Viruses, Genes, and Sin:

A look at Bioethics, the Bible and Theology

Table of Contents
1. Preface
2. Abstract
3. Introduction
4. The Bronze Age Milieu
5. The Breeding of Giants
6. The Ebola River Virus
7. Memes and Anti-Memes
8. The Imputation of Adam's Sin
9. The World, The Flesh, and The Devil
10. Modern Dilemmas

Preface

There will be a lot of conjecture in this book, some unavoidable, some avoidable through patient research. Alas, neither my profession nor my personality admit of much patience, but more importantly, the times are such that patience may perhaps be opposed to valor. Where I err in boldness, I hope and pray others will correct with patience.

Abstract

In this article we explore the connections between viruses, genes and sin. We attempt to show there are controlling analogies between the three categories that inform both theology and biology alike. Like viruses that seem to straddle the line between machine and organism, sin straddles the line between body and spirit. Both viruses and sin appear to be transmitted in similar ways, adding even greater significance to this controlling analogy. We argue that the Bible speaks quite explicitly to the relevance of genetics for sin, and that indeed, genetic engineering turns out to be one of the more serious sins of the Old Testament. Although it is difficult if not impossible to know fully the reasons for these prohibitions, we speculate on possible consequences of permitting genetic engineering. Nonetheless, the line between genes and viruses also appears to be blurry, with some viruses inserting their genome into the gene. Thus genetic engineering, genes, viruses and sin appear to be inextricably linked into a web of meaning that has taken on new urgency in this age of biological technology and medical miracles.

Introduction

The revolution in biotechnology of our present age mirrors the revolution in computer technology or communication technology. Yet unlike these latter hardware revolutions, the wetware revolution might be claimed to be the initiator of human civilization, for it was the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer that defined the beginning of the ancient civilizations of the Middle East. Despite this 5000-year history of biotechnology, much of the modern dilemmas of bioethics apparently have no historical antecedents: in vitro fertilization, cloning, life-support systems, transplantation, stem-cell research... However, we argue that the Bronze Age culture that spread like the Indo-European language completely across Europe, had already introduced genetic manipulation as a principle component of a complete socio-economic system. Therefore the earliest books of the Bible--the five books of Moses and Job--address and respond to this indigenous culture with laws and decrees intended to create and separate a new socio-economic system that would eventually supplant the "European" worldview. This culture war took 3000 years to reach fruition, from 1500 BC to 1500 AD, but eventually led to the flowering of science and culture that today we call the Renaissance. Perhaps not surprisingly, this highly successful synthesis is under attack today by many who would replace it with a resurrected descendant of the "European" worldview. To understand the present culture wars, therefore, one must understand the Bronze Age battles; why they were fought, what was at stake, and how victory was secured.



• A Timeline

When I began this study, I did not think that the analysis given below depended greatly on exact chronologies, that the discussion flowed naturally without dependence on dates, requiring only the weakest of temporal progression. However, many unanswered chronology problems surfaced and began to make the Neolithic-- Early Bronze Age transition a crucial part of the puzzle. David Rohl's re-dating of Egyptian dynasties, Iman Wilken's relocation of the Iliad to England, Ventris' deciphering of Linear B have all led me to the conclusion that the millennium around 2500-1500 BC was crucial in understanding both the spread of Indo-European culture, and the spread of genetic engineering. Something big had happened in that millennium, something that was lost in the dark ages of the Hyksos, the fall of Crete, the vanishing Mycenaean, the defeated Troad. What hints we have of that golden age of Europe come filtered through Homer and Gilgamesh, through Greek myth and Ugaritic pantheon, and ultimately overshadowed by the glory that was Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome.

I have yet to find a good source for this material, so the reader must excuse my profound ignorance of this millennium, and the wild conclusions I draw. If the reader knows of a good reference, please send me an e-mail, and I will happily correct my errors. One of the most confusing things about this period is the haphazard way it has been dated. Reading David Rohl's "Test of Time" shows the problems faced when there exist historical documents, much less the complete lack of documents typical of the Mycenaean, Minoan and European Early Bronze Age. To quote Jeremy Rutter [1997],


In general, absolute dates for the Aegean Stone and Bronze Ages are not yet very reliable and many different sets of dates are often in use for one and the same phase or period. A major debate has been raging since 1987 over the absolute date of the great volcanic explosion of the island of Thera/Santorini early in the Late Bronze Age. As a result, absolute dates within the first two-thirds of the second millennium B.C. (ca. 2000-1350 B.C.) are presently in an unusually active state of flux. It is therefore always best to describe an archaeological assemblage in terms of a relative chronological label (e.g. Early Helladic II, Late Minoan IA, etc.) rather than in terms of its supposed duration in calendar years B.C. Indeed, it is often preferable to refer to a particular assemblage by the site and level in which it was found (e.g. Troy VI, Lefkandi I, Lerna V, Ayia Irini VII, etc.), particularly in the cases of archaeological cultures whose precise chronological positions are disputed even in relative terms (e.g. the Kastri Group and Lefkandi I)

If the Iliad actually is located in England as Iman Wilkens argues [1990], it makes nonsense of the widespread dating schemes for Mediterranean Crete and Mycenae, much less the nearly ephemeral "Achaeans", all based to a greater or lesser extant on Homer. Separating fact from fabrication then becomes a chore that I, an uninformed dilettante, am clearly not prepared to do. As a tremendous oversimplification, I take the 250 year time difference of David Rohl's "new chronology", as well as the 300 year time difference of Santorini/Thera explosion dated by ice cores to infer that the commonly accepted pottery dating chronology of 2500-1500 BC can be off by as much as 300 years in the same direction. That is, artifacts may actually be 300 years older than presently dated. This has the effect of making the Late Bronze Age "dark ages" longer and darker than previously appreciated. To help separate this confusion, let me use the convention that "BCE" represents the traditional date and "BC" indicates my hypothesized 300 year older date.

I had thought, when first encountering these dark times of the Bronze Ages, that it might be tied to the Santorini/Thera volcanic explosion. Despite a male preference for things that go boom, however, no neat coincidence of events lend themselves to a 1650 BC date. Homer's Iliad is traditionally dated to 1200 BCE, which at my 1500 BC is still much later than Thera. Furthermore, if the Thera event were so tumultuous, one would have expected such a recent event to have at least made it into the mythology recited by Homer. The same problem exists for the Mycenaean collapse and even the Minoan decline, all dated to approximately 1500 BC. Clearly, Thera was important, and we should look for evidence in the historical record, but it precedes by over a century the descent into darkness we hoped to explain. Therefore many scholars, when describing the Mycenaean collapse, look for more gradual and non-anthropogenic explanations such as extended drought, climate shifts etc, that could have forced a prosperous civilization into ruin.



• A Time Bomb

There seems to be another well known mechanism that may have effected the transition, one which leaves a notoriously difficult signal in the archaeological record: plague. We have other historical examples of vanished civilizations that succumbed to disease such as the mound builders of the Mississippi basin. Yet plague does not automatically annihilate culture, for Europe survived the Black Plague during the Dark Ages. What are the conditions that might contribute to such a catastrophe? What sort of evidence do we have for such an upheaval? The answers are inferential, not direct, so I hesitate to speculate wildly in a field so far from my expertise. Let me draw a few analogies then, and suggest that we need to examine the historical record with the perspective of biology to appreciate the revolution that led to both the golden age of Achaea and the Dark Ages that followed the fall of Troy.

Plagues come in many forms, some that attack only a specialized sector of the population. Cholera spreads through contaminated water supplies, so it is a killer of the disadvantaged who often share crowded housing with poor sanitation. The progress of the Ebola outbreak was concentrated in hospitals, where workers were exposed to the blood from victims of that hemorrhagic fever. The bubonic plague began first among city-dwellers, where it was spread by rats. Are there any plagues mentioned around 1500BC? Yes there are, some of the most famous plagues in history actually, the ten plagues of Egypt. So when Moses records that the 10th and final plague of Egypt was a silent death in the night taking the first born progeny of both men and beast, it made me think, if the oldest son were the inheritor of the estate, if he were the educated, the rulers and the magistrates, could this selective plague have effectively decapitated society and plunged it into decline? What if society itself had been practicing "planned parenthood" where single-child families were the norm, certainly this plague would be devastating then! Or what if the knowledge base of the culture were orally transmitted, would not a plague cause widespread chaos? I write these words in September of 2001, in a world that easily survived the Millennium doomsayers, only to fall prey to kamikaze hijackers. One wonders whether these desperate suicidal men thought they could precipitate what the millennium did not, the meltdown of globalization caused by disruption of the economic heart of America. It is this same question we are asking of the Early Bronze Age, whether any simple cause such as I have described could precipitate the loss of civilization, through a death of its most valuable citizens.

But even supposing such a selective plague could disrupt the society, still I had to pause and wonder, What sort of plague could accomplish this? Is this even possible to ascribe this discriminatory killing to a microbe? And even if I can imagine a scenario, would it generalize to all of the Mediterranean world? I don't want to pretend that anything I say here about biological explanations for Moses' plagues rises above sheer speculation, yet it is important to ask the questions nonetheless, or we will never discover the answer were it to land on our head. What can we make then of the statement that this plague also killed the firstborn of both man and beast?

First, do we have evidence of any other disease that depends on birth order? Indeed we do. The firstborn Rh positive baby, born to an Rh negative mother will survive, whereas all subsequent babies will die in utero due to antibodies in the mother's blood produced during the birth of the firstborn. We also know that stem cells from the baby regularly infiltrate the mother, changing the environment of subsequent pregnancies. Is it possible that some such mechanism is at work that inoculates the later born children against a particular disease, while leaving the firstborn vulnerable? Although it may seem far-fetched, suppose that an AIDS-type virus is endemic among males, and that the mother produces antibodies that protect her baby only after delivering the first born.

Still, such an explanation does not account for the death of the first born of domesticated animals. Most pathogens are not sophisticated enough to cross over species, and this would be a highly specific pathogen to begin with! But perhaps there were a religious ritual that exposed the first born child to a pathogen, much like kuru spread among Papua New Guineans by eating a ritual spoonful of the deceased brains. Although it is hard to imagine how a microbe could be limited only to the first born, cultic practices show no such limitation. That is, suppose some Druidic ritual involved cutting the flesh of the firstborn male of man and beast with an infected knife. Could this not silently spread some killer virus, that like the Herpes virus whose outbreaks are stimulated by some environmental stress, was triggered perhaps that fateful Passover night? Yes, I may be straining here, but the goal is not to provide definitive answers, only to open the up the possibilities and consider the potential interplay between biology, history and theology; between science, culture and cult.


Whatever the cause of the Dark Millennium in the Early Bronze Age, it is a period when great forces molded and changed civilization. Foremost among these was the developing science of agriculture and genetic engineering, which like most great discoveries, was a double-edged blade. Since our present day culture is today impaling itself on the same sword, it would behoove us then to study this earlier period in greater detail.


The Bronze Age Milieu

The Bronze Age Farmer

What are the fundamental advances that led to the flowering of civilization in the Indus River, the Nile River, and the Euphrates/Tigris river valleys? In all cases, warm climates with long growing seasons were combined with a ready water source to produce highly fertile cultivated fields. Curiously enough, it was over irrigation and resulting salinity that later led to the sterility of some of these same regions, as was well known to the Romans who salted Carthage, nonetheless, we might classify the similarities of these civilizations as the invention of irrigation, the cultivation of seed-bearing plants, and the domestication of animals. Indeed, Jared Diamond in his book, "Guns, Germs and Steel", ties the entire fate of humankind on this ability to produce abundant food. Whereas Diamond adopts a neutral evolutionary approach to the subject (man does because he can), we argue for a much more proactive role (man does because he wills). The distinction is subtle but the consequences dramatic. Yet despite our different explanations, we begin with the same factual foundation, which I review briefly next.


• Irrigation

Despite the romanticism of Hopkins "Pied Beauty", the patchwork of plowed and fallow fields, say, in Amish Pennsylvania, which depends on fickle rains and short growing seasons, cannot hold a candle to the monoculture agribusiness of the irrigated San Joaquin and San Fernando Valley. More importantly, the Amish farmer depends literally on centuries of accumulated knowledge in the proper care and planting of his crops to mitigate the fickle climate. If one were just beginning in the agriculture business, one would prefer the dependability of Southern California climate and irrigation water.

In exactly the same way, the spread of agriculture roughly 8000 years ago occurred in just such a warm climate with abundant irrigation water. Not only was the farming more predictable and manageable, but such control was necessary for these early farmers. Since the yields for these nearly wild grasses was so low, the cost of plowing and planting and harvesting could easily exceed the benefit gained by cultivation. A single bad year, like farmers in the Midwest, would not only bankrupt a would-be farmer, but possibly starve his entire family. So the only location where such marginal agriculture could take root, was one in which all other environmental variables were easily controlled.


• Cultivation

Since the yield was so low in these early cultivars, early farmers must have greatly valued strains that produced a greater harvest. At some point in history, the rudiments of genetic manipulation must have been learned. Farmers crossed grasses with superior seed characteristics to produce the grains that were already well known at the dawn of written history: barley, oats, rye, and wheat. A very similar revolution was occurring in the Americas with the cultivation of maize, demonstrating the parallel development of civilization required mastery of the cultivation of seed grains. Perhaps the mathematics of Mendelian genetics was not fully understood, yet the vigor of hybrids, the importance of back-crosses and the selection of traits was well established by these Bronze Age farmers. The wealth and power that accrued from these simple lessons in biology did not go unnoticed. In every one of these cultures, religions arose that celebrated these aspects of farming: fertility goddesses, the powerful pedigree, the changing seasons, and thunder gods of rain. Complicated rites involving fertility gods should not obscure the obvious lesson that mastery of biology was the foundation of cities and the beginning of empires.


• Domestication

Nearly simultaneous with cultivation of grains, was the domestication of animals. The donkey had obvious use as a beast of burden and tiller of the soil. The horse, which perhaps came somewhat later in empire building, was the crowning achievement of the defense research program. But the cow, however humble, was perhaps of greater significance. One could, of course, cultivate animals for their meat and hide. However such costs had to be weighed against the more obvious stratagem of hunting. As long as humans did not dominate their environment, hunting remained the most cost-effective strategy for obtaining food. Compare, for example, with the Plains Indians who lived off the vast bison herds of the American Great Plains for perhaps millennia, yet never domesticated the bison. Hunting was just too easy. But domesticating the cow from the wild ox had a more significant advantage for the early farmer, for a cow produced consumable food from non-consumable fodder.

The significance of cows came home to me when I spent three years in Switzerland. The Swiss like to brag that there are more cows in Switzerland than people, but more to the point, cows are treated better. I saw farmers mowing long strips of grass morning and evening, so that their cows in the barn could eat fresh grass without trampling the soft fields into mud; breakfast and dinner in bed, so to speak. Along the valley of the Rhone, the language divided by altitude, with German-speaking cow herders in the mountains, and French-speaking grape growers in the flats. For cows permitted the settling of hostile high-mountain meadows by converting straw into gold, so that the Celtic-Germanic tribes occupied this empty niche by clever domestication of wild oxen.


It should come as no surprise then that the Hindu religion saw the cow as sacred. By now, it should be clear that knowledge is power, and power is manifest in religion. There is something significant about domestication that is only hinted at in cultivation. That is, domestication requires controlled breeding of animals, which may or may not have been recognized in cultivation. The same breeding techniques could equally well apply to goats, pigs, horses, cats, dogs and donkeys, as indeed they were. The existence of mules indicate that great sophistication in breeding was known from earliest times. Would the Bronze Age farmer not also apply these same techniques to humans? How did such knowledge reveal itself in the religious rites of the people?

My thesis is that the breeding of humans was well understood by the Bronze Age farmer, and that aspects of this knowledge were captured in the religious rites and taboos of all these cultures. Careful analysis of these religions, and the counterpoint presented by the Hebrew Old Testament, shed a great deal of light on these practices and their consequences.

The Bronze Age Religion

I hesitate to summarize with my cursory knowledge what is the lifework of many scholars. Hopefully, egregious errors in my analysis will be corrected without impacting seriously on the conclusions. Several books I read recently triggered my mind in their similarities to Old Testament prohibitions. "Where Troy Once Stood" by Iman Wilkens argued that the Iliad and Odyssey fit far better in northern Europe than in the Mediterranean. As he builds the case, he casually mentions that Agamemnon's demise was caused by the sacrifice of his daughter, Iphegenia, to the gods as a potent request for victory, evidently a common practice among Celts. This resonated with the story of child sacrifice mentioned in 2 Kings 3:27 concerning the siege of a Moabite city, Kir Hareseth, and the despicable gods of the Moabites and Ammonites, Chemosh and Molech. Likewise, the epic of Gilgamesh, composed around 2500 BC, mentions temple prostitutes in the conversion of a "noble savage" into a civilized warrior. Temple prostitution was a common theme in the Old Testament, and indeed an element of some contemporary religions today. How is it that "the world's oldest profession" is inextricably linked to "the world's oldest religions"? Indeed, the story of sex and civilization seem to be a common theme in both Genesis and Gilgamesh, why is that? My thesis is that all these practices can be linked together with an understanding of genetic engineering.


• Druidic prohibitions

When we try to reconstruct the religious rites of these Bronze Age people, we find ourselves at a disadvantage. Unlike the Hebrews or the Hindus, the Celts of Europe left little written record of their ceremonies. Wilkens argues that the high priest class, the Druids, forbad the written transmission of their secret rites despite the ability to write using a runic alphabet. Rather, they were highly adept at memorizing lengthy monologues that contained the trade secrets of their religion. This treatment of religion as a "secret initiation rite" that should not be written down is similar to Gnosticism or Voodoo, and finds many parallels in modern culture. The communist or anarchist "cells" of pre-war Europe operated in a fashion to prevent a paper trail, to prevent penetration by enemy agents. One finds this method of operation used whenever there is something to hide, or an unidentified enemy to defend against. If the Druids were the educated class, then this mechanism concentrates knowledge in the heads of a few, and limits the power of the military. If Wilkens is correct in his analysis of the author of the Iliad, he argues that this Druidic class was almost immune in military conflict, treated almost as visiting ambassadors of a foreign power.

What would have maintained this vow of silence for so many centuries? What was there to hide? What power did the Druids have that would engender such respect? I cannot piece together such a story with the limited resources I have available. But I would venture a guess that one secret, well guarded by the Druids, was the knowledge of genetic manipulation. This made sex one of the trade secrets of the business, and explains the prevalence of temple prostitution. It may also explain child sacrifice.


• Child Sacrifice

Child sacrifice seems so repugnant as to be irrational. Why would anyone sacrifice their child, their future, their retirement income, for any ephemeral gain such as victory in battle? Yet we have not only Greek plays and Bible stories, but Celtic graves chronicling this practice. From a Darwinian perspective, it seems rather counter-productive to the propagation of one's genes. After all, if the gods demand sacrifice, surely the child of my enemy or my slave should do quite well, as witnessed in the bloody Aztec religion. Why should the gods of the Celts demand my child, the investment of my labors, the retirement income of my old age?

There are no explanations for this vile practice that make any sense either practically, religiously, or even "evolutionally". As many do, we can dismiss all sorts of irrationality as "religious practice", but we may miss the key that unravels this Gnostic culture. As we said earlier, religion is about power. If child sacrifice is to become the ultimate power gambit, as witnessed at the walls of Kir Hareseth, then there must be an advantage in destroying the flesh of my flesh, the bone of my bone, the inheritor of my genes.

Before we go further, let us make clear what is not an advantage. In the modern world today, child sacrifice in the form of abortion is defended on primarily economic grounds. When defenders of the despicable procedure make an attempt at rationalization, they generally say something like, "she can't afford another child", or occasionally "another child isn't wanted". Fundamentally the first statement is about economics, and the second about hedonism. I leave to television the case against hedonism, and address only the first. For centuries, children have been seen as an investment, a social security for one's old age. I have always cherished the statement made to me by a student from China when I had my third child in graduate school "you must believe in Chinese social security!" Now if I were to say at a crowded cocktail party, "I can't afford an IRA", I would have a hundred bankers vying for the opportunity to straighten me out. Yet this is exactly the claim made about children.

