How we come to be: Almost everything that leads to our existence

Our existence as human beings – conscious, emotional, active, responsive, self-aware - is a most remarkable thing. It depends on a very large number of different aspects of how things are, ranging from the existence of the Earth in a typical galaxy in an expanding and evolving universe; the way that all biology including the mind/brain emerges out of physics; and the evolution of living beings to be what they are through the process of Natural Selection, as momentously discovered by Darwin and Wallace. It includes the extraordinary way we each come into being, from simply not existing at all before conception and birth, to becoming breathing living beings; and then developing our capacities and awareness via developmental processes and social interactions of great complexity. This is all based in the underlying molecular biology – storage of information in the double helix of DNA, and reading that information via complex interactions mediated by RNA and proteins in the context of a living cell. All of this is in turn is based in the underlying quantum physics, with interactions between electrons, protons and neutrons described by the Schrödinger equation – the basic equation describing how all things evolve at very small scales.