I was sitting in my summer biology class in college 20 years ago, and I remember my mind being wowed. I remember the day, where I sat, and who was sitting next to me. We all come from the same mother. I looked at the teacher incredulously as he announced this matter of factly. I looked around at everyone and I thought shouldn’t we do something. Does the world know about this. This is incredible, revolutionary. Well, we left the classroom that day. And forgot.
How do scientists know that we come from the same mother – the link is found in the mitochondrial DNA.
“To say that we get exactly half of our DNA from our father and half from our mother is not quite true. One tiny piece of our DNA is inherited only down the female line. It is called mitochondrial DNA because it is held as a unique circular strand in small tubular packets known as mitochondria that function rather like batteries within the cell cytoplasm. . . . . Males, although they receive and use their mother’s mitochondrial DNA, cannot pass it on to their children. The sperm has its own mitochondria to power the long journey from the vagina to the ovum but, on entry into the ovum, the male mitochondria wither and die.
So each of us inherits our mtDNA from our own mother, who inherited her mtDNA intact from her mother, and so on back through the generations – hence mtDNA’s popular name, ‘the Eve gene’. Ultimately, every person alive today has inherited their mitochondrial DNA from one single great-great-great-. . .-grandmother, nearly 200,000 years ago.”
Are you also blown away? But maybe you knew this and forgot, as I did. You think to yourself, hey, how can that jerk over there be related to me. That jerk is my brother, literally. We forget what’s right in front of us. We forget what we carry within. We forget our unity.
I think that on those occasions when we remember who we are, we should remind ourselves of our inter-connectedness. On those days when it’s easy to acknowledge that we all indeed come from the same mother, we should remember our sameness. The more we make our unity conscious on average days, the easier it will be not to take that jerk so seriously the next time he or she is being a jerk. Because afterall he or she is related to me.
We can put a stop to the downward spiral of eye for an eye, revenge and hatred, retaliation and attack. We can. With conscious effort. No one is coming to save us. To love us. To pacify us. To unify us. It is up to us. We have all the knowledge, the ability, and the skill to live in harmony. It doesn’t take a genius. Or an elected official. Let us start with us. We already are unified. We just forgot.