"But there is a world of difference between these two investments!" one might object, "an IRA is trusting in the government, while a child is trusting in biology. What if your child dies, or is a prodigal, or disowns his parents?" Precisely the point. Jesus said "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." The modern plague of teenage rebellion might easily be a direct result of parents unable to afford another sibling. But for the sake of argument, let us pretend we live in a more innocent age, say, 1900, when large immigrant families amassed huge family fortunes. Should those immigrants have depended on the government? Could they depend on the government?

In 1917, Russia entered a great experiment, which in nearly every way paralleled the American experiment of 1776; Russia became a communist country. Rousseau's promise was made to every serf and steelworker in that vast nation: the state would take good care of its citizens. In the name of the state, free abortions were provided for the populace, and the average Russian woman used the procedure more than twelve times in her childbearing years. Of what benefit are children when the state provided for every need? I will never forget the 2 weeks I spent rooming with an East German scientist at an international conference, discussing the implications of communism. He was an ardent party member, having joined the Communist party to obtain access to research funds. His wife and daughter had even "volunteered" to work in Soviet work camps that separated him from his wife for 2 years. He had had only one daughter, and at the dawn of reunification of Germany, he looked forward to losing his entire life's work in a bureaucratic reorganization. Yet he clung to dialectical materialism like a drowning man clings to driftwood.

Seventy five years later, Soviet pensioners who bought into the system are finding, like him, that the state does not endure forever; that the pension they have worked and sweated, lied and murdered for, is so much worthless paper; that the laughter of children's children has been replaced by the hollow echoes of a cane in a crumbling one room flat. If there be any certainty in history, it is that nations do not endure forever, that currency is devalued, that birth is the only miracle to conquer death.


What power then is accrued through this sacrifice? I cannot answer this question directly, but perhaps we can reconstruct the thought processes that led to this choice. Imagine that you, a Bronze Age farmer, have carefully selected the seeds from your most successful wheat stalks of the year before, planted and watered them and awaited the outcome. Some came up short and scrawny, others appeared to grow tall and strong but produced little seed. What did you do with these plants? You cut them down and roasted their seeds for food, preventing the inferior strain from propagating. Imagine that you bred two cows in your pasture, and produced a strong calf and a runt. What did you do with the runt? You castrated or slaughtered the calf for your food. Suppose the Druid who is wise in these things, visited your house after your wife had delivered and pronounced this baby defective in some way. What did you do? Offer him as food for the gods.

For only in doing so, the Druid would say calmly, can the nation prosper. Only by weeding out the weak, the defective, those cursed by the gods, can a nation find favor with heaven, and its armies succeed. To do any less would be to revert back to the wild type, as cows revert to wild oxen or wheat revert to wild grass. Only by sacrificing our children, can we hope for a better future for a better race. And so the hollow bronze image of Molech was heated by an internal fire until its outstretched arms glowed brightly in the smoky temple, ready to receive its helpless sacrifice.


• Sex and Civilization

Just what exactly was the wild type? And why must it be feared? This came home to me while reading the Gilgamesh epic, written about events in Mesopotamia circa 2500 BC. The most complete version was found in Assyria around 700BC, but was thought to be a faithful rendition of the original. In the epic, Gilgamesh is a Sumerian king of a city-state whose alter ego is a strong but wild man of the desert, Enkidu (who bears a striking resemblance to the modern Tarzan). Enkidu roams with the wild animals and destroys the animal traps of a trapper, so the trapper brings a temple prostitute to a watering hole frequented by Enkidu and his wild entourage where he is seduced by her charms. Having lost his virginity, the animals will no longer approach Enkidu and he is led, a newly civilized man, into the city. Like Enkidu, the wild type is the untamed master of the fields, the strong, unfettered, independent man of the mountains.

But why would sex make a man civil? No, this is not a repetition of the well-known myth that marriage settles a man down. ("You don't find the right man", says Hagar the Horrible's wife to her daughter, "you make the right man. You should have seen Hagar when I married him." And in the background one sees Hagar eating chicken with his fingers and throwing the bones over his shoulder.) Clearly this wasn't marriage, and the function of a temple prostitute was clearly sex. Nor is this a repetition of the myth that sex weakens a warrior, for Enkidu goes on to be a powerful ally of Gilgamesh. No, somehow, the writer of Gilgamesh is saying that sex is a necessary and sufficient condition for civilization, which is not exactly the view of the monastic orders of the last millennium who did so much to preserve civilization during the "dark ages". Perhaps the writer of Gilgamesh is telling us that it is genetic manipulation, exemplified by sex, that is the foundation of the city, the start of modern civilization.

But why couldn't they have sent a virgin to bring Enkidu to the city, or even a "professional prostitute"? Is there something significant about temple prostitution? My first thought is that religion both imitates and codifies power, so that prostitutes exemplified the power of genetic selection. One can read innumerable books about ancient fertility cults, and the function of prostitutes in the ritual. Yet something has always bothered me about such condescending explanations, prostitutes are almost always sterile by the inevitable ravages of sexually transmitted diseases and pelvic inflammatory disease. Why would one celebrate a fertility rite with a sterile mate?

I am reminded of an insect control program, in which researchers irradiate larvae to make them sterile, and then release them in the wild. The sterile males mate and the female lays eggs that never hatch. The program claimed amazing success in reducing the insect population. Could temple prostitutes be functioning the same way? Were perhaps the unwitting citizens bringing back venereal diseases to their families and effectively sterilizing themselves (much as Henry VIII's wives were sterilized)? Is this a ploy of those in power to reduce the population of the plebeians and thereby change the genetic makeup of society? Did the kings and princes believe that they knew which were the better genes to proliferate?


• Kings and Divinity

In many cultures, a king's claim to power was by divine appointment. It was not just that a king was a clever leader and politician, but that he somehow personified the divine. This trend could be observed in Rome, as it transitioned from Republic to Empire and led inevitably to claims of divinity. Perhaps it was to smooth the potentially dangerous transfer of power from father to son, that divinity was considered hereditary (despite the obvious contradiction in methods by which the founder of the dynasty was crowned.) This divinity by heredity was well established in Greek mythology, which Wilkens links to Early Bronze Age Celtic religion, as personified in the many demi-gods of Zeus' trysts. A blatant expression of this trend can be seen in Egyptian dynasties, where the most celebrated of the many wives of the Pharaoh, the one most often displayed in official murals was the also the closest relative of the Pharaoh himself; a half-sister, in the case of Tutankhamen.

My first reaction to reading this bit of Egyptology trivia was revulsion that the culture could tolerate such deviancy. "Perhaps this accounts for the bizarre shape of his father, Ankenaten's anatomy." was my first thought. But on reflection, there is a strong statement about heredity in this practice. It says that paternal genes are not enough to ensure divinity, that maternal genes are important as well. Perhaps it reflects knowledge that hybrids revert to the wild type in one generation, but that purebreds breed true. If continuation of the dynasty depends crucially on genetics, it is the best insurance that the blood of the gods rest within the scion of the founder. Once again, the Bronze Age practice reveals a deep understanding of pedigree and power.


• Temple Prostitution

But have we truly answered our earlier question about the role of temple prostitution in the early Bronze Age? Surely, birth control through sterilization would tend to weaken a nation, not strengthen it. What advantage could be gained through such a practice? A ray of light came through reading a recent sociological study of divorce in American society. The study, which consisted of quotes from the recent sociological literature, recorded that the "technology shock" of contraception and abortion greatly changed the institution of marriage, leading to higher divorce rates and the present >50% failure rate of marriage today. The report then went on to show how these effects ripple outward over multiple generations, causing the children of divorce to be less capable of stable marriages themselves. In addition, these children are less able to succeed, and more likely to collect criminal records. In other words, the breakdown of the nuclear family starts a multi-generational decay of society in general, and the nuclear family in particular. Could it be that temple prostitution was intended to weaken or destroy the nuclear family, much as abortion and contraception operate today?

I shook my head, surely this would be suicidal to any society. Why, America owes its greatness to the strength of the nuclear family! What national leader in his right mind would attack this bastion of stability? Unless the nuclear family itself was a threat to the power elite. If we associate the nuclear family with a tribal unit, then we can see more clearly the conflict. Abraham led a tribal unit in a surprise attack on four kings, rescuing his nephew Lot from their raid (Gen 14:14). "Black Hawk Down" is a recent movie documenting the tribal warfare in the city of Mogadishu that repelled the control of the American superpower. Clearly tribal warfare has to be suppressed in the establishment of cities and the founding of empires. What better way to undermine tribal loyalties than by attacking the nuclear family at its core? Not only were temple prostitutes sterilizing the population, they were disintegrating marriage bonds, tribal loyalties and certainty of pedigree. In the place of tribal loyalty, they were encouraging a community spirit, a city allegiance that transcended paternity. Yes, there were societal costs to be paid for such practices--illegitimate progeny, broken families, disenfranchised children--but these were evidently worth the expense for the security they afforded the rulers.

It is worth remarking that often these highly civilized but decadent city-states did themselves succumb to attacks from tribal peoples, such as the destruction of Ninevah or the fall of Rome. So temple prostitution was ultimately a deal with the devil. It quieted discontent within, but weakened the state to attacks without. Even this appears to be understood in the Gilgamesh epic, for it is Gilgamesh who recruits an outsider, Enkidu, for the defense of the city. Thus it appears that it is not sex, but civilization that weakens the free warrior.


• Sex in the City

I break the flow of the argument about bronze age religion to analyze another religious bronze age document about sex, the Song of Songs. This book, in common with another book of "wisdom literature" from the Bible, the book of Job, has been widely misunderstood, either from ignorance or intent. In my own studies (WTS 1984), I first understood the Song of Songs (also called "The Song of Solomon") to be a collection of love songs, rather than a single ballad or chronological history. What jumped out at me then as it does today, is the overt sexual references and images that appear in this poem of Holy Scripture. Unlike the book of Job, the difficulty for theologians has not been how to find the subtle meaning of this book, but rather how to extract spiritual truth from such blatant passion. I hesitated for two decades to write on this poem, because I could find no application for my Freudian analysis beyond fueling the argument of divine inspiration versus human motivation of scripture. However, in the light of bronze age religion, I have begun to find a face in this poem.

A cursory reading of Song of Songs, finds a lengthy love poem, full of nature and fertility images, sometimes overtly so as when the poet waxes eloquent on the parts of his lover's anatomy. One could develop this theme to great effect, even noting the strongly sensuous overtones of much of the nature imagery. However, there are two nightmares in this idyllic rhapsody that disturb the flow, two stains staring out from a white satin wedding gown. And as I studied these stains they grew darker and larger to become the black eyeholes of a mask, the eyesockets of a skull in which I found myself entrapped looking out into the garden of Eden.

For all or most of the metaphors and similes compare the lovers to nature: to spice, orchards, gardens, and lilies, but in 3:1-4 and in 5:2-8 the woman cannot find her lover, and significantly, both nightmares occur in the city and at night. If nothing else, the city is not a garden, nor an orchard, nor a field of lilies. And the city is where she has lost her lover. In the first episode, the lover is absent night after night, until in desperation the woman searches for him in the dark streets of the city. The mood is dark, apprehensive, fearful. The watchmen of the city are neutral here, in that they hear her plea but do not respond. She turns from them in despair, and immediately finds her lover, whom she holds onto fiercely as she takes him back to the marriage bed.

(One might argue that we have no evidence of marriage between the lovers in this love song, but I counter that sex outside of marriage was strictly forbidden for Yahweh's people, and it seems clear that sex was implied here. My interpretation of this poem is that it is all about the relationship of sex and marriage, and without marriage, the poem becomes unintelligible to me.)

One has a foreboding that the city is bad for this marriage relationship. One could almost see the modern wife waiting for her husband to come back from work, or waiting for him to get off the computer and come to bed. Whatever the cause, the lover is distraught enough to not let go until she has him safely back in the bedroom. The poet reinforces this point by a direct plea to the women of the city, 3:5, "I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem...that you will not arouse or awaken love until she pleases." Something almost went amiss in this relationship. Something that came between the love she has for her man. Something that required her to drag her husband through the streets of the city without letting go. Something that distracted from his normal desire for her, and caused her to use physical force to drag him home. Like the watchmen, the husband appears like a zombie, unable to respond or speak to her entreaties. Clearly there is some force, some reason, something that has stifled his eloquent responsiveness to her love.

What this sinister something is, goes unstated. But 5:2-8 reveal an even darker nightmare. Again, the wife is in bed, waiting for her lover, her husband. He knocks at the door, perhaps because the door is locked. As in many pioneer log cabins a century ago, the latch was operated by a pull string accessible through a hatch in the door, usually covered with a leather patch to block drafts. If one wanted to lock the door, the pull string was lifted out of the way, so that it was inaccessible to someone reaching through the hatch. She has apparently locked the door, so that her husband, coming home late, put his hand through the hatch but could not find the latch string. In a provocative bit of writing, the poet tells us that she doesn't even bother getting dressed, but runs to the door full of longing. But when she opens the bolted door, he is gone! Again she searches the dark alleys of the city, but this time the watchmen beat her, wound her, and remove her shawl--making us wonder what she had left to wear. Again the poet reinforces this point with a direct plea to the women of the city, "I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, as to what you will tell him: for I am lovesick."

Not only is the relationship going bad, but she has been wounded, shamed and now is sick. She cannot even find her husband, but addresses her plea to the women of the city. This looks like desertion or abandonment. And the city watchmen are complicit, even shaming her for trying to find him. What is the meaning of this recurrent nightmare?

If one accepts that sex is the underlying theme of the poem and of these sections, then it would appear that 3:1-5 is a warning that the city has temptations luring the husband away from his conjugal duty, not to mention his conjugal love. But 5:2-8 is perhaps more ominous, for it implies that even greater wounds and damages are found in interrupted intercourse. Many commentators have suggested that Freud's sexual interpretation of all psychiatric disorders came from counselling rich Viennese women whose husbands practiced birth control via "coitus interruptus". The Bible records in Gen 38:9-10 that Onan practiced this form of birth control and therefore God slew him. So the two nightmares of Song of Songs, the two events that destroy the idyllic physical love between a man and a woman, are not the bugbears of modern society, infidelity and finances, but apparently the innocuous behavior of too infrequent conjugal relations and birth control. And both are related to the city.

Suddenly I was wearing the mask, looking out into the Elysian fields of physical love. For how often has our society required a man to desert his first love for his business? How often has city finances and city careers caused him to forgo having children? And these, said the Song, are the root causes of wilting love. Temple prostitution may cause either or both of these sins, but the man who puts the city above his love, has prostituted himself in the temple of civilization.


• Sex, Lies, and Memes

There is yet one more way to understand temple prostitution. Not only did it sterilize women and emasculate men, but it infected civilization. In his book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins applied an evolutionary filter to sociology, and sees within society certain elemental rules which when multiplied to the n-th degree, define what a civilization is. This little bit of irreducible civilization he called "memes", and argues that it is the passing down of thousands of such memes that produce the society we enjoy today. Such an atomistic view of society is to be contrasted with, say, Hegelian views that find society to be the whole greater than the sum, but nonetheless we find the word useful. In order that a societal revolution be effective, it must reproduce. Unless a meme is taught to the next generation, it is a "sterile meme" which disappears from the meme pool. In this sense, divorce is a particularly fertile meme.

As the sociology paper reports, the sexual revolution was not confined to a single generation, but propagates at a disturbingly high rate throughout society, affecting one of the most powerful memes a culture possesses, the institution of marriage. What the paper doesn't report, is that the high priests and priestesses of the "new religion", have attempted to spread this revolution into as many other cultures as they can find, including animist, Moslem, or Catholic states, regardless of the consequences of their new meme, as witnessed by the rejected resolutions of the UN Conference on Women. Thus memes are not blind bacteria, or "selfish genes" which spread by random diffusion, but are often quite self-aware and targetted at the competition. One cannot view memes as passive bits of societal information, but as voracious species in a Darwinian struggle for survival.

So it is that temple prostitution, once accepted as part of society, quickly becomes self-propagating. Amy Carmichael, a century ago, ran an orphanage in India filled with girls she rescued from the local temples. They may have been illegitimate, or perhaps simply unwanted in a paternalistic society, the cultural cost of maintaining a practice of temple prostitution. In fact, the India of a century ago would very well fit the Bronze Age culture we describe, and in many ways, is the best test of all of these theories of Bronze Age religion. But it took courage and determination for Amy Carmichael to thwart the system, and ultimately, the power of the British military to effect a change in such an entrenched religion.


These memes, therefore, carried with them enormous costs, more than the wasted lives of unwanted children, or the pain of an empty womb, or the decadence of a demoralized militia. These memes stifled the advance of civilization, the growth of knowledge and the birth of science. For these reasons, I prefer to think of them as anti-memes, civilization parasites, or mental viruses. For they multiplied at the expense of people, and meant that the human race barely expanded its tentative hold on the planet for the first five millennia of civilization. Far from being the steady march of progress implied by evolutionary theory, history seems to indicate that many civilizations reach dead-end cul-de-sacs from which there is no escape. Or to use a biological metaphor, societies acquire parasites and viruses that control and prevent the success of the host. One can then see history as the continual struggle of host versus parasite, of civilization versus chaos, the one building elaborate defenses while the other contriving ever more sophisticated attacks. Thus the religion of the Bronze Age, far from codifying the successes of the prehistoric farmer, instead relegated them to millennia of frustration and class conflict. The Bronze Age religion used genetic manipulation, with the consent and control of the power elite, to consign the nations to continual warfare and almost certain defeat. The Bronze Age cosmopolitan civilization was afflicted with a most pernicious virus, which in part, depended upon genetic manipulation. Let us build our case by considering some of the other consequences of genetic engineering.

The Breeding of Giants

Our argument has been that genetic engineering was power, and power, in the words of Lord Acton, corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Rather than using that power to further civilization, much as the Green Revolution of the 1960's abolished famine with superior yield grains, the Bronze Age elite abused it to concentrate power in the hands of a few. In the analysis of Karl Marx, this precipitated class warfare, and produced a culture of conflict. Such continuous conflict meant, for example, that the Romans met little united resistance in their conquest of Gaul, or the British in their subjugation of India. But how could something as esoteric as genetic engineering cause class warfare? The answer (and its consequences) are so well known as to become mythological, the answer is giants.

In Defense of Size

Let us begin by defending giants. As is known from geology, the meat-eating dinosaur didn't immediately show up as a 100-ton monster, but over the course of millennia the fossil record shows a successive evolution of larger and larger animals. Tyrannosaurus Rex stands at the end of a long chain of bipedal predators, each larger than its ancestor, so that we can safely assume that size begets success. Or one could compare the 70-ton M1A1 Abrams tank with a long line of US tanks, each larger and heavier (and meaner and nastier) than its predecessors. As a series of tank dominated wars in the deserts of the Middle East have taught us, when head-to-head combat occurs, giants rule.

Now the Bronze Age military had bred the warhorse, and used it extensively in battle, as witnessed in victorious Egyptian and Hittite murals, or poetically inscribed in victory sagas such as the Iliad. But the invention of the stirrup came long after the Bronze Age, so that the horse was not so much ridden into battle, as it was hitched to a war chariot. The chariot was the Bronze Age equivalent of the tank, and provided the core capability of (surprise) Middle East desert warfare. However, two stories from the Bible indicate a serious flaw with chariots, they don't work well in the mud. In the famous crossing of the Red Sea (Ex. 14), it was the mud that immobilized Pharaoh's charioteers, and led to their eventual drowning (14:25). In the less famous battle between Barak and Sisera, it was a sudden thunderstorm (Judg.5:4) that stopped Sisera's chariots and led to his eventual demise at the hand of a woman. Mud and mountainous terrain were so difficult, that the disorganized Israelites (the Abiru of the Amarna tablets, see David Rohl's A Test of Time (a.k.a. Pharaoh's and Kings)) could occupy the hill country without fear of retribution from the heavily militarized Egyptians (or their vassals, the Philistines) and their iron chariots in the coastal plains. So it was that the Philistines had a defense research program for an armored all-terrain combat vehicle: a giant.

