Kashif Khan - What Does Our DNA Say About Evolution?

Welcome, everyone. We're going to dive into something that can be controversial.

We're looking at human evolution and why I say controversial because depending on where you look and what you follow, science says, yeah, it's very clear there's a path to how we got to who we are. And it's evolutionary in nature, meaning that we are inheriting the genes or traits or legacy of our ancestors, not only as family but also as species. Meaning that there's cross species, evolution.

Religion and some other groups say that, well, that's not what happened. We showed up the way we were and we didn't come from any other species or animal, etc. And we came to this planet the way we are. So what's the truth? Well, it's not only did we evolve and is there proof of it, but it's also, are there different ways that evolution could have happened? And we're gonna. By the time we get through this, you'll understand a little bit more about what I'm thinking and what we're saying.

For example, the belief right now is that evolution is linear, that we today are the best that this planet has ever seen. We started from something lesser, and you can go back however many billions of years you want, and that continued to progress into who we now are. So that's the belief that there's this upward trajectory of evolution and we keep getting better and better and better. And in the future, there's also going to be our, you know, our lineage, our progeny that will be better than us. Is it possible that evolution or this changing species is more cyclical? Maybe it doesn't continue to go up in a line. Maybe it goes and there's a plateau and then there's a replacement. Maybe there's something else altogether that happens. And that's what we're going to explore here today. And the really cool thing is that there's hints in our DNA, there's clues that are telling us what happened.

There's still science that needs to be applied to it. There's still sort of adoption and belief that needs to be spread. But I have some thoughts here on what our DNA is saying. So, first of all, we do see evolution in animals. It's clear that there's things going on and future generations adopt, learn, change from the ancestors. And I put out a post once on social media about how elephants are being born without tusks. So what's going on there? The elephants without tusks are the ones that are not being hunted for their ivory. And so as an Evolutionary and sort of, you know, safety of the species function. The next generation is being born without tusks, and it's the parents or ancestry without tusks who survived to begin with. They weren't hunted, so they're passing down their genes. So we do see evidence of next generations changing because of what the current generation experience. You can deny that certain genetic code is passed on and things change. Meanwhile, I don't think the question has to be so broad that is evolution real or not? It could be. Hey, we've seen evidence of evolution in animals or plants, but does it happen the same way in humans? Maybe it's a different question.

We know, and I've said this before, that around 200,000 years ago, we changed. And what do I mean by that? I mean that there was some occurrence of who we became.

Versus the species that was there before us, the primates. That should have taken millions of years if you're going down the evolutionary path in order to change the way we change, which means that our brains became 50% larger. So if you compare us to the primates from who we think we came from, or the Neanderthals, whatever, our brains became 50% larger seemingly overnight.

This does not speak to an evolutionary path. This speaks to a rapid change. Something else happened. Our current brain capacity is the same of those people of 200,000 years ago. There was a flip, a switch that was flipped, and we changed. We also developed new features cognitively. A lot of this is driven cognitively. When you look at how we're different.

Our neocortex became a lot larger, which allowed for certain traits and certain activity. There's certain human features that appeared seemingly overnight, again at that time around 200 to 250,000 years ago. So we then start to ask, how did this happen? At the same time, what changed? And there's science that speaks to this. So there's plenty of published research out there that talks about how things change at that time and what actually happens, which doesn't speak to, again, a long term evolutionary roadmap versus a rapid change, some form of intervention. Where did that intervention happen? We don't know. We don't have the answers to that. But what we do have the answers to is that the research is now pointing to something changed. And here's what changed. So human chromosome number two, it seems as if there was a fusion that happened. You can literally see a pinch if you look at human chromosome number two. And there was a fusion that happened and we still don't know how or why. Or what drove that. So there was primate genetics. That's true. There was primate genetics. But then there's human genetics that looks like a fusion of the primate genetics. So it's not like the primate gene evolved into who we are. It looks like the combination of these two primate genes fused and created something new.

