devices like our ears and eyes. 
   
Brains 
One particular device, key to the evolution of creatures like us, is the brain. Creatures like the hydra and jellyfish have needs you can satisfy with a simple network of nerves. More complicated creatures like sea slugs come with networks of nerves looking more like subway maps that provide dedicated routes for signals to travel directly to where they were needed. In more evolved creatures, nerves congregate, first as in insects into “ganglions”—knots of nerves where signals can be more efficiently sorted—then as in mollusks into brains. The octopus has a brain in each leg as well as one in its head. Finally came creatures with backbones and a single brain in their heads that feeds signals down a spinal cord able to carry out even more elaborate behaviors. 

What drives evolution 
Genomes are special in carrying written along them all the scripts needed to grow and maintain a living creature. They’ve been around without a break since life first began. As living creatures became more complicated, involving more script, the genomes carrying those scripts grew longer. 
   So, not much question, living creatures evolving is going to have a lot to do with genomes. 
   
   
   


CHAPTER 5
Minds
   
How can the various parts of a body know where they belong? They do seem to. Take a hydra, for example. Mash it into a clump of separate cells and in a few days those cells will have reorganized themselves back into the hydra’s original form, resuming its usual behavior. Each cell will have migrated back through physical space to where it belongs! 
   In effect, it’s as if each cell has a mind, able to read the other cell’s minds, together forming a single group mind that “knows” the creature’s original form and where each cell belongs in it. 
   Here’s another example. Cut a planaria worm in half and each half will figure out what’s missing and grow it back, precisely, including new eyes and brains, in the right position in physical space. It’s as if the worm can tell what’s missing and figure out what’s needed to replace it. Some creatures can replace almost any part of their body they lose, even parts of their brains. 
   So each cell in a creature’s body seems to “know” what kind of creature it’s a part of. But if so, what part of each cell is doing this “knowing”? What else could that be but the genome? It’s the only structure in a cell complex enough to “know” something. But this makes sense. Genomes “knowing” what kind of creatures they’re part of could account for how embryos—single cells—“know” how to grow in space and time into an entire adult. 
   How far apart can genomes be and still communicate with one another? If they communicate with one another to manage the growth of entire creatures, such as a whale, then they must be able to communicate over the adult whale’s length of 100 feet. 
   That’s a lot of “knowing.” Does that much “knowing” amount to a mind?
   What would it mean for genomes to have a mind? I think it would mean that a genome can think.
   Could molecules like genomes think? What we know about ourselves says, yes, they could. You may object that a genome is just a molecule and molecules can’t think but our brains consist of only molecules yet we can think. And the genome is a far more complicated molecule than any in our brains. Also, it’s been evolving for billions of years, who can set any limit to what that’s made it capable of? So, yes, there’s reason enough to conclude genomes could have minds, they could think.
   If genomes can read each other’s minds over distances of up to 100 feet, why not from one creature to another? This could account for how insects such as bees and ants show intelligence when gathered in a colony that they show little sign of as individuals. And we see creatures of entirely different kinds happily communicating. Bees and aphids work together as farmers and their livestock, algae and fungi cohabitate amiably as lichens.
   So we see networks of genomes’ minds appear to stretch among cells, throughout individual living creatures, to colonies, to varieties within species, to species, even to creatures of entirely different kinds. How far might this network extend? Maybe to a network of intelligence covering the entire living world. Each node in the network would correspond to a distinct mind managing the life served by that node and directing its evolution.
   I’m not the first to come up with such a suggestion. The Ancient Roman Stoics believed in just such an intelligence. They believed it was such an intelligence that maintained creativity and order throughout the entire natural world. What made humans special, they said, was this august intelligence embedding in each of us a small portion of its majestic wisdom. They referred to this wisdom embedded in us as the Microcosm, to the mighty intelligence in nature as the Macrocosm. Microcosm and Macrocosm, they said, each reflected the other. What you wanted to find out about either of them you could learn by studying the other. 
   And this makes sense. Before genomes could devise and embed minds in us, wouldn’t they have to have evolved minds themselves? To come up with minds to give us they’d probably draw on what they already knew about their own. Borrowing from the Stoics, we can expect to find their minds similar to ours. 
   Looking at evolution this way tells us it’s not primarily about living creatures, it’s about genomes. To really understand evolution we need to figure out how genomes evolved.
   At first, genomes evolved extremely slowly. For a billion years living creatures were tiny and simple. It took another billion years for a second kind of living creature to emerge from the first, also tiny and relatively simple. A further billion or so years after that, one of one kind got itself lodged inside one of the others, resulting in a much more complicated cell with its genome confined within a nucleus. Those genomes developed complicated sex properties that provided evolution with separate channels within which to innovate. That’s the kind of cell that creatures with more than a single cell are made of.
   What took so long? It took that long, over three billion years, for genomes to evolve a mind. But once they did they made up for lost time with a remarkable burst of creativity. In just twenty million years they came up with almost all the kinds of complicated creatures we know about today. Then within each kind they set about creating a huge variety of even more complex creatures. Among them, very recently, came human beings. We have by far the biggest brains of creatures our size, and hands, vocal apparatus enabling us to speak, and a wonderful palette of thoughts and feelings. 
End note: Since we come with feelings, does that mean that genomes do too? We know we get at least some of our thoughts, feelings and behaviors from our genome—in each of us at puberty emerge the feelings and urges readying us for sex. We don’t have to be taught that, those feelings and urges develop in us naturally, as a complex and coordinated program of feelings and behaviors. 
I don’t see how logically we can deny feelings like those to genomes themselves. For us to have those feelings there must be corresponding code written along our genome. If the genome can embed those mental abilities in us, I don’t see how it could without possessing similar abilities itself.


