Book excerpt: Who am I? Why am I here? Is there a god? Do we have free will? Does it matter?We can answer these types of questions by taking a look into how our universe brought humans into existence. Starting at the beginning of time, everything in our cause-and-effect universe is the result of things that came before it. And it appears that everything exists along a spectrum. That includes all the celestial bodies as well as all the life on our planet.As we figure out more and more about the behaviors of animals, we gain an understanding of our "self", our actions and the meaning of life. We can even appreciate how cognitive reflection reconciles the mystery of how we can make those decisions without the free will in a deterministic universe. The journey of understanding human behavior inevitably leads to politics, religions, war, our legal systems and our ultimate death. All of these things are integral parts of the magnificent expedition through life.This is the story that science tells us of what it means to be a typical human existing along many different spectrums and where we fit into what is possibly a typical universe.