The All-Terrain Land Warrior

Thus we read that the town of Gath, in Philistine territory, was a city with many famous giants, the most notorious being Goliath. And it appears that the Philistines were not alone in this defense escalation, but many Amorite kingdoms (and possibly even the Egyptians, 2 Sam 23:21) apparently had giants. Moses' spies were disheartened by the immense size of these giants, and fearfully reported that the land was full of them (Num 13:32). Not all the inhabitants were giants, of course, but enough to produce a great psychological effect.

Could these reports merely be exaggeration? It seems doubtful, for the historians of the Israelite conquest often made explicit reference to exact units on artifacts that could be checked for veracity. (One doesn't claim that the Washington monument is 1000 feet tall after all, if the monument is still standing and can easily be measured.) So for example, 1Sam 17:4-7 records:
A champion named Goliath, who was from Gath, came out of the Philistine camp. He was over nine feet tall. He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore a coat of scale armor of bronze weighing five thousand shekels ; on his legs he wore bronze greaves, and a bronze javelin was slung on his back. His spear shaft was like a weaver's rod, and its iron point weighed six hundred shekels.
Clearly, the armament survived his demise, as we read in the story of David fleeing for his life and being given Goliath's sword (1Sam 21:9). So if the armament were available for reference, the historian would be less likely to exaggerate. And only a giant would be able to carry the armor described above.

Nor is Goliath the only giant mentioned in the Bible, but even before the Israelites crossed the Jordan River they encountered this breed. Og, the king of Bashan who challenged the Israelites in battle but was defeated by Moses, was a giant (Deut 3:11),
Only Og king of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaites. His bed was made of iron and was more than thirteen feet long and six feet wide. It is still in Rabbah of the Ammonites.
The defeat of Og is quite important in the history of the Conquest, receiving mention in the Old Testament no less than 16 times. For Og represented not just a giant, or a king of a hostile nation, but a giant-king of a race that dominated the politics and warfare of the kingdoms of the Middle East. It is not without significance that we are told he was the last of the Rephaites. Who were these Rephaites, and why was Og's defeat so important?

The Rephaites

Tracing the history of the Rephaites is fraught with difficulty. We have only the Bible as written record, and no archaeological record at all. Since the historians of the Conquest were uninterested in telling us the history of the conquered, we must piece together a story that is 10% fact and 90% conjecture. My only comfort in taking on this task is that I am in such esteemed company.


• Biblical Account

The Rosetta Stone that gave the clue to unravel this mystery people was 2 Sam 21:20 (and repeated in 1Chr 20:26)
In still another battle, which took place at Gath, there was a huge man with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot--twenty-four in all. He also was descended from Rapha.
Such inherited defects are well known among highly interbred populations, and in particular, polydactyly is a dominant trait where the sixth digit serves no useful function. Now whenever breeders are selecting for a specific trait, they often find secondary traits that become closely associated with the primary and impossible to separate. So, for example, the schizophrenic behavior of Siamese cats is well known, as is the degenerative arthritis afflicting german shepherds. The fact that this giant had an extra digit strongly suggests that he came from inbred stock. And since the 6th finger was of little military use, the primary trait most likely to have been selected was size. That is, not only was this giant descended from a large ancestor, Rapha, but he was inbred as well. In other words, the people of Gath were attempting to create a purebred line of giants in the same line as Og.

With this insight, the long, boring genealogies listed in the Old Testament suddenly take on a new meaning. We are not just being told about famous lineage, we are being given pedigrees, traits, explanations of current events. Let us then trace the lineage of Og and Goliath, which may explain the rise and fall of a giant race in the ancient Middle East.

When Moses first sent spies into Canaan, they returned saying that the land were full of Anakites (Num 13:28), who evidently were a large people. But even more terrifying were the Nephelim, the ancestors of Anak, and who made the spies feel like grasshoppers (Num 13:33).
We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them."
Later on we are told that the Anakites were called Emites by the Moabites who displaced them from the rocky highlands east of the Dead Sea, or were called Zamzummites by the Ammonites who displaced them from the Transjordan. All these people groups were considered Rephaites, as is recorded in Deut 2:9-21.
Then the LORD said to me, "Do not harass the Moabites or provoke them to war, for I will not give you any part of their land. I have given Ar to the descendants of Lot as a possession." (The Emites used to live there--a people strong and numerous, and as tall as the Anakites. Like the Anakites, they too were considered Rephaites, but the Moabites called them Emites...) ... The LORD said to me, "Today you are to pass by the region of Moab at Ar. When you come to the Ammonites, do not harass them or provoke them to war, for I will not give you possession of any land belonging to the Ammonites. I have given it as a possession to the descendants of Lot." (That too was considered a land of the Rephaites, who used to live there; but the Ammonites called them Zamzummites. They were a people strong and numerous, and as tall as the Anakites. The LORD destroyed them from before the Ammonites, who drove them out and settled in their place.)
From this passage, we learn that Anakites are a subset of Rephaites, which included several other subgroups of tall races such as Emites and Zamzummites. This suggests that Rephaite is a generalization or abstract word that includes several members, however there are several other references to Rephaites that seem to treat them as a people group (Gen 14:5) on equal footing with Emites. To clarify the relationship between Nephilim, Anakites and Rephaites, we turn to etymology.

Holman's Bible dictionary tell us that Nephelim comes from the verb root "to fall", so that the Nephelim are those who cause to fall, "a feller, i.e. a bully or tyrant:--giant" Holman's has no root for Anakim, Emim, or Zamzummim, treating them as proper names. Rapha has a curious root, meaning "to mend (by stitching), i.e., to cure, (cause to) heal, physician, repair, mend thoroughly, make whole". Then Holman's derives a related meaning, for rapha "in the sense of invigorating: a giant". However, Holman's gives a second meaning for a related root, Raphah, that appears to be the exact opposite "to slacken...abate, cease, consume, fail, be faint, be feeble.." Then to confuse the situation completely, Holman's hedges its bets by arguing either root is the origin of the Rephaites, "Rapha or Raphah,--a giant"

From this confused etymology we observe that Rephaim is probably a generic word meaning "a giant race". This then suggests that all giant races (Anak etc.) were descended from the Nephelim, who get mentioned only twice in the Old Testament. We have read how Moses' spies seemed to say that the Anakim were bad enough, but the Nephelim were absolutely terrifying. The only other reference to Nephelim occurs in Genesis 6:4,
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days--and also afterward--when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.
Without resolving the issue yet who were the "sons of God" and who "the daughters of men", it is clear that the Nephelim were a people of mixed ancestry, a race of hybrids. Could the immense stature of these people be a direct result of such hybridization? If so, then perhaps we can unravel the mystery of these people by considering modern technology of hybridization.


• Hybrid Vigor

The "Green Revolution" that occurred in the 1960's revolutionized agriculture and led to strains of wheat, maize and rice that have doubled or tripled the number of bushels per acre. One of the key methods that enabled this tremendous fecundity was the use of hybrids. For reasons that were not originally well understood, a plant crossed from two unrelated strains of maize would grow stronger, higher and produce more grain than either of its parents. However, this effect vanished on the next generation, so that planting the seed from a hybrid resulted in no better yields than the original parents. This meant that the farmer would have to purchase hybrid seed every year in order to achieve consistently large harvests. Likewise, the seed companies had to hybridize their seed corn from purebred strains every year as well. This process involved growing the two parent stocks side-by-side, and manually removing the tassels from the "female" plants so as to prevent self-fertilization. Every summer, my cousins would find temporary work in the fields "de-tasselling" growing corn plants, in preparation for the seed that would produce the following years hybrid harvest.

So if the Nephilim were a hybrid, perhaps they did not breed true. That is, children of the Nephilim were as likely to be runty as their grandparents. With long experimentation in genetic manipulation one might try to produce a strain that bred true, but it is unlikely that it would ever attain to the size of the original hybrid. Thus, the verse in Numbers 13:33 might be saying that the Anak are the "purebreds" (who are derived from the hybrid Nephilim), which are impressive enough, but in addition, there were also hybrid Nephilim of terrifying size who still existed. If this interpretation be correct, then perhaps the etymology begins to make sense.

The root of Nephelim seems to be "fall", and rather than implying that they cause others to fall, perhaps it is a reference to their hybrid nature. That is, if sexual relations between "sons of God" and "daughters of men" were forbidden, than a hybrid is an indication of a forbidden act, much like the original "fall of Adam". Now if one breeds a hybrid, it reverts back to its parent type, so that it is useless to plant seeds collected from hybrid crops. In fact, many hybrids, such as mules, are sterile and cannot be bred at all. So if these Nephelim hybrids did not breed, or did not breed true, or produced a lot of monsters with feeble-minded inbred defects, then we would expect a successful breeding experiment to be considered unusual, a repaired race. Thus the Repha'im could be "the repaired ones", as well as Rephahim, "the feeble ones", depending (almost randomly) on how the progeny performed.

This may also account for the curious phrase describing Og in Deut 3:11, and repeated several times in Joshua's account of the Conquest,
(Josh 12:4 NIV) And the territory of Og king of Bashan, one of the last of the Rephaites, who reigned in Ashtaroth and Edrei.
(Josh 13:12 NIV) that is, the whole kingdom of Og in Bashan, who had reigned in Ashtaroth and Edrei and had survived as one of the last of the Rephaites. Moses had defeated them and taken over their land.
How can Og be the last surviving Rephaite (Deut 3:11), or one of the last surviving (Joshua) when we get a half-dozen or more listing of Rephaites that survive until David's reign several hundred years later? Was the writer speaking accurately, or did he speak out of ignorance of "hidden" defense assets down in the Philistine plains? Perhaps the writer was saying, "This was the last of the repaired giants, the smart and big kings who could command armies." Sure, breeding continued, but perhaps after Og, there were no other successful ruling giants. If so, this may have been caused by accumulation of defects caused by intense inbreeding.


• Inbred Failure

Let me make a digression here, and ask, "If giants were a superior race, Nietzsche's superman, then why didn't they take over the world?" The answer, I believe, is again so well known as to be mythological. In almost every fairy tale I know that mentions giants, they are portrayed as stupid. Occasionally, they are portrayed as overly aggressive, and therefore incited to ruin, which is another form of stupidity perhaps more common even among us moderns. Since the various races of modern human beings, using something as arbitrary as IQ tests, are generally within a few percentage points of each other, it would seem that gross stupidity would have to be bred in. This may not be so unusual, for there is some evidence that anabolic steroids, used by weightlifters to add muscle mass, causes over-aggression in those who take large quantities. If large size were a result of hormonal imbalance, it doesn't seem out of the question that such giants might have a secondary characteristic of stupidity.

This brings up the question, how does one defeat a giant? During WWII, the German Tiger tank was so well armored that it took several direct hits by an American tank to disable it. After the first round, and before the Americans could load a second, the German tank with its superior gun would have taken out the little upstart. So the Americans devised a strategy by which several American tanks would gang up on the German, and deliver killing blows in rapid-fire succession. By analogy, one would imagine that a Philistine giant could be attacked by several soldiers and thereby be rendered ineffective.

However, not one of the giants whose last battle is described in the Bible was defeated in this manner. Rather, they were all killed in one-on-one combat by a hero, who often became one of David's "mighty men". It isn't clear whether David had developed a strategy for giant killing, or whether giants were simply overrated. My reading of the text is that a well-trained soldier with sufficient courage could take out a giant. Therefore it may be that giants were primarily for waging psychological warfare, and/or perhaps, that giants had lost the edge they had once had. If so, this would support the claim that giants were getting dumber with longer inbreeding.


• Sons of God, Daughters of Men

Well, I've sidestepped the question of who are these parents whose hybrid children were the Nephelim. The phrase "sons of god" in Gen 6:4, is often translated "angels" elsewhere in the Old Testament. Thus, some commentators take this verse to mean that the Nephilim are an angel-mortal hybrid. This might account for the large size, for angels are often described with larger-than-life powers. However, other references to angels give them non-human characteristics, which cast doubts on this interpretation. For example, Jesus, in refuting the Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection, said in Matt 22:29-30
Jesus replied, "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.
This would imply that angels are not sexual beings, and therefore would not be the subject of the Genesis verse.

Another interpretation is that the "sons of God" refer to the descendants of Seth, the holy progeny of Adam and Eve, whereas "daughters of men" refer to the descendants of Cain, the unholy progeny of Adam. This would at least be physically possible, though why such a hybrid between near relatives would produce such exceptional children is not then understood.

But if we are truly looking at two separate races described here, would not a hybrid, like maize and mules, be both understandably large and probably sterile? Possibly, but what separate races do we have any knowledge of?

It is at this point that I launch into the wild blue yonder of speculation. Leaving behind the Biblical evidence, I reach for some evidence of two races that might hybridize in the fashion I have outlined above. For that purpose, I will need to do some juggling of dates and chronology, and attempt to show that we have anthropological evidence for multiple races in the Middle East and Europe that might account for this hypothetical scenario.

In a recent article in Nature (Dec 7, 2000), scientists have tried to refine the DNA sequencing technique that relates randomization of DNA among separated people group to a chronological clock and family trees. Revisiting a technique from 10 years ago that looked at mitochondrial RNA inherited from the maternal side, they have used sophisticated advances in base pair sequencing developed in the human genome project to sequence the entire RNA rather than a small piece. From this new data, they ascertain that human beings (or the primordial "Eve") lived no longer than 100,000 years ago, and possibly as recent as 38,000 years ago. They also surmise that Eve lived in Africa and the human race spread from there. Now this is quite interesting, because Neanderthal culture was widespread throughout Europe from 200,000 until roughly 30,000 years ago. Since the Cro-Magnon race began and overlapped with Neanderthal from about 40,000 years ago, it is generally held that Cro-Magnon man displaced Neanderthal, though there is some evidence that they co-existed for several millennia.

Could it be that Cro-Magnon is the ancestor of modern man, and that the Nephilim represent a hybrid between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon? If so, we would still be trying to account for a 22,000 year gap between the disappearance of Neanderthal culture, and the rise of written history. The discovery of possibly hybrid Neanderthal-Cro-Magnon bones in Portugal dated at 22,500BC may reduce that gap to 15,000 years, but it remains too long to be comfortable. We could hypothesize that written history records a much longer oral history, yet it seems unlikely that any oral history could survive so long. Or we might argue that despite Neanderthal culture finally vanishing in the Iberian peninsula roughly 20,000 years ago, the Neanderthal depended on the ice-age fauna which moved out of Europe, (see Val Geist's comment) so what we are observing is a climate induced migration. If this be the case, then perhaps Neanderthals survived, say, in the hinterlands of Siberia chasing the last woolly mammoths, until the end of the last glaciation period, which is marked by the sharp, Younger Dryas (YD) transition recorded at 9,400 BC by the Greenland ice cores. If somewhere, pockets of Neanderthal were able to survive this late, then the possibility exists that the Genesis 6:4 account records the last mixing of these races.


This section on the Rephaites has been perhaps overly speculative, but I hope that I have presented a case for the origin of this giant race. Independent of their origin, however, their effect on society and eventual demise tell us something important about genetic manipulation and its damaging impact on culture.

Class Struggle

What are the consequences of having a warrior class? (My National Guard brother tells me that this is an ongoing debate in the schools of military policy.) Well, for one thing, it presupposes a feudal society, with certain classes having privileges and power over other classes. More significantly, it suggests that there is a societal advantage to equipping and maintaining a warrior class. Such cost must be repaid by dividends, which are, ofttimes, the spoils of war. It makes no sense to have a standing army unless there are military uses of the army. Thus it appears that the arms race in the Bronze Age led to continual warfare between tribes, as is evidenced by the necessity of walled cities and garrisons etc.

It is hard to estimate the impact of continual war, but I suspect that this is the essential cause of the "Dark Ages" following the fall of the Roman Empire, and perhaps following the fall of Troy as well. The reality of this came home to me as I read to my children the story of a Bible translator in Papua New Guinea, living among Stone Age cannibals in the mountainous highlands of the island. No less than 800 distinct languages exist on that humble island, in large part due to the isolation of continual warfare between tribal units. The language group of this particular tribe numbered only 2500, hardly viable in any other part of the world. Yet is this not exactly what we read in the story of Joshua's conquest, over 10 tribes and language groups occupying the sliver of land between the Jordan and the Sea?

Far from being an evolutionary pressure on society to improve, continual warfare appears to stifle the scientific spirit. In all the cultures I have had occasion to study, (Chinese, Greek, Arabia, Renaissance Europe) science blossomed during times of peace, and vanished during times of war. "But wasn't the Manhattan project a wartime effort," you might object, "and aren't many of our present technologies the fruits of defense spin-offs?" True, yet war is ultimately about destruction, not creation. Despite the many war machines (and agricultural machines) invented by Archimedes, he was killed in war by Roman soldiers on the island of Syracuse, and most of his marvelous inventions lost to posterity. It seems that when science is fertilized by war, it begets monstrosities that devour their parents. Thus it is my contention that breeding giants produced a feudal society of warring tribes that kept the human race from advancing in population or science.

The Ebola River Virus

Perhaps the most puzzling problem for Bible scholars and one that has sparked vigorous debate if not outright heresies for 2000 years, is the remarkable difference between the Old and New Testament attitudes taken toward outsiders. In the Conquest, Joshua is given a list of at least 7 tribes that must be utterly annihilated, down to the last man, woman, child, donkey and cow.
(Deut 20:16,17) However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them--the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites--as the LORD your God has commanded you.
How can this vengeful OT God be reconciled with the God of Love of the NT? Surely there has been some confusion or corruption going on, heretics have argued, that requires a purging of the Scriptures. Yet if genetic manipulation were ongoing, perhaps we can build a case for this apparent overreaction of the Israelites. We begin with the story of the Ebola River virus.

The New Yorker magazine first carried the story about the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, and the sorts of jobs taken on by epidemiologists; discovering the cause of Hanta fever outbreaks, flu epidemics etc. But the scariest outbreak of all, the story went, was the Ebola River virus. It was a hemorrhagic fever that caused massive internal bleeding, was highly contagious, and had over a 90% mortality rate. It made the Black Plague sound like a Sunday school picnic. Fortunately, the disease had been localized to the jungles of Africa. The story goes on to describe an outbreak that almost made it into western cities, where it would be expected to spread disastrously fast. Stringent quarantine measures were implemented to prevent the disease from spreading outside the Belgian hospital where it was finally stopped.

What caught my interest, was the method that the native Africans had devised for coping with this most deadly of diseases. They quarantined the affected tribal members in their hut, and shoved in food under the door. If the food went uneaten for 2 days, the entire hut was doused in kerosene and all its contents burned to the ground. Only by practicing such a scorched earth policy could the virus be stopped. It might sound merciless, but indeed, it was the most merciful action possible. Could it be that the 7 tribes of Canaan had something equivalent to a deadly virus infection that required God to implement a similar policy? What sort of inferences can we make with this analogy?

Human Vectors

The early Bronze Age Israelites fleeing Egypt under the leadership of Moses were promised that God would bless them, and deliver them from all the diseases that afflicted the Egyptians. Moses writes in Exodus 15:26,
He said, "If you listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you."
Now, many of Moses' commands were of the sort that we would classify as "public health", or community hygiene: Washing hands after touching something unclean, quarantining sick people, eliminating pork products. But there is more than hygienic warnings in the curious juxtaposition of Deut 7:14,15 and 16.
14 You will be blessed more than any other people; none of your men or women will be childless, nor any of your livestock without young. 15 The LORD will keep you free from every disease. He will not inflict on you the horrible diseases you knew in Egypt, but he will inflict them on all who hate you. 16 You must destroy all the peoples the LORD your God gives over to you. Do not look on them with pity and do not serve their gods, for that will be a snare to you.
Moses begins in verse 14 by saying, that if they obey these commands, they will not be sterile. Now despite the major advances of modern medicine, the major causes of sterility today are still pelvic inflammatory and venereal diseases. In other words, following Moses' laws, changing the civilization memes, has consequences for the spread of disease and fecundity of both man and beast. This theme is broadened in verse 15, by saying that not only venereal, but every disease will be abolished, especially the horrible diseases of the Egyptians. I could almost understand this verse if it said "contagious disease", but it says "every disease". My best guess is that Moses is promising more than public hygiene, he is promising enhanced immunity. Since the modern plague of AIDS is an attack on the human immune system, one can easily see, in reverse video as it were, the converse of this statement, making the promise all that more real.