So you see this pinch and it's a gene editing. If you look at the way it was done, it was done for the purpose of stability, meaning that this was meant to exist long term and continue. And it was done right. So we are just now starting to discover CRISPR technology that can do this. We know it's true, we do know that gene fusion editing and I'm going to get a little more into that is possible.

We don't know how it happened then. So what's the outcome? Like I said, we now have a larger neocortex with a sort of more powerful brain function. There's a gene called TBR1 which is responsible for 76% of this size change in our brains and our neocortex, which leads to things like sympathy. We feel things that the animals around us don't feel, compassion. So we can actually treat people in certain ways or understand or come with sympathy or empathy and have this compassion about us that you don't see in other animals. Emotions in general. So the way we feel, the way we filter this, this experience that we have through feelings is unique to us and unique to our brain capacity. That the huge number of emotions and the variability and the nuances and how we can feel is unique to us. If you look at something like a reptile, well, they have in the serotonin gene, which we also have this reptilian response where they don't have a, maybe they have a fight or flight. There's 100% safety. Snake is sitting on the ground and then attack. And there's nothing in between. There's no consideration, there's no I don't feel right, there's everything is good and then snap and attack. So obviously humans are evolved way beyond that. We can have many layers of emotions in between the safety and that decision of it's time to attack. And it actually takes a lot to drive us there. We do have reptilian genetics in us in terms of that reptilian response, that serotonin response, that ultra sensitivity to stimulus and stimuli that may cause us to react to certain things. But in general we can feel all the nuances in between. So we now look at that and we also see that we don't Know what we look like before, we know that. We also know that this fusion, what we're talking about, never happened before. So this one point in time, this 200,000 years ago when this happened to us, and ever since then, it also never happened again.

So this very unique nuance of evolution, which is this ongoing ladder of continued improvement versus a very purposeful change where these chromosomes were fused, we still don't know how it happened, which created a ripple effect of this cognitive power, namely the neocortex expanding in size, a 50% larger brain, which leads to capacity, computing power, and certain genes that are driving this in us, namely that TBR1 gene. So again, we don't know what, like what we look like before. We don't know if this has ever happened. And we haven't been able to find any other case of this in history. And we also can't find it ever happening again. So very unique circumstance would this happen. So the interesting thing about this fusion is usually what happens is some of you have heard of telomeres. So telomeres are these sort of caps to your genes. And you can actually use your telomeres to understand your biological age. If you have been abusing your body, if you have been, you know, under toxicity, stress, lack of sleep, the things that lead to aging, outward aging that you can see. Well, you could actually measure your telomeres. There's tests you can do, certain blood tests that will tell you how worn down your telomeres are. There's the trial end caps to your DNA that are meant to be that sort of rubber or bumper that absorbs all the damage.

That's usually where these changes happen. Right. You'll see evidence of sort of a cut slice fusion connection. That's naturally what our genes will do. But this fusion that happened 200,000 years ago happened right in the middle. It was a splice.

So you literally see a pinch connection and this splice that puts them together, which again, today we are just starting to utilize CRISPR technology for this purpose. And we have not yet to date done this in humans, and in fact we're struggling to do it in animals. There's isolated sort of jurisdictional products that have been done. I know that about two years ago, maybe a year ago, FDA approved a trial for some condition of the eye where we were able to splice and edit and fix this particular localized problem. But head to toe adoption, where you are now a different version of yourself, your genetic code and every one of your 50 trillion cells is now different, that we have not Accomplished, but this is what happened to us. So again, we did change. We certainly changed, but. But we did not. If you look at things the way that we look at them for 200,000 years ago and you apply what evolution is meant to look like, we haven't done that. So there was a rapid change overnight, and then we continue to then be those people. And of the genetics of 200,000 years ago. So that's what we see.

