If our perceptions are accurate then the opportunity of survival is very great. But if we are programmed with misperceptions and read the environment inaccurately, then that means we will inappropriately engage our responses. Consider an anorexic person looking in a mirror. While we may see that person as dangerously thin, the anorexic perceives himself or herself as very large and fat. That misperception signals their biology to get rid of more fat and that misreading of environmental cues can lead to their death. The significance is very clear: when our perceptions are inaccurate, our behaviors are no longer synchronized to support our survival.

Perception also controls the read-out of the genes. It is how we see life that determines which genes will be activated to provide for our survival. Again, emphasizing the role of misperception, if we inappropriately activate genes because we sent the wrong signal at an inappropriate time, then we can subvert the function of the biology and actually cause disease and dysfunction. We are not so much the victims of genes as we are the creator of our lives, selecting genes to control our systems, based upon our perception of reality.

It is true that we have a period of development from conception to the fetal stage wherein the body plan is being laid down and the structure is being coordinated by the genes. Information feedback between the embryo, its environment and the genes controls this developmental period. This is a period where genes are the primary source of control. From the fetal stage on, our perceptions of the environment determine what is going to happen to the rest of our development.

Genetic Engineering

Today we’re dabbling with genetic engineering. In so doing we’ve created a great number and variety of genetically engineered crops. What we are not considering is the consequence of putting those crops into the real world. We are now finding the engineered genes we put into certain genetically modified organisms moving through the ecosystem and being picked up and used by other organisms. For example, in efforts to make plants resistant to a poison that is used to kill surrounding weeds, scientists engineered crop plants with poison-resistant genes. It was later found that these plants passed the engineered genes on to all the other plants around them resulting in the creation of “super weeds” that no longer can be killed by the usual agricultural poisons.