But it is verse 16 whose close proximity to 14 and 15 that is so jarring. After talking about disease, he suddenly requires the annihilation of the peoples that God has specified for destruction. What link does this have to disease? How can showing pity cause illness, or serving their gods be linked to disease? How can kindness or service be a trap, a snare to catch the unwary? Lest you think that mere proximity should not be taken for cause, Moses repeats this warning several more times in the book. Here it is in Deuteronomy 28:58-61.
If you do not carefully follow all the words of this law, which are written in this book, and do not revere this glorious and awesome name--the LORD your God-- the LORD will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh and prolonged disasters, and severe and lingering illnesses. He will bring upon you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you. The LORD will also bring on you every kind of sickness and disaster not recorded in this Book of the Law, until you are destroyed.
Thus it seems that God requires the eradication of the peoples of Canaan (the words of Deut 7), in order to prevent a "clinging" disease from spreading through the population.

In the theoretical discussion of plagues and epidemics, scientists argue that a disease that kills too quickly doesn't get spread, whereas a disease that moves too slowly engenders resistance. What sort of plague would infect an entire population, without killing them outright, yet would be deadly for outsiders? What sort of disease is it that "clings"?

When Hernando De Soto took his rag-tag group of Spanish soldiers through the southern United States in search of the golden city of El Dorado in 1540-43, he encountered a large Indian civilization living in the plains along the Mississippi and in a swath across the South. Today they are known as the mound builders, because they built mounds for their houses or temples, mounds that were all that remained of this vanished people 100 years later when the English explored the region. Where did they go? Records indicate that De Soto did more than explore, he carried measles and smallpox with him that apparently were devastating to the concentrated populace in the cities of the mound builders. For this plague to take hold, De Soto's army must have incubated the virus for at least the 3-month journey across the Atlantic and the years of marching across the south. In other words, smallpox needed a carrier who would not himself die quickly from disease.

I'm not an expert on smallpox, but many diseases can apparently go dormant, so that the carrier does not notice the disease. "Typhoid Mary" was a famous lady who transmitted typhoid fever without herself succumbing. More recently a rash of antibiotic resistant bacillus aureus infections at a hospital was linked to an orderly with a chronic skin infection. But perhaps the most famous recent plague of this ilk is the herpes virus. Herpes can insert its DNA into the cell and remain dormant for years, then suddenly erupting in one of those annoying cold sores, whenever the carrier is under a great deal of stress. Although ointments have been devised to dry up the sore, no cure is known for this disease, which also causes dangerous infections in newborns exposed during birth. Although herpes is perhaps a poor analogy for a deadly disease, one could easily envision an entire nation, practicing temple prostitution, that is infected by such a dormant disease. A disease, that while not immediately fatal to its carriers, is fatal to foreigners.

Could it be that the danger of this widespread disease necessitated such a purging of the 7 tribes devoted to destruction? Could it be that consequences of a chronic disease included a deleterious effect on civilization, an effect that Moses had to eradicate in order to fulfill the promises of a blessed inheritance? Could it be that just as temple prostitution spread viral genes, so viral genes spread viral memes? What is the interplay between genes and memes?

Parasites and Hosts

We all know about diseases, and immunities that have developed in response to these potentially fatal infections. So we are not surprised to find that sickle-cell anemia is an adaptation for surviving malarial infection. Or that zebras are hypothesized to have stripes so as to confuse the compound eyes of the tse-tse fly, the carrier of the dreaded African sleeping sickness. This is rather passive adaptation, albeit odd to have protective coloration from a microbe. However the idea that viruses are not just passive bits of DNA waiting for a chance to infect another host, but are actively modifying the behavior of their host in order to spread themselves, struck me as a poor plot line from a late-night movie of "body snatchers". Yet this is exactly the story that parasitologists have been uncovering for years. There is a not-so-silent war between host and parasite, between invader and defender, with far more action than a few stripy genes. The story that changed my thinking came from an article in Scientific American.

It appears that there is a one-celled paramecium that infects snails. An infected snail's horns enlarge and turn bright green, while simultaneously it changes behavior from demurely feeding on the underside of leaves at night, to coming out in bright daylight on the upper side of the leaves. In other words, the snail is carrying a flashing neon sign that says "Eat me, Eat me!" Birds, the natural predators of snails, eat the infected snail, and the paramecium invades the liver of the bird. Now the infected bird droppings land on leaves where, you guessed it, snails feed. Clearly, the one-celled paramecia have changed the behavior of a multi-celled gastropod, to the higher organism's detriment.

Sounds weird, as if the one-celled organism were smarter than the complex neurology of the snail. Yet such parasite-host modifications are the rule in nature, not the exception. The malaria parasite that infects mosquitoes also clogs up the digestive tract of the mosquito, causing it to become ravenously hungry and bite many more people than needed to get a meal, thereby spreading the disease. Humans are not exempt from parasites either, for example, the cholera bacterium excretes a toxin that kills the cells lining the small intestine causing its victim to pump fluids out of their body into the gut. This massive diarrhea may result in the victim not making it to sanitary facilities before losing control, thereby contaminating the water supply, the major means by which cholera infects. So despite the high mortality of untreated cholera, the bacteria manage to spread at epidemic rates.

With a little practice, one can identify all sorts of other pathogens that modify the behavior of their host, even a host as intelligent as us. What about the sneezing reflex, almost totally commandeered by the rhinovirus, the common cold? Or tuberculosis and coughing? Or the manner in which pinworms spread? Well, I've probably brought up enough distasteful topics for one paragraph, one can probably remember with embarrassment being taught these lessons in private hygiene. And this is precisely the point. Without those lessons in hygiene, lessons that do not appear intuitive in the slightest, we would all be infected with far more parasites than we care to imagine. Life is a continual battle between parasite and host, the one attempting to outsmart the defenses of the other. The most deadly plague of our generation, AIDS, is a virus that targets the part of the immune system that defends against viruses. Only because of our ability to teach these lessons to our children are we free of many of these diseases.

Now if we identify these hygiene lessons as memes, then we begin to see the complex interplay of genes and memes. The memes are far more efficient than genes in protecting a host from an invader. In one encounter, say, in one month, an intelligent host may gather enough information to defeat a virulent pathogen, which is presumably far faster than the centuries required for zebras to inherit stripy genes. One reason the bubonic plague was so deadly is that the responsible bacterium could escape detection in the centuries before the invention of the microscope. Despite the lack of adequate diagnosis, effective remedies rapidly propagated by word of mouth, so that young Isaac Newton spent a plaguey summer away from the rat infested alleys of London at a relative's apple orchard, to the benefit of mankind. Even without the advances of modern science, humanity found ways to overcome that first assault. It is interesting to note, however, that the bubonic plague did not rest either, but somewhere in the decades following that first assault, the disease transformed from a flea-bite epidemic to a pneumatic or water-droplet transmitted disease that spread the contagion even more rapidly. The war is not over after one repulsed attack, for memes and genes are constantly adapting.

So it is that the lore of herbmaster was prized highly and carefully guarded by the ancients such that the remedies of the ancient Greeks have become the aspirin we take today. In many cultures religion and medicine intertwine like the snakes of Moses in the staff of Hippocrates. Long discussions interrupt the laws in the books of Moses dealing with the proper treatment of infectious diseases. And in nearly every culture of the world, it is the religious leaders, the shamans and priests, who carry out the process of curing, healing and preventing disease. It is in recognizing this intertwined nature that we can reverse the perspective to ask, "how many religious taboos today are themselves derived from parasitic attacks"? Or even more scary, "how many parasites have successfully modified their host memes like the snail paramecium?" Or the really scary thought, "How many aspects of a culture/religion are successful parasitic attacks in disguise?"

Prions, Cows and Kuru

Lest you think that I have watched one too many B-movies late at night, let us define a bit better what is or is not a parasite. The answer is very surprising, and is best given by example. It is a story about a parasite that isn't even alive.

The story begins in Papua New Guinea, after explorers in the 1930's had pushed through the lowland jungles, scaled the encircling mountains and were amazed that first night to see the highlands dotted with a thousand points of light--the watch fires of a completely unknown people. As it turned out, it was not one people, but over 800 distinct language groups in this medium-sized tropical island, all living in an essentially Stone Age culture, completely isolated from 3000 years of civilization. In the 1960's the Australians systematically surveyed and united these peoples, demanding the cessation of tribal warfare by demonstrating the effectiveness of modern rifles on a pig, and insisting that certain cultural laws be followed, namely, bury your dead.

Curious, why should the Australians be so concerned about cultural norms? Yet they were, and so were all the major cultural groups of the civilized West, going back to Neanderthal burials 30,000 years ago. At least one tribe of highlanders, the Fore (not Papuan), on the other hand, who were known to practice cannibalism on occasion, had a ritual where the deceased was honored by having living relatives eat a symbolic spoonful of the dead, and the body left on a raised platform until the bones were bleached. Only by so doing, they explained, would the spirit of the dead leave the bones and not cause trouble later. Cultural diversity did not impress the Australians. "Bury your dead within 2 days or face the consequences." they said.

Perhaps unknown to the Australians at the time, though they would have been happy to learn it, was that many of the Fore tribe suffered from "kuru", an affliction striking in the 30's or 40's that caused the sufferers to go mad and die. As scientists studied this affliction, they hypothesized that an undetectable virus was transmitted in the cannibalistic death rituals which took 10 or more years to kill its victim, and which they named with typical lack of imagination a "slow virus". But it wasn't until cows started going mad in England, that the nature of this slow virus was thoroughly studied and understood.

"Mad Cow Disease", or "Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy" as it is affectionately called by scientists, was spread by animal feed companies that found a cheaper way to increase the protein content of their product by using the discarded remnants from meat packers, and reprocessing it into feed. Naturally, the feed companies didn't want to spread any diseases, such as trichinosis, so they cooked or sterilized the product and certified it as safe. Strangely, this did not stop the "slow virus" that spread rapidly through British herds, transforming the brains of infected animals into swiss cheese. What kind of immortal organism was this, that could survive cooking, stomach acids, digestive enzymes, antibiotics and even food additives? The key experiment came when scientists irradiated the feed with sufficient gamma rays to disrupt every DNA strand in any living organism. This is a proven method for sterilizing food, which has been used to give TV dinners an unrefrigerated shelf life of years, since not a single bacterium survives the treatment. In other words, nuke 'em 'till it glows.

It had no effect.

That is, destroying every living organism in this product did not destroy the slow virus. There was only one possible answer: it wasn't alive. Further research corroborated this conclusion; the slow virus was actually a protein. In fact, it was a protein found primarily in the brains of all cows, infected or otherwise. But how could a protein that already exists in the brain become a virus?

Well let's first talk about what it means to be alive. A human, an oak tree, and a bacterium all consume simple substances from their environment and use them to construct the complex structures needed to grow and reproduce. A virus is a minuscule parasite of living cells that is only half alive, because it cannot reproduce itself without pirating the machinery of a living cell. But in all these cases, the information for reproduction is encoded in nucleic acids, either DNA or its close relative, RNA. So ubiquitous are nucleic acids, that scientists working on the problem of "the origin of life" assume it is equivalent to "the origin of DNA". Without D/RNA there is no life, so a slow virus can't be a virus. This conundrum was solved in typical scientific fashion by coining a new word; it wasn't a virus, it was a prion.

Semantics aside, how could a prion act like a virus? The secret is protein folding. The most basic building block of all living things are proteins, which can be manufactured by the cell for almost any task, from muscle contraction to digestive enzymes. The way they accomplish their tasks is determined by their three-dimensional shape, and their 3-D shape is determined by the manner in which they fold up from a long string of spaghetti as it were, since long strings are the end product of the cell's protein assembly plant. Theoretically calculating how these very long molecules fold up is so difficult it has become the next great challenge after the human genome project, but we can appreciate its importance by considering an egg.

Now proteins can have very different properties depending on how they fold, so for example, the egg-white albumin protein folds differently and irreversibly when it is cooked, which is the principal difference between a raw and 3-minute egg. Well the prion is the self-same exact protein that is naturally found in the brain, now folded in an irreversibly wrong way so that it stops doing its proper job in the cell. Like egg albumin, this new folding cannot be undone or even destroyed by heat, acids, digestive enzymes, or gamma rays. That is bad enough, but even more insidious, this new configuration acts as a 3-D enzyme, converting properly folded protein into copies of its twisted self. It is an autocatalyzing enzyme, which is crystallizing the brain as it were, slowly at first but at an exponentially increasing rate.

Now we can appreciate how mad cow disease and kuru have become viruses. As soon as a feedback loop was created by cannibalism, whether human or bovine, this protein started to become amplified, much as putting a microphone too close to a p.a. speaker generates a high-pitched whistle. This amplification apparently is entirely indiscriminate, requiring no "vital force" or "elan vitale", just a fortuitous loop that multiplies anything vaguely resembling a slow virus. In cultures where the average lifespan might only be 35 years, the disease may go unnoticed or easily tolerated because of its limited impact, much as cancer and heart disease were tolerated 100 years ago in the West. But one would imagine that early death would be noted in any culture.

Thus the meme of burying one's dead served a vital purpose, it prevented any feedback loop that might generate parasites out of even innocuous proteins. Indeed, looking at the devastation of the European beef business coming so quickly on the heels of animal feed innovations of the 1980's, the amplification of cannibalism is fast enough that one can imagine that the consequences will be obvious within one generation. No wonder almost every culture has incorporated this meme into its religious rituals, and that the Australians were adamant in demanding its practice.

There are some nagging questions, however, that this neat finale doesn't answer. Which came first, the parasite or the feedback loop, the gene or the meme? It seems as if this cannibalistic feedback loop can turn anything into a parasite, even innocuous proteins that aren't even alive! That is, cannibalism is a meme that precedes the parasitic virus, the gene. Can there be memes that are not necessarily responding to parasites then, but preventing them? That is, if the memes are primary, perhaps it is memes that evolve, independent of particular genes that might try to exploit an available amplification loop.

But wait, even should the memes be primary, what are the chances that the protein that was transformed into a parasite would be such a perniciously indestructible, immortal prion in both cows and men? That is, most proteins would succumb to one of heat, acid or peptic enzymes, unless, like the keratin that makes up hair and fingernails, it was intentionally meant to protect the cell against these attacks. Yet prions are a protein found in the brain, which is not exactly an environmentally exposed location. If the meme is primary, why is it that this particular protein was available for amplification, one that survives both cooking and stomach acids? It is almost as if this prion were invented to guard the meme, rather than the other way around. That is, before a truly nasty parasite could evolve to exploit the cannibalism amplifier, this protein would kick in and put a stop to it, as a sort of biological self-destruct switch. In that case, this particular gene would have created the meme. But does that explain how this gene shows up in cows as well as men?

Alas, we back to our chicken-and-egg problem, unable to tell whether the meme or the gene is the origin of this anti-feedback loop. Well if something as small as a prion can evolve as a meme-enforcer, or if memes can manipulate genes into parasites, is it much of an extrapolation to take prions one step further and imagine parasites that have no biological material at all, mental memes that can replicate themselves in a destructive fashion? That is, can there be memes that are autocatalyzing, twisting protective or cultural memes into self-destructive ones?


In one sense, we have already met such a meme. The Papua highlanders who learned the meme of cannibalistic death ritual, died at a young age. This kept them from gaining experience or the wisdom that comes with age, thereby preventing the advance of civilization and the knowledge that kuru can be avoided. Though this may not be the main reason, nevertheless it contributed to the persistence of a Stone Age culture well into the 20th century. Thus a potentially protective gene was twisted into a self-perpetuating destructive meme. And this ultimately may be more dangerous than Ebola.


Memes and Anti-Memes

The concept of a parasitic meme came one day as I sat down at my computer to read my e-mail.
Virus Warning!!! was the message. Don't Open Any Mail That Says "Mail returned to Sender"!!! It has a virus that will destroy your hard disk!!! Tell all your friends!!!
I looked to see who had sent me the message, and sure enough, it was the secretary for the department. "Computer newbie," I muttered as I deleted the message. Sure enough, 30 minutes later came a second e-mail.
"Sorry about the last e-mail. It was virus hoax. Look at www.virus-hoax.com for information on this hoax."
So having a bit of time, I went to the site and read all about hoaxes and how they function. There are three or four techniques that are common to most hoaxes. Their main function is to convince someone, generally a new computer user, that he/she should warn as many people as possible about this new virus.

I thought a bit about this common thread. A hoax must be a sort of mental virus, which infects only the mind of its host, and gets the host to spread the virus hoax willingly. Quite effectively, I might add, all without a line of code. This reminds me of a more recent e-mail I received, which might be classified a "virus hoax hoax". "Warning!! Your computer has been infected by a Polish virus!! We don't have good programming skills so please manually delete all the files on your hard drive and pass this message on to your friends." Strangely enough, all my friends had seen it already. Even a joke has in some sense, a life of its own.



Mental Viruses

What are the characteristics of mental viruses? The same as those we identified as memes: the property of being propagated and spread. Well how can we tell the difference between a meme that is a piece of civilization or culture, and a virus that infects that culture? That is sometimes as difficult as, say, trying to decide if a newly written piece of literature is just a fad or will become a classic. But we have another criterion to tell the difference. A parasite, like kuru, doesn't just get spread, it takes something from its host in the process, which impacts on the quality of life of the host. If it benefits the host, then we would tend to call it a symbiote, rather than a parasite. Therefore a mental virus absorbs resources from society which would otherwise be spent more profitably, such as the thirty minutes or so of secretarial and employee time used up in dealing with this hoax.

Now this mental virus hoax could only exist in our modern age of e-mails and personal computers whose duration of 20 years may be more ephemeral than the reign of Tutankhamen. More important are those memes, such as Fore death rituals, that directly impact on lifespan, genes and survival. The mental viruses that are most significant to civilization are those that take the most away. Therefore I want to concentrate on the memes of marriage, family, health and education. For it is these memes that contribute so much to the stability of civilization, and the parasites of these memes that detract.

In order to get a feeling for civilization viruses, let us take a well-known mental parasite, alcoholism. This disease has been with us at least as long as the Flood, with highly recognizable attributes. Although there may be some genetic predisposition toward alcoholism, with certain groups such as American Indians lacking enzymes that metabolize ethanol, nonetheless it is a recognizably mental illness wherein the host engages in self-destructive behavior. To qualify as a parasite, however, we have to see how that behavior would propagate itself.

We can't claim Madison Avenue ad writers are parasitized, because most advertisers are not themselves alcoholics, however some parasites come in clusters that are synergistic. For example, the rapid spread of AIDS in Africa is primarily through heterosexual behavior, unlike the West, but with the synergistic infections of canker and gonorrhea that greatly enhance the transmission rate. In just such a manner, one might argue that greed is a parasite that benefits from addictive behaviors of any sort and therefore encourages many others including alcoholism. Thus St. Paul writes: The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.

