Science continued to evolve and in 1859 Charles Darwin wrote the ‘Origins of Species’ where he said
that a person’s traits were passed down from their parents. He believed something physical was passed
down from parents to their child in the form of hereditary traits which controlled the characteristics of
that child’s life. From this belief science set about on a mission to find out what controls our strengths,
intellectual, artistic and physical abilities and what determines our weaknesses such as disease,
addictions and challenging mental health.
100 years on from Darwin in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick hypothesised that the DNA molecule
in each of our 50-100 trillion cells, containing our genes, was the governing mechanism that controlled
the potential of our lives. From this hypothesis the ‘central dogma’ of biology was born. It was said our
genes control our lives. If you got a ‘fat gene’, ‘happy gene’, ‘success gene’, ‘depressed gene’, ‘alcoholic
gene’ etc. then that is what you would become. Basically our strengths, weaknesses abilities and
potential were all believed to be pre-programmed by our genes – great if you got a good set, pretty
miserable if you got a bad set. This became known as Genetic Determinism but the problem lies in that,
this was NEVER a scientific fact, it was a hypothesis that then became an unquestioned belief like so
many areas of our consensual reality.
Why?? Again it comes down to the disempowering agenda of the control system we explored in the
previous section. To believe that we are pre-programmed, fixed, physical machines and that we were
“born that way” is one of THE most disempowering beliefs that exist. It often leads to a subconscious
victim mentality, with no understanding that we are in charge of our destiny and have HUGE potential to
change. It also leaves no room for the power of the mind which we’ll be looking at shortly.
Fortunately, the current understanding at the leading edge of science shows us a completely different
picture of how life works. They have found that our beliefs, attitudes and overall mindset to life are the
all-governing factors in what happens in our body and inevitably our life. Reductionist, deterministic
science is beginning to lose steam – hurray!
Our genes have very little, if anything to do with our traits, personality, characteristics, abilities and
potential. In the Nature vs. Nurture debate, Nurture is king. It is our early programming and the way we
update and program our minds which determine the quality and success of our lives. Genes may directly
determine simple physical characteristics such as hair or eye colour but they do not determine our
psychologies. Dr Andrew Weil, professor and pioneer for complementary medicine studied nearly 1000
adults for a period of 9 years and found that people with high levels of optimism had a 23% lower risk of
death from heart related disease and a 55% lower risk of death from other causes when compared to
their pessimistic peers. This is a staggering insight as their physiology was not slavishly following the
dictates of their genes; instead it was deeply influenced by their state of mind and personality traits.
The bottom line is that our destiny does not lie in our genes but rather in our beliefs and this is
incredibly powerful in terms of expressing our full potential in the world.
Beyond Mainstream Science
Mainstream science has become rather dogmatic in its influence over society and cultures. It has
become the institution responsible for establishing the boundaries of what it is OK to accept as reality
and what it is not. In the early 19th century John Dalton discovered the world’s smallest particle – the
atom. For a long time consensual belief was that it was indeed the smallest particle that existed; in
hindsight, it was all we were capable of measuring at the time. Towards the end of the 19th century and
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