  
  

CHAPTER 6
How evolution works
   
Nowadays, biologists trace how living creatures evolved by studying their genomes. They tell species apart by what’s written along their genomes. They refer to those stretches of writing along a genome as genes. When one species evolves into another they say, essentially that’s due to changes in their genes. 
   So to drive evolution genomes must be able to make changes to the genes they carry code for, the very same molecules they consist of. 
   Even if genomes come with minds, how could those minds make changes to the molecules those genomes consist of? I suggest, the same way we do. To commit something to memory our minds make changes in our brains, something purely physical. Later, we can draw on those purely physical brain cells to bring that information back to mind. Minds and brains are free to interact. Remember, they’re the same stuff, just with different properties and processes.
   So what I’m supposing is, all a genome has to do to evolve the living creature it codes for is just to think about it—bring code from the genes of that creature to mind, think about the creature again, any new thought registering back as changes to those genes. Merely by thinking about it, a genome can evolve one kind of creature into another. 
   Hey presto! A new theory of evolution. Genomes can simply think new species into existence.
   And a new answer to the question that so puzzled Darwin: what is a species? Our answer: a species is a thought in the mind of a genome.
   Wait a moment! By supposing a genome can think into existence new kinds of living creatures, am I invoking the supernatural? I know, that’s how making this connection between mind and matter can seem at first, when applied to the genome. But remember it’s something that, as we register our thoughts in brain tissue and later bring them back to mind, we’re doing all the time. In us, mind and matter can interact freely. So why not in the genome?
   
How genomes satisfy creatures’ needs
Among life’s processes I included creatures’ needs being paired with corresponding solutions. Bees’ need for food for their young was satisfied by them being able to produce honey. Another example: vertebrates emerging onto land from the sea needed amplification apparatus in their ears to help them hear better in air. The solution was for bones associated with the gills of fish to be shrunk and moved up into the head and into precise position in their ears. Both these innovations came about, I’m saying, by genomes thinking them up. 
   What’s involved in genomes being able to create innovations like this? First they have to be able to read their creatures’ minds—well, they would wouldn’t they, since they made those minds. Being able to read their creatures’ minds makes genomes aware of those creatures’ needs. They then come up with solutions that they can think into those creatures’ genes. That accounts for why genomes have grown to be so long over the course of evolution, as they wrote into themselves code for an unending flow of ingenious solutions to creatures’ needs. 
   We now know of two sets of causes for things happening in our universe. There’s physics. And there’s mind. Recall my comparison of the Earth and Mars, how different the evolution of living creatures has made the Earth. I’m proposing that difference is because of minds, ours and the genomes’.
   
End note: We come with a multitude of innovations built into us. For example we’re born with several dozen cells in our brains that label things around us with directions and distances of them from us. We’re born with capabilities for memory, sensation, prediction, decision-making, doubt. We come into the world with a whole lot of equipment helping us think.
Drawing on this machinery we can then—by association and contradiction, by reason and logic, by being answers to questions, by being causes and their effects—come up with new meanings. Here’s an example: “Mother” and “Father” may be among the first meanings we form. From them we can construct “Motherland” and Fatherland,” the former the country where our mothers nurtured us, the latter the territory our fathers call on us to defend. And so on, as long as we live. As long as we live our stock of meanings continues to grow.
   