But what about alcoholism is parasitic? Other than drinking buddies, which may not really fit the description, it seems unlikely that anyone would be convinced to drink by watching a alcoholic stagger by with a paper-bag wrapped bottle. So how could the disease spread? Through the family. What social workers discovered 20 years ago, was that alcoholic families all behave the same way, they all show similar adaptations to an alcoholic parent. By now the jargon is so widespread we may forget where it originated, but it was first used to describe these homes. The co-dependent spouse may not be alcoholic, but enables the disease by denying the problem and covering up the consequences. In a real sense, this spouse needs the alcoholism, for if it were cured, the spouse often initiates a divorce, thus the term co-dependent. This constant denial and shame produces children with very twisted views of reality, so that daughters often marry abusive men with drinking problems; sons will often be highly controlling and prone to alcoholism themselves. The grandchildren grow up with these dysfunctions, which continue to affect their behavior and interpersonal relations. And depending on how willing they are to seek treatment, recognizable behavior modifications may even persist to the great-grandchildren of the original addict.

From this example it is clear why Moses writes not once, but four times about the four generational impact as he does in Num 14:18:
The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.
So the principle of family transmittal of mental viruses was well appreciated even in the Early Bronze Age. Why else would the concept of coming from a "good family" be practically universal in every culture? Note that Moses gives such a parasite a 3-4 generation effect, which clearly indicates a different mechanism than a purely genetic transmittal.

Well if only the children are affected, and an alcoholic doesn't have a big family, or if the bad family atmosphere discourages grandchildren, how would this parasite ever spread? By marriage, because marriage takes an uninfected person and exposes them to the disease. With divorce and remarriage becoming more common, one can predict a directly comparable growth in the occurrence of this disease. In fact, with over 50% of marriages ending in divorce, a hypothetical infection rate of 50% or more could rapidly reach epidemic proportions.

We can apply the same analysis to many other addictive behaviors, looking for ways that these behaviors can spread laterally among the population, or how these behaviors spread vertically down family lines. Some details may vary, but the story is very similar for sex addictions and child abuse, perhaps even more so. We see almost immediately the results of this type of abuse on children, and have all read of the rapacious drives of the repeat sex offender. The use of addictive drugs, such as opiates or cocaine appears to have a larger lateral spread, but the vertical spread should not be overlooked either. Even violence and spouse abuse can be seen to have parasitical properties that are quite similar to that of alcoholism. These are all memes that affect the behavior of their host in such a way as to propagate themselves through the population.

Which raises the question, why are so many parasites found in clusters? I don't have the resources to argue this case here, but I believe that one can build a hierarchy of parasites, with upper level parasites encouraging or benefitting from lower level parasites. For example, the malaria parasite that exploits the mosquito-mammal loop is joined by other parasites that do not have the ability to clog the mosquito's gut such as yellow fever, but benefit from this malarial induced voracious behavior. And of course, since the mosquito itself lives off mammalian blood, we can see parasites within parasites, a hierarchy of exploitative organisms.

We mentioned how greed can exploit any addictive behavior, and we showed how addictive behavior could often be parasitical. Thus we would expect a system that permits and rewards greed to filled with drug addicts, sex addicts, violence addicts and alcoholics. The very hopelessness of the population plagued with these addictive parasites contributes to the attractiveness of greed, making greed into a meta-parasite, a mosquito carrier, a greater parasite filled with lesser parasites. From this perspective, the only way out of the vicious circle of drug addiction, poverty, and violent crime appears to be promotion to drug pusher, to pimp, or to gang boss. That is, because the addicts have parasites that sap the strength of the body, they become prey to parasites that sap the strength of spirit. They act synergistically, each encouraging the other.

Doesn't this sound like inner city projects or perhaps the Mafia? With this dark web of disease spread over the city, how can one fight the addictive parasitic behavior at any level? The same way the city of New York fought the disease, zero-tolerance for anything remotely resembling a parasite. By becoming healthy in the body, the brain is spared. In the words of Jesus, (Luke 15:10)
Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.
That is, the same way in which mental viruses encourage other diseases is the way in which the disease is fought: inch by inch, one symptom at a time. Simply put, character counts.

Now we come to the scary part of the story. Have these mental parasites, these anti-memes, inserted themselves into the genome of society, have they infiltrated civilization and affected entire cultures? What would be the evidence of an infected civilization? What would be the evidence of an uninfected civilization? What sort of "immunization" scheme would be required to protect a civilization from the infiltration of anti-memes?



Death and Culture

Having practiced on relatively uncontested diseases, it is easy to apply the same analyses to more controversial anti-memes that, say, destroy, modify or replace the well known stabilizing effect of 2-parent, nuclear families: divorce, "shacking up", abortion, birth control, fertility clinics and day-care. We can identify these anti-memes as parasites by finding ways in which the behavior spreads. We can separate such anti-memes from symbiotes or civilizing memes by quantifying the negative impact on society, which would include sociological estimates of impact such as college graduation rates, "satisfaction" indices, or real income growth. Several such studies have been done with rather frightening results. As mentioned earlier, a sociology paper has concluded that the nuclear family is far worse off today than it was 50 years ago with widespread consequences for society.

Who are the promoters of these parasitical anti-memes? One doesn't have to look far. It is the power elite, the rich, the city-dwellers, the large corporations, the government bureaus, the education establishment, all those that are forever "progressive". What are the indications that such groups are heavily parasitized? That they engage in radical social experiments, none of which are successful, all of which cannot be easily undone, and many of which result in greater numbers of infected citizens. One can look at the outcome of the "New Deal", the "Great Society", the "War on Poverty" and ask, were the consequences of these large social experiments better than doing nothing at all?

Who then are the defenders of status quo against such innovations? The poor, the disenfranchised, the rural farmers, the church-goers, the silent majority and those that are labelled "reactionary". Then it is clear what is immunization, it is religious belief, what Marx called the "opiate of the masses", but we now see is the "quinine of the masses". Religion is a tremendous stabilizing force, precisely because it codifies societal expectations into moral commands. This has been known for millennia, as the book of Job records for us circa 2000 BC. (See ../../JOB/job.html). Therefore it is the breakdown of a religious consensus that makes a society so vulnerable to parasitical attack.

That is, societal decay does not happen without cause. A society does not just fall into ruin because it grows too rich or successful or big or powerful. On the contrary, societal decay occurs as the parasitical load of anti-memes overwhelms the original stabilizing civilization memes. Eventually an infected society succumbs by starving its citizens, descending into chaos, or losing the ability to defend its borders. History is littered with such stories, from ancient Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome to modern sagas such as Chinese dynasties, the British Empire, Russia and Yugoslavia. With a little pessimism, we might even believe that civilization is itself unstable, unable to long maintain itself in the face of parasitic attack. Could it be that only a "young" society is healthy, as measured by the strength of its armies, the prosperity of its people, and the orderliness of its citizens? As we examine history, can we extract any lessons that, say, produced unusually long-lived civilizations?

The task is hopeless, for if we take but one well-documented civilization, the Roman Empire, and ask "What caused the Fall of Rome?" we will receive several bookshelves of scholarly works debating these points. One suggests it was moral decay caused by Christianity, another suggests lead poisoning from the water supply, and on it goes. However if we ask "What caused the rise of Rome?" there is remarkable consensus. A highly disciplined army. A determined populace willing to undergo tremendous privation to win the Punic Wars. A balanced form of government. In essence, a moral superiority to its neighbors. In other words, a young and unparasitized society. So we see a pattern, perhaps. Civilizations progress to a certain point when they become old and sick, and then are replaced by young and virile new societies. Even long-lasting civilizations such as Chinese or Egyptian dynasties show a constant ferment, a continual turnover, with 100 - 200 year viability for any particular government.

I am reminded of National Geographic article about the bison of Yellowstone park, trying to survive the harsh winters. The writer reports of buffalo wallows dotted with the red blotches of blood from exploded ticks as the animals rolled in their beds of snow. Some of the big animals did not survive the winter, but sick and weary, covered in sores and mange, they were unable to rise from their bed to graze in the meadows near the hot springs. Then the coyotes would gather, waiting for the dying gasps of the sick animal to cease. They did not immediately move in to feed, however, but waited a while longer for the ticks and fleas to freeze before they cautiously approached the carcass. Even the predators had a healthy respect for parasites. So it appears that death by freezing is the only certain cure for these bison afflictions.

As I pondered these pictures, it seemed to me that death may be the only cure for all parasites, and rebirth the only escape. For bison, for civilizations, for people, perhaps death is the ultimate defense. Earlier we had said that religion was immunity, and we know that religion labels the opposition as sin. In the Garden of Eden, God said to Adam, Whoever eats of this fruit shall die. Thus there is a strong link between sin, death, and anti-memes. Since the Bible records nearly 2000 years of history (and possibly summarizes another 1000-2000 years of Mesopotamian tradition) it provides a valuable resource in understanding the life cycle of memes and anti-memes, of civilizations and their parasites.


Even as we begin to study anti-memes using the Biblical terminology of sin, we find it is invariably connected to more than faceless bureaucracies or evil empires, but to individuals. Parasites of civilizations function by parasitizing individuals, societal sin operates through personal sin, rebirth of nations occur simultaneously with the rebirth of men. The story of Israel escaping the parasitized Egyptian nation begins with the birth of Moses, and final deliverance is accomplished through the death of Pharaoh's army, drowned in the Red Sea. So there is a deep relationship between memes and genes, between anti-memes and death. A relationship that has puzzled and attracted attention for thousands of years. If we are to make progress in this study, we must go over well-trodden paths with the night-vision goggles of biology guiding our search. For the story of parasites and defenses take us into the religious world of sin and death, into the mystery of life and rebirth, into the genetic transmittal of that first parasitical meme--the imputation of Adam's sin.



The Imputation of Adam's Sin

As we enter in the debates swirling around the concept of original sin, we must be careful that we do not confuse science with theology, general revelation with special revelation. Finding a "scientific" explanation for a theological principle neither concludes nor exhausts the meaning of scripture. At best it illuminates, corroborates or illustrates a doctrinal concept. We must be highly cognizant of the many facets of truth, of which empirical scientific data is but one small face. There is no place for intellectual smugness that reduces doctrine to dogma with "nothing buts". Our purpose here is not to "divide and conquer" but to "unite and praise" the often separated strands of truth in religion and science.

There have been many attempts over the last 2 millennia to identify the source of the genetic transmittal of Adam's sin. For example, in the medieval "homunculus" theory, a man's sperm is a seed containing a very small human being that is planted in the fertile soil of a woman's womb. Thus Adam's sin is genetically transmitted through the man, and the woman contributes nothing to moral depravity. Such a theory would conveniently explain the sinlessness of Christ, because he was conceived not by an act of man, but by the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately improved microscopes and cell biology indicate that no such analogy to seed and soil is appropriate. This then is the danger we face in attempting to attach scientific explanations to theology; our theology is more permanent than our science!



Pelagius, Augustine and Murray

In John Murray's scholarly booklet, The Imputation of Adam's Sin, he categorizes a number of views that he finds deficient. In every case, the deficient view employs a reductionist "nothing but" explanation. Adam's sin is nothing but solidarity of humanity in Adam. Or it is nothing but legal guilt imputed by God. Or it is nothing but proclivity to sin genetically transmitted. What Murray is at pains to recover are the multitude of ways in which original sin impacts on the human race, and the refusal of Augustine, or Calvin, or Edwards to limit themselves to a single interpretation. This is significant, for otherwise our emphasis on genetic features of sin are likely to incite a lynching mob for Pelagians. But can one really hold two opposing views simultaneously?

The key to this dilemma lies in recognizing that there are many false dichotomies, false divisions in theology. This is partly to blame on language, which is itself ambiguous. Do you go out or at night? Do you walk to school or carry your lunch? This is partly due to theologians, who often have ulterior or polemical reasons for pressing a false dichotomy. Murray blames the cause for Hodge's reductionism on an overreaction against Catholicism. And it is partly to blame on human psychology that desires to simplify the complexities of life into a series of black-and-white rules. (Stage 3+4 for all you Fowler aficionados.) Despite appearing much harder to defend, a rich multiperspectival position is ultimately less susceptible to heresy, as a historical survey even of this limited doctrine can attest.

Let us give one example from Murray's book, just so I am not misunderstood as advocating a post-modern pluriform truth (which is actually an attack on logic that would make Aristotle blanch.) Murray discusses the "immediate" and the "mediate" application of Adam's sin, where "mediate" is understood to be the transmittal of original sin mediated through an additional mechanism. One subcategory of mediated sin would be Pelagius' doctrine of an inherited proclivity to sin. Murray makes a number of points against this view, my favorite being that St Paul makes the parallel to Christ's redemption, and one really wouldn't prefer a mediated view of salvation. The contrasting view is that original sin was "immediate", that it appeared the moment a child existed. However, and I stress this point, the immediate view does not require the nonexistence of mediated sin. There indeed might be many inherited proclivities to wine, women, and rock music entirely consistent with the view that original sin came with the first squalls of a newborn. It is a false dichotomy to say that the "immediate" view prohibits discussion of mediated sin, rather it is the reductionist "mediate" view that censors Augustine. With this insight from Murray, we are bold to investigate some of the biological mechanisms by which sin is mediated in us, confident that we remain firmly within the strong fortress of orthodoxy.



Adam's Apple

What exactly was the original sin of Adam? The story of the Garden is perhaps too familiar, but let us review it from this new perspective. Here is the warning God gave (Gen 2:16-17):
And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
Note that there is no apple mentioned, which is an important point. Apples are good for us, so that if we assume the prohibited fruit was an apple, it implies that the warning God gave was entirely arbitrary. Suppose, however, that there was a prion or a virus in that fruit, could not the eating of the fruit have begun an infection that is with us to this day? An infection whose only cure is death. But how is this possible? Doesn't moral depravity require more than a bodily illness, rather a spiritual illness?

The purpose of this section is not to prove some new approach to sin, but merely to explore whether any biological explanation for original sin may be plausibly entertained. For this purpose, we want to know whether a learned behavior such as Adam's can be inherited by his progeny. Now if someone had asked this question immediately after my college biology 101, I would have said "No, that's Lamarckianism." For as we were told in class, Lamarck held the erroneous belief that environmental effects could be inherited, that giraffes have long necks because generation after generation of giraffes stretched their necks to reach the high leaves at the top of the trees. This was emphatically disproven when August Weismann cut the tails off 22 generations of mice, and showed that it had no effect on the length of newborn mouse tails. Such empirical proof, we were told, was ignored in the Soviet Union, where Lamarck was valued for his applicability to dialectical materialism, resulting in a lost generation of Russian biologists. The gene, we were informed, is the master of your fate. Some have even gone so far as to say a human is just a gene's way of replicating itself. So from this logic, nothing Adam did could affect his genes, and therefore original sin cannot be genetically transmitted.

Some recent results, however, have started earth tremors in this fortress of gene orthodoxy. There appear to be mechanisms by which the environment triggers genetic changes. Lamarck's mechanism may not be true in general, but it is true for some specific situations. Let me begin with an observation that struck close to home.

When my wife was pregnant for the first time, she developed a passion for avocados that she never had previously or since. And it is a well known fact in my family, that my firstborn prefers avocados to this day. This story was repeated with watermelons and potatoes in subsequent pregnancies, so I can attest that it was not a fluke. But what relevance does this have for genetic transmittal? Only that in the debate between nature and nurture, nurture has been found to begin even before birth, which has added a great deal of confusion. Imagine that you are doing a study with identical twins separated at birth. An ideal case, you think, to separate nature and nurture, to distinguish between genes and memes, things inherited and things learned. But now we recognize that 9 months of identical nurture has made indelible changes in the twins, how then can we separate the influences? This has become even more apparent in this age of cloning, for scientists have found it exceedingly difficult to replicate the nurture needed to get an embryo to grow normally, much less to appear identical to its parent. Granted that nurture is important, can it be passed on to further generations like a gene?

Quoting extensively from Lee Spetner's web site:
In 1982 Barry Hall reported on an experiment in which he prepared a strain of E. coli bacteria lacking the beta-galactosidase gene lacZ, which normally hydrolyzes lactose [milk sugar]. When these bacteria grew and multiplied on another nutrient, but in the presence of lactose, they gained the ability to metabolize [digest] lactose, an ability that proved to be heritable. The gained ability was found to be due to the presence of a new gene. The new gene encodes a new enzyme that can perform the function of the beta-galactosidase, enabling the mutant bacteria to metabolize lactose. The gene was present all the time, but in a dormant state. It was turned ON by two mutations that occur in the presence of lactose and do not appear in its absence. Hall declared that the "normal function" of this gene is unknown, and he called it a "cryptic" gene.

Neither of these two mutations alone gives the bacterium any advantage, so there could not have been any selection for them separately. For the cryptic gene to become active, both mutations have to occur. In the absence of lactose, these two mutations are independent. They can occur together only by chance, and will do so with a probability of only about 10^-18 [billion billion] per replication. If they occur at random and independently, the expected waiting time for one of these double mutations to occur in Hall's population would be about 100,000 years. But in the presence of lactose, he detected about 40 of them in just a few days! One can conclude that the lactose in the environment was inducing these mutations...

In addition to these recent observations of nonrandom mutations in prokaryotes [bacteria], there has long been evidence of nonrandom variation in eukaryotes, including plants and animals. Seventy-five years ago Victor Jollos experimented with Paramecium aurelia, and found an environmentally-induced variation that was heritable. When the environmental stimulus was removed, the variation persisted in subsequent generations. An interesting feature of this work is that the original state of the organism returned after 40 generations without the environmental stimulus.

Many other examples can be given of environmentally-induced variations in plants and animals observed over the past hundred years. Taken together, the evidence indicates nonrandom variation, induced by the environment, may play an important role in evolution. These varied examples share a common feature: namely, that an adaptive variation can appear in large numbers in a population when it is needed. When adaptive nonrandom variation does occur, it is far more frequent than chance, and it appears in a large fraction of the population...

Living organisms respond to their environment on several levels. As Jacob and Monod have shown, the genetic control system senses the presence of an enzyme's substrate and turns ON the gene that encodes the enzyme. The cell's control system turns genes ON or OFF as they are needed, but makes no heritable change in the genome. This kind of control permits the organism to operate efficiently through specific short-term changes in the environment.

I have suggested that a straightforward extension of such controls, making their results heritable, can lead to changes in the long-term -- on an evolutionary time scale. Moreover, if the control is in the development process, even a small change of the "right" kind can lead to a large adaptive change in the phenotype. The "right" kind of change is unlikely to occur by chance. If the changes are random, the probability of a "right" change occurring is a function of the fraction of "right" changes among all possible ones. The number of "wrong" changes is so much greater than the number of "right" ones, that a "right" change is unlikely to occur by chance even in large populations and over immense periods of times. But, if the genome had the built-in ability for an adaptive change to be triggered by an environmental cue, then chance would not be a factor -- the right adaptive change would be elicited when it is needed....

So far I have indicated only how an environmental cue can enter an exposed cell and cause a heritable effect on its genome. How could an environmental cue produce a heritable change in a plant or animal? Having the environment cause a heritable effect on an exposed cell is one thing. But creating a heritable effect on a multi-celled organism, where the reproductive cells are isolated from the somatic cells, seems to be something entirely different.

Environmentally-induced changes seem more difficult to achieve in plants or animals than in single cells. For one thing, in multi-celled organisms the environmental cue has to penetrate to the reproductive cells, or gametes. Second, the environmental stimuli that have been seen to trigger bacteria are relatively simple, while those that would trigger plants or animals would have to be complex. Can complex environmental cues get into the organism? We know they can because animals, for example, adjust their birth rate to match available resources. Plants are known to adjust their seed production to the available space. We know that complex stimuli can enter through the sense organs and be processed by the brain to produce appropriate physiological or psychological states such as stress. These states stimulate the production of hormones, which travel throughout the bloodstream to reach their targets in any part of the body. The target sites of some of these hormones could well be the reproductive cells, and there they could make a heritable change. These suggestions must remain speculative for the present until more is known of how environmental cues act. But herein lies a possible mechanism for observed evolution.


