"In all the world, and perhaps in all the Universe, there's no greater question one can ask than the question of one's own origins. For us, as human beings, this comes up often in our early childhood: we see, touch, and experience the world around us, and wonder where it all comes from. We look at ourselves and those around us, and wonder about our own origins."
"For millennia, we had only stories to be our guide: mythologies and untested, unsubstantiated ideas that sprung forth from human imagination. However, the enterprise of science has, for the first time in the history of our species, brought to us compelling, fact-based answers to many of these questions that enable us to make sense not just of nature, but of the story for how we came to be."
Human beings experience profound curiosity about their origins from early childhood, prompted by observations of the natural world and the heavens. For millennia, mythologies and untested ideas served as origin explanations. Scientific advances in the 19th through 21st centuries have provided compelling, fact-based answers across biology, chemistry, and physics. Scientific knowledge enables reconstruction of a narrative for how humans and the cosmos originated and evolved. Biological evidence traces modern humans to a continuous, unbroken chain of life extending about four billion years. Genetic inheritance comes from a mother and father, each contributing half the genetic material that encodes proteins, enzymes, and determines many traits.
Read at Big Think
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