Another area, we see it human chromosome number seven. So the Fox P2 gene has been completely stable for 75 million years. You see it, you go way back. It's of, you know, call it primates, Neanderthals, you go way back. We then somehow created this new snip in the gene, and that snip made it possible for our brain to connect with our tongue in a way that created complex language. This just happened again at that same time. At the same time where this fusion happened, where you connect these two primate genes and all of a sudden you have this human chromosome that looks different.

We also had this happen where there was a stability created around this particular gene, snp, that allowed us to speak the way we speak, to develop language, to sing. Animals don't sing. Animals don't. They will mimic. They'll mimic sound, but they truly can't sing the way we sing. They cannot adopt complex language. They will mimic again sounds and sound as if they're speaking, but they cannot adopt and use complex language. So this also happened 200,000 years ago at the exact same time, this rapid change, which was not adopted from any particular species prior to us. Again, it was like a switch that was turned on at that time.

So how do we know this is true? Well, we know that we're able to extract fossils from the earth and now test the DNA. How do we look at, you know, dinosaurs and other things, even plants and trees, we have the ability to look at old DNA and understand it. And we know that when we look at DNA of that time, there was this change and prior to it was completely different. What we don't see is 200,000 years ago, all of what I'm talking about, and then maybe 3, 4, 500,000 years ago, some slight path towards that, or a million years ago, some changes towards that. We don't. What we see is a completely different picture pre, 200, 250,000 years ago, and post again, a change, not an evolution. So do we then not evolve? Well, I mean, I myself talk about warrior genetics and I myself talk about how I am like my ancestors. Who lived in the Middle east under high levels of stress. And so I adopted what's called warrior genetics. I thrive with reward. I strive and drive myself with seeking reward and winning and challenges. And that is very clearly inherited from my ancestors. But it's not what we think to be evolution, meaning my ancestors. My ancestors didn't change me. My ancestors gave me certain versions of genes which their predecessors also had the options of. Three versions of the DRD2 gene, which determines how well you bind dopamine. There's three potential outcomes for that gene. You know, slow, medium, fast, how, how well do you. We look at the alleles of A and G and is it aa, AG, or gg? And you can then determine to what degree do you bind open, how hard dense are your receptors. So again, that's not evolution, because you didn't change something. You didn't change somebody's dopamine levels, you didn't change somebody's receptor levels. What you did was you gave them an allele, a version of and one of three options which were the same options that have always existed. Now, depending who you mate with, who has the AG or GG or aa, you then each pass on one version of that gene to your children. And I happen to get passed on both of the fast versions. But with my children, if my wife is a AA or ag, she could potentially give them back one version of the slow. And that sort of tennis match can keep going for generations or multiple and keep changing and keep changing. That's not what we call evolution. So evolution is a continual improvement and a continual, ongoing. I'm changing because of what my ancestors did. I'm now a better version of that species. What we're actually seeing and what we sort of refer to and assume as evolution is this warrior genes that I have, which is I am a warrior, I strive, I thrive, I drive towards reward because of what my ancestors did, but only because both sets of my ancestors passed me on these same version of these genes. It's not because.

They went through something and their genes changed and now they give me a better version, a software update. That's not what happened and that's not what happens. What happens is you get a version that that person used and they're now in the context that they're matched to. So if they were fast, gg, low dopamine receptors, you know, fast clearance, so they move on quickly and they can shift gears quickly, well, then they're naturally going to fall into a context where that's how they thrive. They will be the warrior as opposed to the accountant or the thinker in the back of the room. They're the person that's out there making change, front lines. So we look at these contexts and we kind of see, we look at it backwards. That person was a warrior under stress, so they passed on their warrior genetics. No, it's because they were a warrior that they were able to fit in that context and thrive in it. And then they pass those alleles on versions, not an evolution of the gene.

So in that context, you know, what we often call evolution is just selecting what version of the gene that is best for us because of our context. And then depending on again, who you have your child with, what do they have and what is also getting passed on, you can go right back to where you started. It could be a never ending loop.

