In the mid sixteenth century, the Polish mathematician, Nicolaus Copernicus proposed putting the Sun at the centre of our solar system instead of the Earth. "The Earth was not the centre of all things celestial", he said, "but instead was one of several planets circling a sun, which was one of many suns in the universe"

Three centuries later, in 1859, Charles Darwin futher changed our view of ourselves, arguing that humans were a part of Earth's natural world, not separate from the biological systems which govern the lives of all other living things.

Developments of Copernicus's heliocentric idea of the origins of our place in the universe and Darwin's ideas of our kinship with prehuman ancestors, now gives us vast picture of our chemical origins.  The celestial canvas stretches from the enormous mass of lifeless stardust at the beginning of the universe to the tiny pocket of stardust that made the Earth and initiated the first biochemical reactions, which now power our bodies.

Zooscan develops this panorama.

There are profound connections between stars and the atoms that combine to drive human metabolism.  Just six numbers, imprinted in the 'big bang', by which the universe was initiated, determine the essential features of the physical cosmos.  If any one of them were 'untuned', there could be no stars and no life.  This realisation offers a redically new perspective on the universe and our place in it, and on the nature of physical laws and their biological principles.

From simple beginnings, complexity can emerge.  The evolution of life involves many emergences. The chemical reactions that allow cells to turn energy and atoms into biologically useful molecultes provides a long biochemical saga of life on Earth.  For a hundred years after Darwin, the only clues to the connection between humanity and the rest of nature were the sparsely scattered bones and artifacts our ancestors left behind on their journeys.  In the past twenty years a record of ancient human migrations has been provided in the DNA of living people.  This DNA record also provides the 'missing link' between humans and all other forms of life.  From tell tale mutations of DNA that occur at a steady rate, it appears that modern humans must have lived in Africa twice as long as anywhere else.  It is now calculated that all living humans are related to a single woman who lived roughtly 150,000 years ago in africa.  She was the key 'DNA Eve' to which all humanity is linked by a relatively simple ancestry.  Shared morphological characters and DNA controlled biochemistry provide the links to all other living organisms.  There is therefore a succession of great grandmother Eves going back millions of years in time to the origins of life.

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