The description in the Urantia Papers telling how, 550 million years ago, the Life Carriers brought life to this planet causes problems for many readers, both new and old, who come across statements from scientific sources stating that life has been on this planet for in excess of 3 billion years.

   In this article I have attempted to throw light on the various possibilities for reconciling the information in the Urantia Papers and the evidence now being pieced together by our scientists, and to show how the findings of science have increasingly converged with what is stated in the Papers.

   To make sense of the Urantia Papers' presentation, several things are essential. One is appreciation of the different aims and purposes of the scientist and the revelators. In Section 5 of Paper 101, the revelators state, "Science deals with facts; religion is concerned only with values." We need to remember that factual truths of a materialistic nature that are so important to science and for history, nevertheless have little or no spiritual value.

   A major concern of the authors of the Urantia Papers appears to have been to provide us with a synthesis of "the apparently divergent sciences of nature and the theology of religion into a consistent and logical universe philosophy." (1105) The authors had to do this within the bounds of restrictions imposed by the rules on revelation. These are covered in Section 4 of Paper 101, and need to be read with a critical and unbiased mind. One such restriction proscribes impartation of unearned or premature knowledge, but this is a restriction that is qualified by permission being given to the authors to impart key information when considered essential.

    In providing us with a revelation that will achieve its purposes, the revelators were required to balance themselves on a knife edge, with the balance point adjusted, not in the direction of scientific fact, but on universe values. Wherever there was conflict, they give "value," not "fact," the priority. And, except in special circumstances, the science component had to remain anchored at the level of knowledge available to us humans prior to the mid-1930's.

   The story in the Urantia Papers of the origin of life is a mixture of both science and history, intermingled so as to contribute to the "universe frame" in which we think¹. ["Partial, incomplete, and evolving intellects would be helpless in the master universe, would be unable to form the first rational thought pattern, were it not for the innate ability of all mind, high or low, to form a universe frame in which to think." (1260)]

   This story is meant to endow us with a concept of how and why we came to be on this planet. It is not meant to be a collection of scientific "facts" by which lay people might impress others with their accurate advance knowledge of planetary history, nor is it meant to be an infallible science text for correcting the errors that scientists may make in their search for truth.

   As with other stories in the Papers, the story of life's origins is there to help each of us to formulate our own personal "universe frame." My guess is that our "frame" will remain personal--and erroneous to some degree-- even up to the time we attain Paradise. Thus the expectation that an infallible "universe frame" has been provided by the revelators in the Urantia Papers would be unrealistic. Now to the story itself.

   The Papers tell us that 550 million years ago, the Life Carriers returned to Urantia to initiate the original life patterns of this world and to implant them in the hospitable waters of the realm. (667) A requirement was that this life plasm would contain "the full potential for all future developmental variations and for all subsequent evolutionary changes and modifications." (398)

   That this "full potential for all future developments" was present in primitive life forms was totally in contrast to long-held human concepts about evolution, both at the time the Papers were received (mid-1930's) and right up until quite recently. These concepts were forced to change when the reality of the so-called "Cambrian explosion" of 540 million years ago was recognized.

   This change in scientific opinion appears to have been catalysed by a re-interpretation of the evidence contained in the remarkable fossil deposits of the Burgess shales in western Canada. One description of the Cambrian explosion states: "In a burst of creativity like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole of the animal kingdom."

   In actuality, the concept that evolution was entirely from the very simple, and then, step by step to the complex was already in trouble, even before the discovery of the "Cambrian explosion." Geneticists studying mutations in fruit flies had found that genes that control morphogenesis, particularly of limbs, consisted of a bundle of associated genes that together were given the name "homeobox." DNA experiments with these genes showed that the same kind of controlling homeobox was already present in a range of invertebrates, including even worms, and was also present in higher animals such as the frog. Hence this finding that the