So a really cool example of something different now is epigenetics. And I'm going to give you a cool example of this where what I just spoke of is what version of what gene do you have? Which is how we believe evolution happens. There's also epigenetic expression. So how do your genes actually express and if you can pass that on to your children, then did they evolve? Did they change? Are they a new version of themselves? So what's actually going on there? I'm going to give you an example. So we all know that for some time the British ruled India. The British, if you look at it in today's terms, and this is shocking, and most people don't hear this, but There was approximately $40 trillion adjusted for today's dollar taken from India. $40 trillion of assets stolen by the British through the British India Company. But if you think about that amount of wealth, I don't know where you can compare today, but India was the richest country at the time, largest economy in the world. And slowly that sort of got chipped away at and $40 trillion of assets left. So what did that leave the country with? Well, it led to famine. It led to nearly 40 famines in this short window of while the British was ruling India. So people went from living this life of luxury that the world hadn't seen to being constantly struggling with even finding food. So what happened is their bodies adjusted to storing fat. And this is not a question again of evolution. Where did the people pass on this ability and now humans store fat? Or is it that the people that had the ability to store fat survived and their children thrived?

So what actually happened? We also then have to adjust for their ability to not put on muscle because Muscle requires calories. So in order to maintain muscle mass, you need more calories. Now, if you go look at India today and you look at what the population looks like.

They look very different than some other countries. Of course, when you come here and adopt a North American lifestyle, I'm in Toronto, things change. But if you go to India and look at a young man in India, you're going to see a very slim, wiry frame, very light, lean on the muscle for the most part, I'm not talking about everybody, but for the most part, and that was an adjustment of who survived. Well, the people that needed less calories, and so they passed on the genetics of the ability to survive with less food, and that required less muscle mass. So the people with more muscle mass would need more calories, didn't do so well, and maybe weren't able to have children. So again, it's not a question of people changing as a. As in, as a civil, as a. Sorry, as a genotype, but more as that genotype is what passed their genes on. So that leads to what we see as evolution, meaning that now all of a sudden, this population is different, entirely different. This one pocket is now proliferated and become the majority because that's who was able to survive in the context that they were in. So it's not that everybody received these genes, is that those people had children and those people passed their alleles on.

We also find in Indian people the epigenetics of trauma because of so much struggle and pain and hunger that happened for so many decades in the epigenetic code. And this is different than genetics. You see the expression of trauma, you see that there's a lot more metabolic disease in South Asian people.

What we see is that the need to fast and the need to have less calories is how this population now thrives. And so fasting is a big part of the culture. Low calories is a big part of the culture, and again, until you leave the culture. But decadence is also still a big part of the culture. And this is why you see that in the city that I'm in, in Mississauga, we have the largest heart center in Canada, the largest heart hospital. It's also the hub of where all the South Asians live. And we're told that genetically we have bad hearts. So we've evolved into having bad cardiovascular health. The truth is we've evolved into having bad metabolic health because our ancestors didn't eat for so many years, generations. So who we came from, the people that survived, which is partly Why I have warrior genetics. People had to fight to survive.

These people and who they pass their genes onto, the children, including myself, are not designed for high volumes of calories. We were designed for very little. We were designed for lean muscle mass, for storing fat. That's why it's such a struggle for South Asian men to lose their bellies. It's. You can do everything right and you still have that fat on the gut. It's challenging because this is. This is what. These are the genes that survived and thrived. And so the genes didn't change.

What we see as evolution is the genes changing, instructing a certain type of person to become the population now, right? So that or a certain trait, I should say, sorry, for a person to become who the population becomes. What's actually going on is who survives passes their survival mechanism on and you become like them, the alleles that you get from mom and dad. And guess what? If we go into a different context, if it was evolution, and why do I say all this? Because if it was evolution, there would be a constant continual improvement in that path. You would not be able to go back.

