whereweallcamefrom
When you look around, you see all kinds of people. Where do they all come from? They all come from their mother’s belly. And where did their mothers come from? They, too, came from their mother’s belly. And so did their mothers and their mothers before them. And so on and so on, all the way back. Thousands, millions of years back. This is the only way anybody ever came into the world. All the animals around us came into the world this way. A female is made pregnant by a male and bears a new individual into the world.
Our ancestors
Over millions of years everything changed gradually. This change is called evolution. Our ancestors of 5 million years ago were more like apes. But they, too, were borne by their mothers.
So we can go back further and further. Sixty million years ago our ancestor slooked perhaps like prairie dogs. And before that? We don’t know. But if we go back far enough, we come to the beginning of life. This beginning was also gradual: larger and larger molecules were formed from the elements that were present in the universe and became big and complex enough to reproduce themselves. And from that small beginning came the vast variety of plants and animals that have lived and died in the world.
Evolution
So this is the story of our evolution in a nutshell. When you come to think of it, we are really made up of the same stuff as the universe. The difference between us and a piece of rock is enormous, and yet at the lowest level we all consist of the same electrons and quarks, tiny bits of energy smaller than the atom. The differences we see are really differences in the way these electrons and quarks are organised. Humans are made up of such a high degree of organised complexity that we are the most intelligent life form in the world. No other creature can talk and write about where they come from.