Now should a switched gene be heritable, as Spetner suggests, it must occur in cells that are essential for reproduction, the gametes. Thus Spetner's "long-term" changes must affect those cells either before or immediately after fertilization. For various reasons, the period before conception is unlikely to be when heritable changes occur in the genome, among which is that the egg cells of a female have already undergone meiosis and are in a condition of suspended animation long before a female reaches the age of fertility. However, the time period immediately after conception seems to be a better time slot for such changes, for one thing, heritable genomic changes between mother/daughter cells are a critical feature of differentiation, the process by which a fertilized egg becomes a baby. So it seems natural to speculate that heritable changes to the genome enter in those first crucial weeks after conception.

More precisely, every example given by Spetner considers the chemical environment of a dividing cell as determined by hormone levels or stress. Speaking colloquially, the daughter cells are responding to the food that the mother ate, which is the theme that began this illustration. Thus Eve, when she conceived Cain, potentially still had in her system the chemicals released by digestion of the forbidden fruit. Cain, developing as an embryo, may have switched on certain genes and switched off others, which left an indelible mark on the future of mankind. Adam's apple may be with us still.

An even stranger version was published just recently in Nature (Nov 2002), where non-obesity in Swedes was found to be correlated with a pre-pubescent privation of the person's father. That is, the lack of food of the father, was possibly affecting his future sperm genes. But perhaps the best example comes from a recent (Sep 2003) article in "The Scientist"


Duke University researchers give a new twist to the old adage, "You are what you eat." By feeding female agouti (A^vy) mice methyl-rich supplements such as folic acid and vitamin B12, Randy Jirtle and Robert Waterland reduced agouti gene expression in their offspring. This change, caused by direct methylation of a transposon at the 5' end of the agouti locus, resulted in dramatic, visible changes in pups, including darkened coat color and decreased weight gain.¹ "Transposons are genomic parasites," says Jirtle, explaining that epigenetic mechanisms such as methylation have evolved to counteract transposon-initiated gene expression.

The research has broad implications. Such epigenetic effects could muddle sequence-driven disease gene hunts; the fact that environmental factors can cause potentially heritable genetic changes blurs the boundaries between nature and nurture. "It's definitely Lamarckian," says Jirtle, referring to the largely discredited 19^th century evolutionist who proposed the inheritance of acquired traits.

Ted Steele, Australian researcher and author of Lamarck's Signature, lauds the work's contribution. "It is clear, phenotypic diversity influenced by a direct environmental trigger, in this case food," he says. Arthur Beaudet, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, says the work will change the way people think about dietary supplements. Jirtle adds, "Trivial doses can dramatically affect gene expression."
--Mignon Fogarty

1. R.A. Waterland et al., "Transposable elements: targets for early nutritional effects on epigenetic gene regulation," Mol Cell Biol, 23: 5293-5300, August 2003.

Besides potentially broadening the bruise of Adam's fall to include the womb of Eve, what have we explained? Can a switched on gene explain sin? Well, I'm venturing into unfamiliar territory when I discuss evolutionary biology, but let me draw an analogy to animals. When it comes to pets, why is it that, say, lions and tigers and bears make impossible pets, whereas cats, dogs and pigs can be housebroken if not household workers? Clearly domestication is related to something genetic, and conversely, wildness must also be inherited. Now if original sin is something like the wildness of tigers, a rebellion against God's control, and saintliness is something like domesticated cat of God's household, then could not a genetic switch convert mankind from angelic saintliness to Satanic rebellion? This is most certainly not the exclusive or exhaustive character of original sin, but might it not be a contributing factor?



Ethnic Variation

We have tried to show how original sin may perhaps show up as a genetic trait, which brings up the question, can moral failings in general have genetic causes? I tread on very thin ice here, since wars and propaganda of wars have often equated nationality or genetic background with moral inferiority or superiority. We do not want to fall into that same error. But there is an equally dangerous error that seems particularly prevalent in American "diversity awareness" and "sensitivity training" that argues for absolutely no impact of genes on behavior or performance. This American indoctrination relies completely on religious justification and anecdote, primarily because scientific evidence is against it. Books such as "The Bell Curve" or "The g-factor", which attempt to statistically isolate genetic dependencies in IQ or intelligence have been so completely ostracized by the scientific establishment that no scientist can ever admit having read them!

Nonetheless, if one examines human performance, genetics seem to play a huge part. For example, compare Nobel Prizes in Physics with Olympic track and field medalists. One could argue that just as genes of Jewish ancestry are overrepresented in the former, African genes are overrepresented in the latter. But what about all the educational opportunities available to the white middle-class that was not available in Africa? Political correctness aside, surely couldn't statisticians perform the studies that separate environmental factors from genetic to determine how much of each was involved? This was precisely the topic of the two censored books mentioned earlier, both of which arrived at controversial conclusions. Now if this is possible with intelligence and athleticism, could we not do the same thing for personality or moral fiber?

It is done all the time, actually, primarily in humor. That is, humor engages in national stereotyping as a way of connecting genetics to personality traits, which while frowned upon in America, is still a common pastime in Europe. One of my favorites is the following anecdote:
If heaven were placed in Europe, the cooks would be French, the administrators Swiss, the policemen English, the mechanics German, and the lovers Italian. On the other hand, hell would be where the cooks were English, the administrators Italian, the policemen German, the mechanics French, and the lovers Swiss.
This illustrates well the point that nationality is not destiny. All Germans do not become mechanics or policemen, rather, one can identify traits which influence the final outcome. That is, genetics is not an exhaustive explanation for, say, superior German armament in WWII, it is merely a contributing factor. Back to original sin and moral failings then, genetics is neither exclusive nor exhaustive explanation of human shortcomings, but it should be seen as a contributing factor. Therefore, just as one can associate physical traits with nationalities, it is common wisdom that one can associate mental or personality traits with nationality, demonstrating that moral deficiencies may be indeed partially related to genetics.



American Slavery

Now I want to come back to an earlier question in this study, why God hates human breeding so completely. We had earlier discussed the sociological consequences of a caste system, and argued that like the Hindu caste system of India, breeding introduces both cultural stagnation and perennial warfare. Now I want to look at the impact of breeding on the individual.

A graduate student of mine who was from India once told me that all the great mathematicians and physicists from India were from the top echelon, the Brahman caste. The American eugenics movement of the 1930's, before Nazis had besmirched the cause forever, argued for breeding programs to increase intelligence, and pointed to Ashkenazi Jews with verbal IQ scores averaging 3 sigma above average, as a success story to emulate. However persuasive the arguments for superior breeding, most of these examples lack real data. That is, either the breeding, such as Hindu castes, or European nationalities, have had so much genetic transfer that they make poor models, or like the Nazi efforts, they were too brief to allow any conclusions. An ideal breeding program would hopefully be modern enough to include reliable data collection, small enough that "purebred" strains could be characterized, but large enough to achieve statistically significant results, and last for at least 4 or 5 generations to demonstrate breeding true to type. (I think I recall 10 generations for a purebred lab mouse, but perhaps modern biology has a more genetically rigorous requirement.)

Pondering these requirements, one might imagine that Easter Island, where the Bounty mutineers landed, might be exactly the sort of modern experiment needed, though finding some test for mutinous behavior might be tricky! Or even more recently, genetic studies of Icelandic peoples have proved valuable since exact genealogies are possible on an isolated people group going back many centuries. But perhaps the largest breeding experiment was performed in America, roughly 2 centuries ago--American slavery.

At first, slaves were brought to the Americas (primarily Brazil and Caribbean) under horrible conditions by the shipload from slaving ports in West Africa. But after England and the US outlawed the slave trade in 1807, it became more economically feasible for American slaveholders to breed their slaves. Of course, this may have been going on before 1807, but became the exclusive method of obtaining slaves after that point. From then until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1864 we have nearly 60 years, which given a generation of 20 years, makes 3 generations. Including some time before 1807 may bring that up to 4 or 5 generations, but not more. Thus we have a muddy signal of the outcome of this vast breeding experiment. Nonetheless, it is clear that slaveholders were breeding (violating nearly all of Moses' written taboos), and that it was an experiment. The social and spiritual consequences of this inhumanity of man toward man has been catalogued adequately by others, including the destruction of the nuclear family and its devastating socio-economic results. We want to add to this list by examining the perhaps overlooked biological and genetic consequences of this venture into eugenics.

What were the characteristics that were so desired by the owners? One doesn't have to read Uncle Tom's Cabin to surmise the traits. Manual labor in cotton fields had become the cash cow for the South, and thus strength and endurance were of primary importance for men, whereas fertility and robust survival for women (who often had many children in less than ideal circumstances) became a selected trait. Could such a short breeding program have any lasting biological success, or for that matter, any lasting biological failure?

I do not know how to run a controlled test of the hypothesis that breeding made a difference. Perhaps one could correlate Brazilian slavery to American, or African to Afro-American to statistically separate the trends. Not having the data, I speculate wildly here, not to condemn or judge, but to implore those who do have the data to analyze the trends. Anecdotally, the Brazilians are unstoppable in soccer, whereas the US has the edge in basketball, and the Kenyans in marathons. It seems that size and muscle mass, then, were among the traits that separate African-Americans from their contemporaries. And since we know that anabolic steroids produce muscle mass along with higher aggression, could it be that the higher incarceration rates for African-American males is at least partially a consequence of their heritage? It has certainly been argued that such societal impairment is one consequence of the destruction of the family unit engendered by breeding. And now we see perhaps, a further reason for God's condemnation of human breeding because it destroys not just the society, and not just the nuclear family unit, but even the individual personality traits needed for a stable society. So to add to the many reasons for the necessity of the American Civil War, we include the moral repugnance to God of a human breeding program, which was terminated not a moment too soon. Thus we see how anti-memes might spread, not just through society and family, but into the very genes themselves.

Is this Racism? No, far from it. Think for a minute what Racism claims and what Diversity counter-claims. Racism says that there is an important genetic difference between races that can be inherited, and can only be inherited. Diversity says that whereas many genetic differences exist, none of them can ever be important, or conversely, nothing important can ever be inherited. We disagree with both views. If you have followed me this far, let me say it again. There are very important inheritable traits that are not genetic. That is, we may all have the gene for "uncontrollable rage" in our genome, but through some murky process, only some of us switch that gene on and pass it on to our children. It is not the gene, which remains constant in all populations, but the switch that is inherited. And likewise the switch can be turned off, and that passed on as well. This view seems to violate much of evolutionary dogma, which we obliquely address in the next section, but first let us summarize.


Returning to the subject of Adam's sin and resulting death, we realize that sin can persist not just for a few generations in the anti-memes of a diseased family, but for multiple generations in the genes of failed breeding programs. That is, sin has additional dimensions of disorder not discussed in theology classes, but can even contaminate and distort the very genes we inherit. For example, in just such a way, cultural anti-memes can destroy not only the institution of marriage, say, through promotion of a homosexual lifestyle, but of even the hope of an heir. Therefore this reciprocal relation, these dual damnations amplify each other in a downward spiral, making it not only likely but nearly certain that the sin we inherit from Adam has biological dimensions, and that the human race faces insurmountable obstacles to holiness, inheriting cultural anti-memes and anti-genes in the womb before it has ever had an opportunity to chose good from evil. Like the telomeres that regulate cell-division and limit our lifespan to threescore and ten, so also sin and death are programmed into our very cells, relegating our lives to misery and decay. This makes all the more poignant Paul's cry at the end of Romans 7, "Wretched man that I am, who can deliver me from this body of death!".

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil

As we struggle with death in all its facets, we are taken aback by the pernicious nature of anti-memes and genes that can and have reinforced each other in their relentless destruction of the human psyche and even homo sapiens. In the evo-devo debates, it would seem that all nature is on the side of devolution, the irretrievable loss of information from civilization, from society and from the gene pool. But wait, it gets worse. The medieval church recognized a trinity of damnations, the sins of the world, the flesh and the devil. We have only scratched the surface of the synergy of the world and the flesh, now we must take on the Devil.

We have spoken about the Darwinian survival of memes and anti-memes, locked in a battle for survival because they are both purpose-driven, they are both ends-oriented. Contrary to popular opinion, Darwinian survival of the fittest only makes sense in such a teleocentric universe (see Neil Broom's "How Blind Is The Watchmaker?"). Without purpose, without direction, one would expect weak and random changes in the gene/meme pool, a diffusion, as it were, of information content. Yet what is observed are dramatic changes to genes or lineages (cf. Stephen Jay Gould's catastrophism) and equally dramatic rise and fall of empires and civilizations. From the Greek myths of Atlantis to the real history of the dark ages, we have this repeated story of wisdom gained and wisdom lost. This is no random diffusion of competitive g/memes, but clearly a highly unstable equilibrium, or shall we say, open warfare between victor and vanquished. Which brings up the question, can we discern the driving force, the telos, the purposes behind these catastrophic historical events; can we guess at the issues, at the sides in these archaic battles? And if we are able to categorize these battles, can we bin them into light versus darkness, good versus evil, God versus the Devil?

In order to proceed further in this discussion, we would do well to define our terms, having invoked two beings whose scientific existence, or shall we say, empirical activity, is itself vigorously debated. Let me beg off the immediacy, however, arguing that too early a definition will color our perceptions, and perhaps unnecessarily distracting us from arriving at our destination. In the spirit of this work, let me rather argue for a biological justification for the Devil's work, and perhaps even a biological necessity for his existence.



The Devolution of Genes

We have said without proof, that evolution requires a teleocentric universe. That is, to assume that random gene mutations will improve anything, is to require a measure of "goodness", a standard to compare against, an ideal to strive for, which is to say, a purpose (see Broom). The usual reply from Darwin himself, is that "reproduction" is a "natural" or purpose-free, neutral ideal. That is, if a species reproduces better, it will dominate its environment, it will survive, and such specie existence is a self-evident good. Such an answer means that one must already have a system capable of reproducing for this ideal to operate, thus making the concept of "pre-biotic evolution" an oxymoron. Even the most ardent evolutionist will freely admit this, which then pushes the ideal back to the intractable problem of the origin of life, that is, why should life have appeared in the first place (see Paul Davies "The Fifth Miracle" for a modern treatment of the issue.) Yet this Darwinian "neutral" ideal really hasn't solved anything for even post-biotic evolution because it does not favor evolution over devolution. That is, bacteria are a whole lot simpler than nematodes, which are a whole lot simpler than people. So if merely making many copies of oneself is the ideal, which can be ever so much more efficiently done by bacteria that multiply every 20 minutes, or nematodes every 3 days, why shouldn't people devolve into bacteria given enough time?

The question isn't so silly as it looks, even accounting for our natural bias for preferring our type of existence, and indeed can be stated with great mathematical precision as a study in the retention and loss of genetic information as a function of time. Given that humans are more complex and therefore have more information in their genome than bacteria, is it more likely that information will be added or information will be subtracted from the genome in a random mutation process? Evolution would claim that information increase is to be expected, devolution would claim that information loss is more likely. We can examine this question both theoretically or experimentally with identical results. First let us consider an experimental procedure to test the hypothesis.

Since bacteria multiply so fast, and have a 100-fold faster mutation rate than humans, (see Lee Spetner's "Not By Chance"), they prove to be an ideal organism to investigate. We can irradiate bacteria to increase their mutation rate by mangling their genetic code, and look for colonies that grow faster or stronger than their parents. We find none, and in fact, this technique turns out to be a good way to sterilize food. And higher organisms fare even worse than bacteria. Well, perhaps that brute force method is too indelicate, perhaps we should use a carrot instead of a stick. Spetner describes an experiment where a certain bacteria is put on a growth medium lacking the usual food sugar, lactose, but possessing a non-organic sugar, xylose. Within a few weeks the bacteria have mutated to a form that digests xylose. Superficially, a perfect example of Darwinian selection pressure.

However, when the mutated bacteria is examined closely, it is observed that the favorable mutation is a degraded enzyme that used to be much more selective for lactose, is now so broadly indifferent that it can do a little bit of xylose as well. Which is to say, a highly specific information rich enzyme has lost information or devolved to handle the environmental stress. And so it goes in every other genetic experiment so far examined. All observed mutations subtract information from the genome, not add. Devolution appears far more likely than evolution.

Wait a minute! Why do I say that a degraded enzyme is losing information? That argument is based on the definition of "information" as "negentropy", which will take a few paragraphs to explain. Back in the 1950's, Claude Shannon of AT&T invented the field of information theory, by looking for ways to put more data on a given chunk of radio spectrum, or "bandwidth". As every radio listener knows, the enemy of signals transmitted by radio is not silence, but noise. That is, as your car drives out of your home town, your favorite radio station doesn't just go silent, it gets very staticky and noisy. AM reception is simpler to explain than FM, but the principle is the same: the signal gets weaker and weaker, and the ever-present noise background eventually overwhelms the signal. Shannon argued that information or signal was related to the "opposite of noise". So first let's model noise, and then we will perhaps be able to take the opposite of it.

So what does the AM noise sound like? Sort of like sizzling bacon or ripping paper or shushing mothers, which when analyzed by an oscilloscope or a spectrum analyzer is called "white noise": waves of every frequency with equal intensity. Why is it called white? Because white light is made up of all the other colors, short and long waves all mixed together in equal proportion. This is the key to understanding noise. If the radio was broadcasting a flute solo, then there would be only one frequency, one wavelength coming out of my radio at a time. But noise is every frequency simultaneously, as if one had scrambled the entire solo and played it back all at once. If one thinks of a flute solo as a succession of short time intervals in which a single frequency is played, then one can construct a huge number of related random solos by changing the order of these instants. Given every possible ordering, the original solo is only one permutation among millions of scrambled versions. White noise, then, is a sampling of one of those million more likely re-orderings that scramble everything, whereas "signal" is one of those few re-orderings that sound nice.

Now "million" is a gross understatement, since given only ten notes, we quickly arrive at more than a million permutations, and most flute pieces have more notes than that. In fact, the numbers are so astronomical, mathematicians use a compression technique to talk about it, the logarithm. Since the log of 10 is one, the log of 1000 is 3, one can quickly see that the log is just the number of zeroes in a big number. This works backward too, so the log of 0.1 is -1, and the log of 0.001 is -3. Now we can start to appreciate Claude Shannon's explanation. One way to measure signal or information, was to compare it to white noise. If the radio station sounds like sizzling bacon, and its frequency spectrum looks reasonably scrambled, then it is just one of the zillions of likely combinations of random frequencies which we can write most easily as a logarithm, which Ludwig Boltzmann, a physicist of the previous century, had named "entropy". But if our radio sounds like a flute solo, then this is clearly a very unlikely random event, and should be treated as signal, or information. That is, if the one in a zillion combination has a calculated probability so small that its logarithm is a very negative number, then we take the negative logarithm of that probability to get a positive number that Shannon called "information", or "negentropy".

Finally, we can apply this to our enzyme. I'm not sure how to count sugars, but if we assume all 5-12 carbon sugars are possible substrates for our enzyme, and counting stereo-isomers, then perhaps we have as many as 500 different possibilities. If an enzyme works on only lactose, then the information is -log(1/500) = 2.7. But if our degraded enzyme works now (poorly) on 10 sugars, the information drops to 1.7. So far, we have used a binary works/doesn't work as a criteria, but of course we could divide those 2 levels into 10 or 100 levels of "activity" such that the drop in activity would correspond to a drop in information as well. So a properly elaborate model would assign high activity, high specificity to high information, and low activity, low specificity to low information. Thus we can see how the degraded xylose activity corresponds to a loss of information, and an increase in noise.