But we can, because like I said in the context of reward and my warrior genetics, and in this context of storing fat and in this context of people with lean muscle mass surviving and thriving, well, when the ancestors start to eat more and when I start to not need to be a warrior or when I start to have a relationship with somebody who isn't, their allele is going to be the one that wins. Right? We're no longer in a position of, you know, of needing to sort of thrive on less food.

I'm no longer in a population where everybody is fighting in a warrior. So I may end up having a child with someone who doesn't have those genetics and then that allele gets passed on.

So if evolution happened in the way we believe it happens again, this is why I asked that question in the very beginning. That.

Is it truly this ongoing forward trajectory of improvement, this ladder that we keep going up of getting better and better and better, that's what evolution means.

Or is it more cyclical in nature where.

Things are being utilized for whatever is our current reality, meaning our genetic code, and the people that thrive pass their alleles on and on in another layer because we have so much diversity and so much movement, alleles keep mixing. And so there's kind of this option pool of three genes, three gene variants per gene, for the most part. Many, many genes. And there's combinations of different people you can create. Right. And now depending what mom and dad gave you, you become who you are. So if you look at this much bigger picture, let's, let's, let's go like you know, 20,000 foot view. How cyclical can this get?

When you look at little clues that we have in history, you look at the Sphinx in Egypt. The Sphinx, as everyone knows, is that famous tourist attraction where there's a cat like body with a human face.

And we think that this happened a couple thousand years ago when the Egyptians were powerful. And we believe that's when the pyramids were built by the Egyptians for whatever purpose. We're still trying to figure that out. The level of perfection that they were able to work at, we still as humans today can't do that. Then you start to think, okay, there was this constant evolution. You know, Egyptians were who they are and we became a better version of them because we become smarter and better and faster. So meanwhile, when you look at the Sphinx, there's an anomaly that is known by historians, but we don't talk about because there's no explanation that fits science and the current scientific narrative. And again, there's more clues that point to the type of stuff we've just been talking about. When you look at the Sphinx, the wear and tear around the base is water damage.

The Sphinx is sitting in the middle of the desert.

The last time that there was water to that degree was pre 10,000 years ago, probably closer to 20,000 years ago. In fact, it's believed there was an ice age that maybe wiped a population out. So then this begs the question. Well, if there was, if the Sphinx existed when water damage was possible in that area of the desert, well that means they were there between 12 to 20,000 years ago.

Prior to the peak of that Egyptian civilization that we now know of. So who built the Sphinx?

And is it possible that there was civilization on Earth that was more intelligent than who we are today? Because they did figure out how to build pyramids that we cannot figure out today. They did figure out that with perfection when you got to the top, that all that peak was, was optimal. Those stones that are the size of buses being placed in outmost like optimal perfection that we can do today, we don't have the tools to do that today. So was there or were there people prior to us.

That because we believe that evolution happens in an upward trajectory, there's a ladder that we keep climbing. Can it happen more cyclically? Is it possible that there was people that existed 20,000 years ago, before the Ice age, they were far more advanced than us in technology. They were able to do things like build pyramids that you found. We find them in different places of the world. They're, you know, in South America, they're in Egypt. They're now being found under grass mounds that have been completely covered by forests.

And how, why and how did this happen? And the really cool thing just to dive into this, we're moving away from DNA. But if you look at that time where the Sphinx, Sphinx was, and if you look at astral maps or the stars.