   

CHAPTER 7
Thinking and consciousness

We’ve two ways of thinking
We come with satisfactions for many of our needs already transcribed out of our genomes into our brains. There they can work automatically, without us having to be aware of them. For example, they can manage our breathing and our hearts beating. We can even drive an automobile automatically while thinking about something else. 
   Let’s refer to this kind of thinking as “autonomic.” It’s sometimes called the quick way. That’s one way we can think.
   But we humans are unique in having a second way we can think. And it involves consciousness.
   I arrived at this conclusion by borrowing from the Stoics. For me, their Macrocosm corresponds to the intelligence and creativity of the genome mind, their Microcosm corresponds to the intelligence and creativity embedded in each one of us by our genome. And just as their Macrocosm and Microcosm reflected each other, so do genome and human minds. That means we can learn more about ourselves by studying the genome mind, more about the genome mind by looking into our own. 
   Let’s give that a try. Genomes make species evolve by thinking about them. So for the genome thinking goes along with something evolving. Can we apply that to ourselves? Could thinking in us involve something evolving? How about thoughts? Could some of our thinking consist of thoughts evolving as they do in genome’s minds, one thought evolving into another, that thought evolving into another, and so on? Thinking like that, being driven by something evolving, could be very different from autonomic thinking.
   What could make it so different? Because how genomes think makes them hugely creative. Did they pass some of that creativity on to us? Can we recognize some of that creativity in how we think? 
   I think so. Sometimes we do feel creative, as if we can create genuine novelties. And it’s true, just look at the new kinds of bridges engineers keep dreaming up, kinds that are entirely new. So yes, we can think creatively, as genomes do. It’s how we built culture and created civilization.
   How can we tell when we’re thinking this way? By what we experience. As I can testify from my own experience and what I gather from reports by others, it’s when we’re being creative that we experience consciousness. Thinking creatively comes associated, somehow, with consciousness. 
   Here’s something else I experience as I engage in creative thinking; a relaxing of physical determinism. I seem to gain some control over physical matter. For example I can look wherever I want. As I do, my physical body registers what I want to look at, and brings it into focus. What’s happening is, muscles attached around the lenses in my eyes are stretching and relaxing in response to my conscious wishes. This is just one example of how while thinking consciously we have some control over physical matter, in this case those muscles in my eye, and the shape of the lens itself. 
   Can we now carry these insights back over to the genome? In us, thinking associated with something evolving induces consciousness. If what’s true of us is also true of the genome, genomes too will experience consciousness as they think. That, I’m going to suppose, is why it took so long for genomes to create creatures with minds. The global networked genome mind had to evolve not just to think, but to become conscious. Only then could it create, in a mere 20 million years, so many kinds of multicelled living creatures, and then figure out how to equip those creatures with minds of their own. And finally to embed in us minds capable, like its own, of creativity and consciousness. 
   Consciousness and creativity stand revealed as the primary powers of evolution. Needs can be satisfied in the physical world, a river can smooth out its flow by scouring out a wider river bed for itself. And needs of living creatures can similarly induce solutions that way; by taking the same route repeatedly they can beat a path. But only when genomes became conscious, with the creativity that accompanies it, could they proactively sense creatures’ needs and satisfy them on a huge scale, creating the magnificent creatures we know today. 
   What difference does consciousness make to us? When thinking autonomically, without consciousness, we can distinguish red and yellow from green, to know when to pick fruit that’s ripe for example. But when we’re thinking consciously we may grind rocks to give us red and yellow pigments, to paint a landscape involving sunset. Consciousness allows us to create in our mind’s eye the picture before we paint it. We can, in consciousness, create new meanings, available then to both our conscious and autonomic minds.
   With this insight into consciousness and creativity, in us and in the genome, we directly connect our discoveries of evolution and the genome to ancient Stoicism, to their intuition of a mind responsible for all the creativity and order in nature, and to that mind embedding some of its wisdom in us. Maybe by continuing where they left off we can join their wisdom to ours.
   Suppose we did. What might happen? Suppose we studied genomes as independent parts of the living world, as persons. Suppose we studied living creatures for the ingenuity in their genomes implied by how they evolved, what you might call engines of evolution. By incorporating these mental engines into our own minds we might succeed in passing on to future generations some of the genomes’ powers. 
   By starting now we might play some part in them becoming children of the genome.
   
   
End note: Have I accounted for consciousness? Can we now understand it? That depends. If for you an account of consciousness must be expressed in terms of physics, then no, I’ve not explained consciousness. But usually what we mean by understanding something is that we’ve been given an account of it consistent with the rest of our thinking. In terms of my story I think I do account for consciousness. And if you subscribed to the set of concepts I’ve framed it in I think my account of consciousness could result in you feeling you understood it.
   
2	Children of the Genome
   
   
	
   
   
The World of Life	2

   

   

   
Assessing the Genome	2

   

   
Minds	2

   
	
   
How Evolution Works	2