A Brief History of Everyone who ever Lived

Nothing living is fixed, and all creatures are four dimensional, existing in space, and also through time.

The Forer effect is a psychological phenomenon where people conclude that broadly true statements are accurate for themselves personally, when they are in fact generally true for many people. In 1948, psychologist Bertran Forer gave his students a personality test, and followed each one with a bespoke vignette of their character. They were then asked to rate their personalized analysis, which they did very positively - an average of 4.26 out of 5. Except they werent personalized at all. All the personality sketches were identical.

DNA is a clue, not a silver bullet. It takes skill and care to make that clue into something valuable.

We don’t have a definition of life, we have inadequate definitions of species. Life does its best to undermine our noble attempts to categorize living and the living-this is what makes it exciting.

Science is a process that strives to excise our limited view of the universe and our inbuilt prejudices from understanding an objective reality. Things are often not as they appear to us, but we invented and developed the scientific process to correct our subjective failings: data is king.

In early versions of the Book of Isaiah, written in Hebrew, there is a prophecy that uses the word “almah” to describe the mother of a boy called, “Immanuel”, meaning God is with us. Almah has no direct translation in English,nor in ancient Greek, but broadly means “young women” or “woman who has not yer bourne a child”. By the time of Jesus, the Jews had adapted Greek and Aramaic, and no longer spoke Hebrew. Almah became the Greek “parthenos” which has a more specific meaning as “virgin”. It’s the root of a biological term, parthenogenesis, used to describe the generation of young in some insects and reptiles in the obscene of a mole: a virgin birth. But in a mutated translation of a single word, the woman becomes a virgin, and the child becomes the Messiah, and the story of Jesus has instantaneously been transformed.