So far then, every genetic experiment that attempts to catch evolution in the act, has instead caught devolution, which doesn't rule out evolution, of course, but makes it even more unlikely than supposed. The theory, however, is not as forgiving. For this exercise, one has to consider a word game where a word is transformed into a second word by changing one letter at a time, with the stipulation that intermediate words have to be found in the dictionary. An example might be changing cat to dog as follows:


 CAT - COT - COG - DOG 

Now for evolution to change one species to another, the intermediate species have to be viable and reproduce, which corresponds to our intermediate dictionary words being available. Then the question becomes, are our two evolutionary endpoints connected by a web of usable dictionary words, or are they two islands surrounded by an impassable sea of gibberish? We can actually calculate this by determining how many 2 and 3 letter words there are in the dictionary, compared to how many permutations are possible. Using a scrabble dictionary (which cheats a lot, but at least is consistent) we have 96 two-letter words, and 972 three-letter words. Since there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, we have 26^2 = 676 two-letter possibilities, and 26^3=17,576 three-letter possibilities. The negentropy is then -log(96/676) = 0.84 for 2-letter words, and -log(972/17,576) = 1.26 for three-letter words. Now if the number of legal words is greater than or equals the number of illegal words, which corresponds to negentropy of -log(1/2)=0.3 then there's a good chance we can hop from start to finish without getting our feet wet. But, as you can see, this was easy for 3 letter words, but becomes downright difficult for 4 letter words, and devilishly hard for longer words. The problem is that negentropy grows with the length of the word, until word clusters are surrounded by impassable swamps that make this game boringly impossible.

Thus, we can now ask, are species separated by puddles of no consequence, or oceans of genetic gibberish? We can immediately calculate the negentropy and find, like our word game, negentropy much greater than 0.3, and therefore very unlikely transitions between species. Is this a fair analogy? Might not two or three mutations occur simultaneously that can jump over small rivers in our land of legal dictionary words? Again, if one assumes that all steps are random, including the time between steps, then one can assign a probability to a double jump. Its just the probability of a single jump squared. Let's see how that works in practice. When bacteria "reproduce" into two bacteria, there is a 1x10^-9 probability of making a single mutation error per codon, which given about 10^9 codons in a bacterium, is one per cell division. A double mutation has a likelihood of 1x10^-18 error, so that one replication every 20 minutes will provide a double mutation every 10,000 years. That makes random double jumps pretty useless for evolution. However, this is precisely what is observed in experiments as we reported earlier from Spetner's web site!

Well, that's a relief, at least we know evolution is happening, even if it seems a bit mysterious to us presently. But wait, Spetner didn't say that the bacterium was evolving, only that it switched on certain crypto-genes that it already had! Our little island of legal words is an archipelago, but still surrounded by oceans of meaninglessness. It is as if we were to examine all the words related to "evolve": "devolve", "revolve", "resolve", etc. but still not find a way to get to "species". Not only did we discover that our little archipelago was connected by bridges, but we found that archipelagos are too widely distributed to communicate. That is, instead of finding random diffusion of information, the bridges show too much information transfer, and the oceans too little. The only certainty with random evolution change is that undirected travel off our island will drown us. Devolution reigns supreme.

Wait a minute! How can I call Spetner's crypto-genes devolution? Because while mysterious, they certainly cannot be evolution. If I will be cornered into choosing in the evo/devo debates, it appears devolution should always win. Nonetheless, there does appear to be all this hidden information in the crypto genes that biologists have not yet characterized because it normally isn't used. That is, without the two mutations that turn on the bacterial gene described by Spetner, the protein is never expressed, and the DNA never deciphered. A recent article in Nature (Dec 2002) perfectly captures the confusion of biologists, because it was commonly believed that unexpressed DNA, "junk" DNA, would mutate at the maximum rate without "natural selection" providing the conservative braking. Nonetheless, now that mouse and human genomes have been transcribed, it appears they have conserved not only most of their active DNA, but large sections of junk DNA as well. It is as if our archipelago contains a buried DC-10 airplane whose existence only makes more difficult the hypothesis that random strolls in the surf populated our island. The right questions to ask are "where did that airplane come from? who made it? can we use it?", but at the moment all we can see is the tip of an exposed propeller, and can't even agree on that. So instead let us focus on the more trivial questions, "What is it? What is its purpose? Why hasn't it rusted away?" For if in the land of chaos, devolution reigns supreme, what then do we make of human progress?



The Devolution of Memes

Whatever we said of genes is equally applicable in our model, to memes. Complex memes, such as making iron from ore, or turning wheat into bread, cannot tolerate much variation without becoming useless, as most novice bakers have discovered. Consider the fact, for example, that every part of the cashew plant is highly toxic excepting the well-encased nut. Just how many people died discovering that fact? Yet we happily munch on cashews today oblivious to this peril, which should at least tell us that memes do not randomly diffuse their information either.

Of course even Dawkins doesn't assume that memes are driven by a random process of single steps, accumulating information the way a spam petition accumulates signatures, rather human minds are constantly directing the process to achieve a purpose or ends. This would suggest, in our analogy, that memes may be islands of information, but can hop on a jet for the next archipelago with relative ease. So, for example, the stone age led to the bronze age or hunting/gathering led to subsistence farming to cities on multiple continents, presumably without much if any human trade. It is this advancement of civilization memes in widely separated places that seems to fit Darwinian evolution better than genes, for it is undeniable progress, which is to say, it has a purpose.

This purpose-driven or telic property of memes, would suggest that memes evolve, not devolve. For example, imagine if your stone-age tribe heard that cashews were good eating, and the first person to try died as a result. There would be an immediate check on the sources of information, and in effect, an error-correction algorithm would be employed to remove the noise. Thus it would seem that culture would always grow more complex and better adapted, since there is a test, or error-check that recognizes "better" and rejects noise. (Note the similarity to Darwinian evolution here, once we allow purpose-driven changes.) Nonetheless, civilizations have not proceeded either at the same pace or without setbacks. Some cultures hardly changed at all over the millennia: the Australian aborigines, the Papua New Guinea highlanders. Others made some progress but then seemingly stalled out: the American Indians never domesticated animals, nor invented the wheel. What stopped this cultural development?

Jared Diamond develops this growth of memes in his book "Guns, Germs and Steel", arguing that the limitation of meme evolution is not ideas, but raw materials primarily, and communication secondarily. Such that the meme of bread-making required native wheat plants, and mobile populations who could take wheat plants with them to new fields. There's more than a whiff of political correctness about his thesis, arguing that no genetic or intelligence differences between populations can or should be used to explain the European domination of America, Africa and Australia, rather, coincidences of climate and environment are entirely to blame for affecting the mobility of germs and memes. Notice also how anti-Darwinian this is, because he argues that it was not the process, not the evolution that determined whether 1st or 2nd world dominated, but rather the starting point, the particulars, the unaccountable coincidences which completely determined the result. But this very mobility which he invokes as the source of the superior European culture, is also its major liability.

We talked earlier about parasites and their control over host behavior. One can also talk about viruses or prions as sub-living parasites, that cannot replicate without pirating the machinery from a living cell. In a reductionist view then, they become parasitical genes, causing the cell to waste resources on their own duplication. We have even discussed parasitical memes, those that cause civilizations to pass on their twisted logic to the detriment of the host culture. Now we want to consider the logic of parasitical cultures, a complex system that bears the same relationship to memes, as parasites do to genes. That is, if parasitical viruses can be considered a simple version of a parasitical bacterium or roundworm, could not anti-memes bear a similar relationship to meta-memes, and anti-cultures? And if so, then the greater the diffusion or transport of memes, the greater the threat of anti-memes, of civilization parasites, of anti-cultures.



The Anti-Meme Complex

Well the first question that might be asked, is what evidence we have of "anti-cultures"? That is, if an anti-meme is one which destroys or detracts from civilization, how could there be a collection of such anti-memes which make up an anti-civilization? Or is it just the whimper of the defeated that might cause, say, a medieval monk to refer to the Mongols as an anti-civilization? I think perhaps the best way to proceed is by analogy with genes. What is it that makes a virus a parasite; how is a bacterium still a parasite if it is capable of replicating itself; and in what way is a roundworm a parasite, if it is multicellular?

I think it is clear that symbiotes differ from parasites in that they contribute something to each other. The E. coli in our gut provide us with vitamin K, and as long as they stay in their right location, bacteria can be quite helpful to us. On the other hand, certain bacteria, such as V. cholerae have no beneficial location in our body, and unlike C. tetani, use their host to spread to other hosts. So a working definition of a parasitical bacterium is one which either due to an inappropriate location or general nastiness, damages its host, yet at the same time manages to spread from host to host. That is, it's the love-hate relationship that classifies it as a parasite, using the host as a necessary vector, yet damaging the host as well. This definition would apply equally well to multicellular organisms such as roundworms, since it is a functional or behavior oriented definition. Note that parasites don't have to spend all their time in one host, or even act in a damaging way at all times. The malarial parasite uses the well-known mosquito-human cycle, while some parasites have a 3, 4 or 5 host cycle.

Okay, how does this apply to memes and anti-memes. We are looking for competing memes, where one meme uses the other both as a host and a necessary vector for replication, yet simultaneously damages that host meme. We've discussed how alcoholism, drug addiction, and sexual abuse are all parasitical in the sense that they damage a living (genetic) organism, and that they damage a civilization (meme) organization. Then we mentioned how inner city projects seemed to have a whole collection of anti-memes at once, and we said that greed seemed to be a meta-meme, pulling in all sorts of anti-memes under its hairy orangutan reach. Now perhaps it's time to explore this meta-meme as a sub-culture, an underworld, an anti-civilization living inside a broader civilization and sickening it, much as the Mafia operate inside cities around the world, but first let us address the effect of anti-memes.

What we have seen is that gene parasites can attack at every level of complexity: prions attack cellular machinery, viruses attack the nucleus, bacteria attack intercellular, roundworms attack organs, and carnivores live off the whole organism. Likewise, increasingly complex meme parasites or anti-memes can be bad habits, addictive behavior, self-destructive relationships, bands of hooligans, and organized crime. Thus civilization can be attacked at every level of complexity, just as living organisms can. If it succumbs to the attack, it becomes progressively impaired and may ultimately collapse entirely. For a living organism to fend off parasitical attacks, it must have defenses at every level, and so must a civilization. Nor can these defenses evolve randomly, they must be purposeful, pre-emptive, predestined in order to work at all. That is, it is too late to wash your hands when the first cholera cramps strike, it is too late to start running when you first see the tiger, there are no lessons learned if one does not survive the attack. The passenger pigeon and the dodo, did not evolve defenses against predation. Nor, evidently, did the Papua highlanders evolve defenses against the civilization parasites that kept them in the Stone Age for an extra 3 millennia. Everything can take knowledge away, little can be done to rediscover it. The Dark Ages were not dark with respect to human history, they were the normal condition of mankind, it is rather that the Renaissance was so bright.

So once again we come back to the nature of complexity in memes, the civilization that Richard Dawkins wants so desperately to emerge from the chaos of the Paleolithic. There is no magic route to modernity, no game rules of "Civilization" that lead us to Alpha Centauri. A random walk from our island of knowledge does not take us to the shining city of Oz, rather it strands us in a wilderness of snapping jaws and sucking swamps. Devolution of memes is unlike devolution of genes in that memes are most certainly purpose driven, which is generally rejected for genes, but like the devolution of genes, loss of information from the "meme pool" is nearly irreversible. I have suggested that anti-memes are what drive the devolution process in civilization, much as parasites drive the same process in the gene pool. Whereas one might argue the beneficial character of a particular genetic adaption to parasites, such as sickle-cell anemia or striped zebras, no one really wants to say that Stone Age tribesmen are benefitted from an adaptation to anti-memes. That is, we are accustomed to applying judgmental criteria to memes and anti-memes, and history would support the detrimental effects of anti-memes. Such is the power of these anti-memes, that entire civilizations such as China and India have incorporated this inevitable devolution into a repetitive cycle of life and death, rise and fall. If we in the West have a progressive, evolving metaphor for civilization, it did not come from observation.

Mind Over Memes

Well, despite the cyclic character of civilization, we are presently living in the most advanced culture that ever existed on this planet, so can one say that the cycles have a trend upward? Can we expect that even in decay, anti-cultures can become the next great civilization? When the government or host civilization is weak, these anti-cultures operate nearly autonomously as their own culture, much like warlords in Afghanistan, or guerrillas in Colombia. At some point, then, do they reform and become authentic cultures? Well, it is possible, as is seen in many revolutions around the world, but we must also remember when it is not true, such as Pol Pot in Cambodia, or The Lord's Army in Uganda, or even Stalinist Russia, where regimes consumed themselves without leaving any recognizable civilization behind. The lesson here is that parasites can be nearly indistinguishable from symbiotes, that culture and anti-culture can look very similar. Pol Pot and George Washington both led revolutions. Stalin and Lincoln both suppressed revolts. The differences (which were obvious to some at the time) is made more apparent in the consequences, or as Jesus said "You will know the good tree by its fruit".

Well if we accept then that memes can form anti-cultures, we should examine a little more closely the characteristics of such Mafias. First, note that they are highly hierarchical, there is one autocrat at the top who is unassailable, and more or less, self-crowned. Furthermore, that anti-culture is the expression of his or her own dark personality. That is, meme-complexes are not a collection of knowledge facts like an encyclopedia, but have human characteristics, a personal flavor, a mental state. What makes anti-cultures wicked is not that they are a collection of anti-memes, as if gathering together a testtube of cholera bacteria will produce a roundworm, but rather normal cultures under the influence of an evil meta-meme, a controlling anti-meme that has subverted a culture to its purpose, a successfully parasitized civilization. Hitler's SS troops were not made up of alcoholics and drug addicts, rather, they were a highly disciplined army, but under his direct mental and physical control. So as we move up the gene complexity chain from prions to viruses to bacteria to roundworms to mosquitoes, so also we can move up the meme complexity chain from bad habits to addictions to gangs to Mafias to Pol Pots. At each stage of increasing complexity there is also an increasing cooperation, increasing intentionality, increasing personality of the system. And at the very top, is the mastermind.

This is a subtle difference between culture and anti-culture, and so I hesitate to call it a crucial difference, so take this as a necessary but not sufficient cause, that anti-cultures have a single mind, whereas cultures have some form of shared mind. Why is this? To quote Lord Acton again, who said a great deal of good things on this subject, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." A shared power system, be it democracy or oligarchy, is an unstable equilibrium, for whoever gains a little bit more power than the others can use it to grab more power until he or she is in absolute power. So what makes a democracy stable? The framers of the American Constitution worked hard to make the system self-correcting with a tripartite power sharing system, but none of these mechanisms should be seen as corruption-proof, as failed democracies in Africa and Latin America have abundantly shown. Rather, what makes a democracy stable is the recognition of a higher power, a higher authority. As John Adams said most eloquently, we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.... Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Thus every civilization has a mind at the top, be it visible or invisible.

Have I just argued for the existence of "mind" out of an increasingly complex collection of mental memes? Is this an example of "emergence" so popular in the Santa Fe Institute's attempt to violate the law of entropy? Actually, no. Don't forget that memes are subsets of what an already operating mind uses, so we have the same oxymoron as "pre-biotic evolution" if we talk about memes evolving into mind. No, what I said was that meme-complexes, meta-memes, civilizations are all an expression of a single mind at some level. They do not create that mind, but they do reflect that mind. This is really no different than our earlier statement that we are accustomed to judging memes and anti-memes (as any parent of a teen-ager can attest), and thus we often assign value to meme-complexes and anti-cultures as if they were expressions of a single mind or will. But does that "mind" have an independent existence?

This is the crux of the issue, which of course, has been denied by various psychologists and philosophers even of rational beings such as you and I. But if we accept that "mind" exists for us, I think we can argue it exists for both cultures and anti-cultures. Again, the method is borrowed from Jesus as much as behaviorists: by their fruits you will know them.



The Devil's Handiwork

An interesting account of a non-religious psychologist who became convinced of the personality of anti-memes, is in M. Scott Peck's The People of the Lie where he tells of a 15yr-old boy who is hospitalized for depression.


Bobby's older brother, Stuart, had committed suicide with a .22 caliber rifle some months earlier. At first Bobby did not seem to suffer any adverse consequences. But then his grades at school deteriorated. Finally, he stole a car. When Peck, the psychiatrist, was asked to meet with Bobby, as a conversation starter, Peck asked Bobby what he had received as a Christmas gift. Bobby would give no answer. Peck pressed harder, until finally Bobby told him he had received a gun.
"A gun?" Peck repeated stupidly.
"Yes."
"What kind of a gun?" Peck asked slowly.
"A twenty-two."
"A twenty-two pistol?"
"No, a twenty-two rifle."
There was a long moment of silence. Peck felt as though he had lost his bearings and wanted to finish the interview and go home. Finally he pushed himself to say what had to be said.
"I understand that it was with a .22 rifle that your brother killed himself."
"Yes," replied Bobby.
Bobby had not asked for such a gift. In fact, he had asked for a tennis racket. Peck, reluctantly, continued the conversation.
"How did you feel, getting the same kind of gun that your brother had?"
"It wasn't the same kind of gun," Bobby replied.
Peck began to feel better. He must have had it confused after all.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I thought they were the same kind of gun."
"It wasn't the same kind of gun," Bobby replied. "It was the gun."
Bobby's parents had taken Stuart's suicide weapon and given it to their son for Christmas.

This story is chilling in that it is all so ordinary. What Peck argues in his book, is that there is a consistent thread running through all these stories, a personality, a mind that he can only describe as evil. We, who have been raised on generations of horror movies, are not surprised that evil exists, only that a psychiatrist would be saying so. Yet what shook Peck was not the skin-crawling sensation of a haunted house, or the gruesome crimes of a cannibal murderer, but the cold, selfish, distant cruelty that destroys others even as it destroys itself. It is the anti-meme, the love-hate characteristic that often appears in all our most common relationships. My purpose here is not to plumb the depths of the human psyche, but merely recognize the behavior, the outcome of anti-memes, and their peculiar relationship to personality. Because evil is ever, always, the same.

Tolstoy was wrong, of course, when he said that happy families were all alike, but unhappy ones were each unique. In point of fact, as the now 20-year old "12-step" movement has revealed, dysfunctional families all operate the same way, whereas happy families have the more diverse and successful members. Likewise, C.S. Lewis, in Screwtape Letters, does a memorable job describing the function of anti-memes from the perspective of a junior executive devil. Not only do anti-memes not appear spooky, but they look ordinary, even mundane, Lewis argues. That is, they can be classified easily and even recognized in historical manuscripts going back several millennia. Greed, avarice, powerlust, are the same in every era, in every culture, on every continent, Margaret Mead's fantasies notwithstanding. But there is more to this story than just these vulgar attributes of homo sapiens.

Ever since WWII, in both movies and public discourse, the rise of Nazi power has been seen as the paradigm for evil. (Even though many people, British among them, hailed it as the acme of progress at the time, suggesting either that evil is not so very blatant or that people are perennially short sighted.) So to understand anti-cultures, we could begin by examining some of the most outrageous behavior of Hitler's Third Reich, namely, his "final solution" to the "Jewish problem". Since Hitler spent enormous resources on his program of genocide, resources that could have been better spent fighting Americans or Russians, we must ask, what did it attain, what did it accomplish for him? Strangely it is hard to find a single thing Hitler benefitted from this madness. It created bitter opposition and guerrilla armies, destroyed the trained workers he needed to run a war machine, caused enormous brain drain to the US, providing his enemies the necessary resources and motivation to build "the Bomb", and gave the Nazi party even to this day, the worst reputation any political party ever achieved. One must wonder, how could Hitler have been so self-destructive? What is it that produces this self-loathing simultaneous with the propaganda about the will-to-power superman? What anti-meme would be so obsessed with destroying itself in as messy a way as possible? Jim Jones in Guyana forced even the little children on his New Age commune to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. The Columbine teenagers shot themselves at the end of their deadly rampage. And the list goes on. Does this death wish even make sense?

There are, as I see it, two ways to make sense of this peculiar nature of anti-memes. First, one could argue that humans are an unusually irrational species, with a built-in death wish unlike any other living species. Or one could look for a rational explanation for such behavior outside human control. Parasitical anti-memes that use and discard their host while infecting another, would at least avoid the existential dilemma. But how could such an anti-meme spread, if it killed its host and followers? Well if such anti-memes have several hosts, they need not pass directly from human to human, and thus do not need to keep their host alive. That is, quarantine and vaccination could globally eliminate the smallpox virus in 1973 (except what is still kept in terrorist laboratories) because smallpox had no other reservoir, no other host to carry the infection. This is not true of cholera, leprosy, and malaria, making these scourges much harder to eliminate. In the same way, if these "Hitler memes" have other hosts, other ways of propagating, then it may make sense for these memes to cause their hosts to self-destruct when their usefulness is gone. This then provides the second clue to discriminating anti-memes and anti-cultures: they destroy their hosts.

