The human brain can hold far more information than one lifetime of memories and skills produces-but why? Such extensive, and apparently redundant, memory space has no reason to exist, at least according to Darwin's much-contested theory of evolution.

Darwin is wrong. We have a vast capacity for memory, suggestive of two possibilities-that we can pass inherited memories down through the generations and that someone or something designed us to do so.

By passing memories to our children, we attain a type of immortality. Our memories continue to exist past death, guiding...