John-Dylan Haynes22 and his colleagues expanded Libet’s experiments in 2008 to show that the outcomes of an inclination can be encoded in brain activ… - Michael S. Gazzaniga

Primitive “bondmaker” molecules, early precursors of the RNA system, which bind nucleotides together, came into existence way before the first cells. So, too, did bondmaker molecules that developed the ability to join nucleotides together following a template — “copymakers.” These bondmakers and copymakers came into existence through random molecular re-sorting. It was the existence of copymaker molecules that set the process of evolution into motion. Natural selection chiseled living things into existence, but the requisite molecules for evolution — the bondmakers and copymakers — existed before life itself.

The issue that captured the church was the issue of ensoulment and when it occurred during development. A church council decided to call it at conception, instead of the time frame St. Thomas Aquinas had argued in the thirteenth century, which was at around three months of gestation.

Festinger was the intellectually intense discoverer of “cognitive dissonance,” the idea that when a personal belief is challenged by new information, we tend to ignore the new information in order to reduce mental conflict.