Unfortunately, it is too late for the infected host(s) to do anything when they discover the parasite, sort of like the nasty being in Alien, or more relevantly in C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength, where the antagonist only realizes his infection during the last few seconds of his life. We need a bit more predictive capabilities if we are to avoid a messy ending. But if these anti-memes are disguised from immediate recognition, how do we avoid them or becoming infected by them? Well perhaps one can identify an infected host, and at least avoid too close a contact with their memes (teachings). So what is a test for infection?

This is not a trivial question, because, as I argued above, these anti-memes have been with us a long, long time. If they are always as destructive as we have seen in recent centuries, they are responsible for delaying the progress of humanity for millennia. Proper identification of anti-memes, then, is likely to be vital for the longevity of a culture or a civilization, and solutions are likely to be mainstays of religious and ethical standards in every culture, just as the "bury your dead" meme was important to the Australians in Papua New Guinea.

Well its pretty obvious that an infected person would not want to discover that he will come to an unhappy end, for if he did, he might want to be cured. Likewise, uninfected people might want to eliminate the source of the infection. Thus for an anti-meme to protect itself, an infected person will have to do a lot of lying, both to himself and others. That is, one attribute of infected people, is that they either do not admit their infection, or they trivialize it. Note that the purpose of the lying is to protect the anti-memes, which will look irrational from the perspective of benefitting the host. Again there's this underlying irrationality that should be a tipoff, except we don't know how crazy we are until too late. That is, if Hitler were to actually win the Battle of the Bulge, we might not say his "final solution" was so irrational. However, the lying is the same no matter what the outcome. This leads to an important third way to identify anti-memes: they are supported with lies and well-disguised irrationality.

So it should not be too surprising that Truth is a big part of religions like Christianity. This analysis gives new meaning to favorite aphorisms such as the one engraved on the CIA building in Langley Virginia, "You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free." Or Jesus' trenchant reply to the Pharisees, (John 8:43-45)

Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me!"
Note that Jesus calls the Devil "the father of lies". Now it seems a bit of a stretch to say that all lies have to originate with the Devil. But it seems very clear that if the Devil were the originator of the anti-meme parasite, then genetically speaking, he is the father of all these present day infections. Now a meme, by definition, must propagate. And the chain of genesis must have a beginning, as Aristotle would remind us. So if we use this definition, we see the necessity of the Devil as the originator of parasitical anti-cultures, the first anti-meme, the father of lies.

So to summarize, anti-memes, like parasites, come in more and more complex forms, with anti-cultures being perhaps the pinnacle of mental parasites. Such anti-cultures can be distinguished from culture by three characteristics: they have a mastermind; the end of the mastermind is irrationally self-destructive; they are based on lies. And the original twisted mastermind, the originator of the parasite, the father of lies, can be spoken of succinctly as The Devil.


Modern Dilemmas

We come, finally, to the modern dilemmas facing our society, modern in the sense that we finally have the technology to carry them out with no immediate side-effects. That is, cloning is not all that different from breeding, but breeding carries with it the bad connotations of 3 millennia, violating many sexual taboos, whereas cloning seems clean, clinical, progressive, an asexual way of achieving many of the same ends. The issues, however, are not at root the sexual taboos, but the motives and mechanisms that lie behind them. Our purpose in constructing an elaborate biological interpretation of the Old Testament commands was exactly for the elucidation of the motives behind the modern dilemmas. With tools in hand, then, we tackle these very relevant topics.

Cloning

Before we go further with understanding cloning, we need to separate science fact from science fiction. Cloning still uses an egg cell, replacing the nucleus with an intact nucleus from a somatic cell (non-reproductive cell), and stimulating the egg into believing it has just been fertilized. Now under normal fertilization, the egg nucleus has lost half its chromosomes, and the fertilizing sperm cell has lost half of its chromosomes, so that when they are combined, they form a complete whole, albeit 50/50 mixture. This cloning approach is equivalent to allowing the sperm cell to have all of its chromosomes and the egg cell none. However, we should be clear that some of the genetic material of the egg cell is not in the nucleus, and thus, pure cloning involving 100% donor genes is only possible if the egg cell is "fertilized" with somatic cells from the same person. In honeybees, this is known as parthenogenesis, or asexual reproduction. Note that this still only works for females, because of the necessity of starting with an egg cell. So at the moment, anyway, there is little likelihood of cloning an army of Adolf Hitlers.

Nor is cloning all that it is cracked up to be. Evidently the somatic cell "remembers" where it came from, so that cloned animals, which require some 300+ embryos for every one that survives, somehow appear to age early, rapidly succumbing to arthritis and other diseases of old age. As we mentioned earlier, some environmental factors are inheritable, and cloning appears to have stalled because of this fact. I find it ironic that meiosis, the mechanism by which normal sexual reproduction prepares the gametes (the egg and sperm) somehow resets the clock and permits a baby to truly start afresh, making NDT the exception, not the rule. The more we learn about life, the more miraculous it becomes.

But supposing, with typical scientific arrogance, that all these problems will be solved, and human cloning becomes possible, what then is the ethical response to be? The point I'd like to make is that this process really is indistinguishable from breeding. If one has a purebred line of white mice, then all the genes in both sexes, barring the Y-chromosome, are identical. Such that progeny of a purebred strain will have exactly the same chromosomes as their parents. This is critical in biology and pharmacology, where uniformity of the biological system is paramount. In essence, all progeny of a strain are genetic clones.

So what then is the point of cloning? Well, producing a purebred strain takes many generations, whereas cloning takes none. Producing a purebred strain involves backcrosses or father-daughter matings, brother-sister matings, (and now with artificial insemination and frozen sperm, even multigenerational matings) such that when applied to humans, it violates every Mosaic taboo, whereas cloning violates none. So now we can see the secret. Cloning barely makes sense in animals with long maturation and/or gestation periods, say, cattle and elephants, but makes perfect sense in humans. It accomplishes all the benefits of a purebred strain without the 100 years of breeding needed to accomplish it. It is as if Saddam Hussein discovered a new way to make atom bombs that didn't involve any internationally prohibited technology. Would it still be illegal?

If, as I argued above, God hates breeding, and the sexual taboos are his way of preventing it, then clearly cloning would be equally unethical, for perhaps some of the reasons we listed above. We could explore some of the many ways that cloning raises ethical dilemmas, not the least is the pop-culture movie "Revenge of the Clones". I leave you with one thought perhaps not discussed in most debates on this subject. As agriculture in America and elsewhere becomes huge agribusiness estates, there is a tendency to create monoculture deserts, where, for example, exactly the same corn is growing for miles upon square miles. This has proved to be a parasite's dream, and the usage of pesticides to combat pests has dramatically escalated in recent years. More and more it is becoming apparent, as Moses commanded the nation of Israel, that rotating crops, or diversifying the landscape with resistant crops is needed to prevent widespread pest epidemics. Should human cloning become common, then human parasites will have a heyday, which perhaps is the whole purpose of civilization anti-memes in the promotion of cloning.



Stem-Cell

We should start by defining stem cells and the several ways of obtaining them. Stem cells are unspecialized cells, also called pluripotent cells that can specialize into all sorts of uses, bone cells, muscles cells, blood cells etc. The body keeps a supply of them in the bone marrow where they often are used to make red and white blood cells. However, embryos are sort of like a big ball of unspecialized cells, since they have not yet developed into a full grown baby. Likewise, the umbilical cord is sort of an embryonic bone marrow, so it too can supply many stem cells. Thus there are 3 basic places that scientists have harvested stem cells: bone marrow, umbilical cords, and embryos. The first two sources do not kill a person, the last does.

Now why would scientists be interested in stem cells in the first place? Well there are many situations when cells die or get sick and it would be awfully convenient to find a substitute. For example, some forms of diabetes are thought to be caused by the death of specialized cells in the pancreas which produce insulin. If one could replace them, one would have an instantaneous cure for acute diabetes. This hope in a miraculous cure has caused laboratories to initiate all sorts of stem cell treatments. By and large, the experiments have not been very successful. In one somewhat spectacular flop, elderly patients with Parkinson's disease (palsy, immobility of the limbs) caused by sick brain cells that no longer produce the neurotransmitter dopamine, had their brains injected with stem cells from homogenized embryos. Initially the results looked good, mobility was restored, but then the mobility became spastic to the point that the patients were even more severely handicapped than before, and the experimental treatment was terminated.

Much of the argument in Congress has been over the ethical ramifications of using stem cells from embryos, though what has garnered less attention is that stem cells from bone marrow and umbilical cords have proved to be far more useful with less side effects. I would have no objection to using one's own bone marrow for stem cell treatments. In fact I have almost no objection to umbilical cord stem cells since this appears to be God's technique as well. That is, it appears that during pregnancy, stem cells from the baby migrate across the placental barrier and take up residence in the mother, some evidently showing up in the brain. Thus with every pregnancy, the mother gets a stem cell treatment more effective than the experimental Parkinson's. So whenever my wife finishes my sentences for me, I tell her that our brains are fused.

Thus the ethical problem boils down to the use of embryonic stem cells in scientific treatment. Can we extract any principles from our earlier discussion that relates to this? Apart from the obvious issues of killing babies and cannibalism, is the question about hybridization. There are many injunctions against hybridization in the Old Testament, some that frankly, are hard to fathom, such as the prohibition against mixing two kinds of grain in one field, or mixing two kinds of thread in one garment. In this case, stem cells from another person amount to mixing two kinds of cells in one body. Is this breeding? Not exactly, but it is related. Like cloning, it is an asexual way of making hybrid organisms, which presumably are superior to their donors. It is subject to all the same pressures as breeding, and could easily lead to the same sort of "superman" that is the object of breeding; brain cells from Einstein, muscle cells from Schwarznegger, etc. Thus it is a destabilizing technology with all the same goals as breeding. Thus I would class this sort of treatment, despite its similarity to bone marrow and umbilical cord treatments, to be of the same character and spirit as breeding, and therefore unethical.

In Vitro

The phrase in vitro is Latin for "in glass", which is contrasted with in vivo meaning "in life". Thus fertilization of an egg cell which occurs in a testtube and is later implanted into a woman's womb, would be in vitro fertilization. The phrase has grown to encompass all sorts of new reproductive technologies that have a slew of acronyms. I would even lump into this nomenclature the practice of artificial insemination, not only because cattle breeders store bull semen in glass capillaries frozen at liquid nitrogen temperatures, but the diluted semen is delivered via syringes into the female. We can't possibly keep abreast of all the recent developments in this lucrative field, so we do not explore each technique separately. Instead we consider whether the tools we have developed earlier can help us ascertain the motives and principles guiding this expanding technology.

Perhaps it should be mentioned why this has become such a lucrative medical technology. Down through history, infertility has been seen as a general curse. A major occupation of Buddhist monks in some countries has been imploring the gods to lift the curse of infertility (and in some cases, propagating their own). The Old Testament story of Hannah and Samuel shows her in the temple, pleading fervently for a child. With such irrepressible hope, it is no surprise that businesses could exploit the demand. And perhaps the modern trend of women beginning their families in their 30's after establishing their career (when a women's fertility declines precipitously after age 27) has contributed both need and money to the endeavor. Considering this long history of suffering, is it even responsible to suggest that there may be ethical restrictions on this life-giving technology?

Well, perhaps we could look at the story of Abraham and Sarah, who when in their 70's decided it might be time to try some other solution to infertility. Sarah sent her maid to be Abraham's concubine and adopted the son of that union, low-tech but obviously workable solution with at least half the genes being right. When later she had her own son, the two sons were sent different directions, resulting today in the two races known as Arab and Jew, with the conflicts we recognize today. Clearly, there are ethical implications to these reproductive technologies, and they should not be brushed under the rug.

What then is the purpose of, say, artificial insemination in cattle breeding? Simply that bulls are expensive to keep. And everybody can't own a prize bull, one that produces better heifers with higher milk capacity. So why not sell the semen and reap the benefits of superior breeding without all the hassle? In other words, AI allows more convenient breeding. Many of the other technologies are the same, fertilizing the eggs in vitro with donor sperm, implanting the embryos in the egg-donor or in another womb, etc. All of these practices, while perhaps not intended as breeding experiments, nonetheless use all the apparatus of breeders.

Now let us go back to the Mosaic prohibitions. What was most important to Moses, prohibiting incest, or the breeding it intended? Would incest be tolerated if it wasn't used for breeding? The motive and the practice are all mixed up here, and probably inextricable. If international law prohibits the sale of equipment intended for ²³⁵U separation, a critical step in making an atom bomb, would it be illegal to sell, say, a biological centrifuge which could be modified to make it into a ²³⁵ separator? If US law prohibits the sale of automatic weapons, would it be illegal to sell single-shot weapons and a separate upgrade that makes it into an automatic? This is the sort of dilemma we are facing with breeding technology.

My own take on this is that both the law and the spirit of the law are equally important. Jesus (and Paul) both refute the claim that they abolish the Mosaic Law. Rather they uphold it but also include the necessity to keep the Spirit of the Law. Thus both reproductive technology and the spirit of breeding are prohibited by the Mosaic law. Despite my great desire to have a son, I would be very hesitant to use sex selection technology to produce a son. It would have to clear both hurdles for me to consider it ethical. However I am much more ambivalent toward fertility drugs. Other than danger to the mother and babies, it doesn't seem obvious that it violates either Mosaic or breeding prohibitions. (Nor strictly speaking, is it an in vitro technology.)

So to sum up, both ends and means are important in making ethical decisions. In this case the means are prohibited reproductive technology, and the ends are breeding of humans. For any procedure to pass this ethical test it must be consistent with both.

Sperm Banks

We have dealt with in vitro technologies above, of which sperm banks are just a subset. But this example makes clear the operation of the two pronged ethical test. Clearly, sperm banks are for breeding. They may withhold the name of the donor, but they include his race, height, eye-color, even IQ on occasion. Further the sperm is stored in vitro and introduced via a syringe. So both the technique and the intent violate our ethical standards.

Abortion

It is difficult for me to say anything constructive about this abomination. Human life is sacred, it is made in the image of God. Note that this is a physical distinction, not a functional distinction. Thus the embryo 3 minutes old is still a thing made in the image of God whether or not it has a braincell in its blastula. However in this section we discuss how abortion may play a part in the breeding agenda of the bronze age. Most certainly they were aware of both abortion and infanticide. Of course, surgical procedures being rather crude in the Bronze Age, abortion would not be considered a common option. We know from the Old Testament that Moses gave commands concerning accidental abortion caused by blows to the stomach. The Romans also were aware of abortifacients. So while rare, it seems that the ancients knew about the practice. Early church records relate the Roman attitudes toward the practice and the utter abhorrence of it. We gave a plausible scenario in the early part of this study indicating that the gods of the Amorites and Moabites played a part in child sacrifice. Certainly every farmer knew about culling the crops so that the remaining ones could grow more vigorously. It doesn't seem much of a stretch to include abortion in the list of ways that breeding and husbandry was carried out.

Compared to other forms of breeding, it appears a rather passive technique. No attempt is made to produce a better baby, only a method of removing the unwanted babies. Nevertheless, when we consider that abortion is the primary method of birth control in countries like Russia and China, and that because of abortion, the ratio of boys to girls in China is better than 3:2, it is a technique with profound effect on culture and breeding. That is, sex selection may not be quite the same as, say, breeding for height or intelligence, but it is nonetheless a form of breeding. And it is a practice that is completely destabilizing to society.

There are many better reasons for banning abortion, but I wanted to bring out that the Mosaic prohibitions also apply in this case as well. Applying the two pronged ends and means, we see that abortion violates both, and should be considered completely unethical.



Birth Control

The Catholic Church has certainly taken an unpopular stand on this issue, and thereby has owned the argument for almost a century. Nevertheless, other philosophical arguments can be made that do not rest upon a Catholic worldview. Indeed, the discussion above in "Sex in the City" argues against birth control for the exact opposite reasons as the Catholic church--it's bad for passion. But to add to this list, note that birth control is also a weak form of breeding, as can be seen in modern China. Namely, choosing sterilization after having a son certainly increases the male-to-female ratio of the population. Much of the blatant racism of the eugenics movement that spawned "Planned Parenthood" is now gone underground and called "birth control", as can be observed in the many UN reports on the subject.

There is very good philosophical basis and even greater historical antecedent for saying that "positive eugenics" which attempts breed by persuasion, inevitably leads to "negative eugenics" that sterilizes by force. Clearly the latter is inethical, and I would argue that even persuasion is itself immoral if the end is not itself a moral cause. That is, propaganda is at best a distortion of the truth, and is therefore a product of denial, if not deceit. So both the means and the ends of state supported birth control are immoral. The personal morality of uncoerced birth control is harder to evaluate outside a Catholic framework, though of course, methods that involve the termination of life (which I would define as beginning at conception) use immoral means. My best Protestant arguments are that the Bible attributes much positive value to children, and few if any negative value, so that should one decide against begetting children, there must be an overriding explanation that offsets the normal value--e.g. holy orders or suchlike. But wealth, comfort and prestige are surely not one of them.

Day Care

Even had the Bible spoken to this rather modern invention, surely I would not imply that a large majority of the West have been morally deficient? No, but society can be. That is, it may have been morally correct for Robert E. Lee to accept the call of the state of Virginia to command the troops of the Confederacy, but it was surely morally wrong for the State of Virginia to do so. We have focussed on purely biological ethical dilemmas, but after devoting so much space to memes, we should not exclude sociological ethical dilemmas. I can add little to the debates concerning homosexuality behavior, marriage laws, and divorce that has not already been said, but I think this study can contribute to some peripheral issues. Day care and public education come immediately to mind.

The meme of an intact nuclear family is not served well by day care. This is not a new observation, for certainly the rich of every millenia have had such services, though it is perhaps a modern phenomena that the poor have it today. The rich, by and large, voluntarily choose this option (though perhaps one can find exceptions such as Princess Diana), but the poor have it forced upon them. It is here that we see the ethical dilemma, much as we argue that state enforced birth control is unquestionably inethical, though personally enforced birth control may have explanation.

We in the middle classes would like to believe that we have choice in the matter, and though we complain about poverty, we act as if we were rich. Nevertheless, as the cost of, say, a new home exceeds the borrowing ability of a single provider, more and more middle class families are finding themselves working two jobs or more and necessitating day care. The government colludes by offering tax breaks for day care. And public schools cooperate by modifying education to become more like day care. The net result is a sociological propagandizing, nay, a sociological coercion toward day care that is inherently immoral.

My aversion is not all that radical an idea, it only appears so by near complete denial. When TV became the favored daycare tool in the 1960's, many parents objected to its passivating effect on mental development of children. Hence the invention of the oxymoron, "educational TV", and the smashing success of "Sesame Street". Studies showed that children exposed to Sesame Street actually did learn to read at an earlier age than those without the boob tube. However, those studies also showed that the effect was highly transient. Follow-up studies showed that extended exposure to Sesame Street shortened the attention span of children, and discouraged them from reading (as opposed to watching more television) as they grew older. In the end, the final result of educational TV was not smarter children, but hyperactive entertainment junkies. This is not very hard to understand, because the very process of making TV educational, teaches that it is the TV that educates. Marshall McLuhan's observation is very relevant, "The medium is the message."

Thus it should come as no surprise that children raised in day care show lessened ability to integrate with a nuclear family, and probably less ability to oversee one. The skills needed to form strong nuclear families are neither elementary nor obvious. Many in the British public suspect that this explains some of the behavior of Prince Charles.
Thus many modern dilemmas can be addressed when we consider the Biblical injunctions on breeding and biological technology. No longer can we assume that the Bible is silent on these important topics. Rather we find that the Bible has a great deal to say, which is very relevant for today.