And you calculate back to about 10 or 12,000 years ago, the Sphinx actually would have been facing a. It would have been facing an exact constellation that actually mirrors this sort of lion like image. It would have been literally facing. It doesn't do that today, by the way. It doesn't do that 2000 years ago also at the time of the peak of the Egyptian population. So there's these clues that point to perhaps we don't evolve in a straight upward ladder. Perhaps it's more cyclical. Perhaps something happened 200,000 years ago that caused a change like we discussed, that we no longer, or I shouldn't even say we, that a population was no longer like who it was, or we appeared and got engineered into who we are, or there was some kind of rapid conversion. Again, the why and how, we don't know. There's no. And this is why science is struggling with even looking at this, because it's so counterintuitive to what science believes to be true. It also speaks to some force that is outside of what we believe brings us down that evolutional path. And that's also why science is afraid to look at it. Because there's things that you can't explain and there's things that maybe are explained through, you know, the energy of the universe, through religion and God depend. You can go down any path. There's multiple paths you can go on that could explain this in other ways beyond our current narrative of how animals evolve. And so this isn't being picked up on in terms of deeper research, but there's plenty of publications to tell us that this is exactly what happened. So if this happened 200,000 years ago, how rapidly did those people evolve and what level of technology did they get to where potentially the Sphinx and the pyramids are much older than we think, and that was only 20,000 years ago. How many times did this happen? How many civilizations were there that we don't know about, for whom? How many ice ages or how many natural disasters wipe them out? And then we rebuild and we come back and then we rebuild and we come back and what we're doing to ourselves today, with climate and, you know, social and war and everything that's going on in the world, Doomsday Clock is in the worst position it's ever been. Now, I want to give you bad news, but that's where we're at. So is it possible for this to happen again? That if this is what happened, might it happen again? Might we reach some peak and then start over again? Whereas we believe we're just going to keep getting better and better and better and better. So there is evidence, like I said, of evolution. You can see in animals that they inherit, like I gave you the example, the elephants, they inherit the survival traits of their, of their ancestors in an evolutionary format where they keep getting better. We haven't seen evidence of this in humans. And this is the bigger question. It's a different question in humans. We see something very different. We are the same. Like I said, we haven't changed from 200,000 years ago. There was a flip that was. There was a switch that was flipped. We became who we are. 50% larger brain, larger neuroco cortex, the ability to process emotions, the ability to sing and speak. We became who we are. At that point, physical features and traits also changed and just overnight became true, which weren't there, didn't exist prior to.

We also know that there was a fusion that happened that is hard to explain. So these two chromosomes came together and we were a new entity that was unlike anything prior to us. So how did this all happen? That's the question we now have to answer. But that starts with science. Even on believing that this is true, the publications, again, the science is there for each piece, but you have to stitch it all together and understand that possibly there was a different path. So those are my thoughts on evolution. This is what I believe to be pertinent in terms of if you're trying to discover and understand what actually happened.

That again, it wasn't this path of constant improvement. It was something much different.

And the things that we see that are nuances or hints towards evolution today, they are sort of, as I said, getting versions of genes from the people who happen to be your parents who thrived in that past context. But those other versions of those genes still exist on other people. And so you might end up. Your next layer of progeny may end up right where your ancestors started. There's no upward trajectory. It's just a constant exchange of genetic traits that keep making us different. And based on your context, you either thrive or you don't because you're either wired it for wired for it or you're not. And just like I told you about what happened in India, you went from.

The most successful country in the world, historically the biggest economy ever, to abject poverty and 40 some odd famines in a very short period of time that led to a certain genotype and phenotype surviving and thriving. And now that's leading to a whole other phenomenon where today evolution, if you look at it that way, South Asian people have crazy metabolic health and cardiovascular diseases because they're not designed for food, they're designed for starvation. That will change because again, the right people for that right context will survive and all of a sudden they will be the people having children and dominating etc etc, etc. So that's how we look at it. I'm sure you're going to have questions. Go ahead, reach out to us. I hope to bring some experts on the topic in to discuss this a little further because it's such a deep topic and I hope I haven't offended anybody. It is controversial to some regard, but this is just me reiterating what I've learned and seen and I hope that's helped you in some way or the other. Again, questions, please reach out. I'm happy to dive into this deeper. Thanks for joining us today.