Edward G. BELAGA Institut de Recherche Mathématique Avancée C. N. R. S., Université Louis Pasteur 7, rue René Descartes F-67084 Strasbourg Cedex FRANCE Téléphone : 33 (0)3 90 24 02 35. Fax : (33) (03) 90 24 03 28 http://www-irma.u-strasbg.fr/~belaga ; e-mail: [email protected] ______
July 2007
Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib
Ever since the creation of the world, the invisible existence of God and His everlasting power have been clearly seen by the mind’s understanding of created things.
Epistle of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Romans 1:20
Abstract. The main purpose of the present paper is — proceeding from a real-life showcase particularly rich in scientific and epistemological implications — to discern, expose, interpret, and thus, to contribute to both the rehabilitation and the renewal of a mysterious but indubitable unity of both «objective» and «subjective» factors of the scientific knowledge acquisition, — the unity so manifestly present at the very heart of the scientific pursuit of Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, or, for that matter, of Albert Einstein, but resolutely passed over if not openly scorned by modern science. To be more precise, by the objective factor we understand the sum of all realities important for the outcome of the scientific quest, the realities related both to a particular researcher’s competence and skills and to science at large — science understood, at a given historical juncture, as (1) the sum of already acquired knowledge, experimental skills, theoretical methods, applied know-how and (2) cultural traditions of public institutions preserving, promoting, teaching and otherwise guiding, disseminating, developing, and applying these skills, methods and knowledge. And by the subjective factor we understand here all cultural preferences, theological, ontological, and epistemological insights, as well as intellectual and spiritual receptiveness, strength, vulnerability, and perplexities of a researcher facing the unknown, unintelligible, unspeakable, unthinkable — and especially those insights, receptiveness, etc., which are rooted in the Judaeo-Christian «Weltanschauung», the original inspirational and working framework of modern science. The chosen here showcase of a tragic but fruitful (dis)unity of these two factors might help us both to climb down the abstract, pseudo-philosophical fence of the mainstream professional epistemological discourse and to back up our biological guesswork by some basic Judaeo-Christian theological insights into the origins of man. We hope, among other things, that a theologian would find here some novel lines of the biblical exegesis inspired, if not, more realistically speaking, «forced on» us by «mad pursuit» of the scientific truth by an agnostic biologist, and that a biologist, agnostic or not, would find here, in his turn, some novel, theologically inspired scientific insights, — even if as yet formally unspeakable, unthinkable, unbelievable, — into the biological origins and nature of man.
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 1 out of 22 23/07/07 §1. Francis Crick’s both tragic and propitious failure : his first and only intrusion into biblical exegesis.
1°. The eminent biologist and Nobel laureate Francis Harry Compton Crick (1916-2004), co- discoverer of the double helix, the genetic blueprint of life known commonly as DNA, possessed an insatiable curiosity about life and a rare creativity of mind. As a colleague of his writes in an obituary : not satisfied with his first success, «he put these qualities to work in an attempt to find the neural correlate of consciousness, a problem he defined as the search for the link between the mind and the brain». (Press Release of Salk Institute for Biological Studies, July 29, 2004.) Crick was also an outspoken enemy of «religion». Indeed, in his last interview, in 2004, he said that «my distaste for religion was one of my prime motives in the work that led to the sensational 1953 discovery» 1 : I went into science because of these religious reasons, there's no doubt about that. I asked myself what were the two things that appear inexplicable and are used to support religious beliefs : the difference between living and nonliving things, and the phenomenon of consciousness. Similar opinions were expressed by John Watson, Crick's co-discoverer of the DNA, in their common interview with The Telegraph. One should know Crick’s story to respect Crick’s intellectual integrity and, as the present author does, to empathize with him in the real source of his intellectual obsession, coloured as it tragically was by his militant atheism : the obsession to find out the ultimate — which, for Crick, meant scientific — truth about the essence of both life and consciousness. As a matter of fact, Crick tells this story himself in his absorbing autobiography of 1988 2, What a mad pursuit : a personal view of scientific discovery, referred henceforth to as [Crick 1988], the first half of its title being borrowed from an ode by John Keats. There is however, as we shall argue below, an unexpected, amazing, both theological and scientific follow-up to Crick’s drama. Unfortunately, — but understandably and, probably, inevitably, — it has been discovered too late to be shared with the author and hero of What a mad pursuit.
2°. A spectacular failure of Crick’s youthful biblical exegesis. The Lord God said : «It is not right that the man should be alone. I shall make him a helper.» … So the Lord cast a deep sleep upon the man and he slept ; and He took one of his ribs and He filled in flesh in its place. And the Lord God built the rib [ in Hebrew, which also could be translated as side, or aspect] which he took from Adam into a woman, and brought her to the man. And the man said : «This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh ! She is to be called Woman [ in Hebrew], because she was taken from Man [ in Hebrew].»
Genesis 2:18,21-23
A man of an almost pathological intellectual pride, Crick is very forthcoming about how, why, and to what effect he became a militant unbeliever, although raised in an English middle-class Christian family [Crick 1988] (p. 10), to whose intimate customs and religious traditions he was
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 2 out of 22 23/07/07 sincerely attached as a child : I was familiar with the account in Genesis in which God makes Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. […] It was only some years later, probably when I was an undergraduate, that I let slip to a friend of mine, a medical student, that I understood that women had one more rib than man. (p. 11) One could easily imagine the rest, with the friend «falling off his chair with laughter», after being presented with Crick's biblical exegesis … Still, according to Crick’s story, one might expect that a friend’s laughter should not be of a great importance to Crick — since, as he recounts it beforehand, his «biblically inspired» understanding of women’s anatomy at the time of this incident was just an accidentally survived atavism of his already dead and buried childish faith : My parents were religious in a rather quiet way. … At exactly which point I lost my early religious belief I am not clear, but I suspect I was then about twelve years old. … I imagine that my growing interest in science and the rather lowly intellectual level of the preacher and his congregation motivated me … Whatever the reason, from then on I was a sceptic, an agnostic with a strong inclination toward atheism. ([Crick 1988] pp. 10, 11) And yet, the shame at being caught by an apparently respected older friend to still profess such a sham was never forgotten, and the sting of the momentary discovery of such a flagrant betrayal of his childhood spiritual and intellectual trust was never forgiven.
Figure 1. What are they believe in, before and after university biology courses (cf. Note 5).
So, whom to blame — family, community, God, or his own ignorance of things spiritual ? Youngsters rarely have a natural capacity to look for intellectual, historical, or psychological excuses or deeper explanations. Today, such explanations are discussed, for example, by Professor Janet Stein Carter on her Web-site Number of Ribs 3, at the demand, as she tells it, of her students,
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 3 out of 22 23/07/07 probably as young as Francis Crick once was, and wondering about the same theology versus biology discrepancy, but in a much more confident, plausible, and non-violent way. Thus, it is apparently not without reason that, in four years, the Number of Ribs site has been accessed more than 82000 times, — even if it is difficult to realistically appreciate how much its explanations4 might really help students to reconcile the conflict between the biological theories they learn at university and their Judaeo-Christian theological baggage : Professors at many U.S. universities say their students are learning about evolution without abandoning their belief in some form of creationism. (The quote and the above table, Figure 1, are borrowed from an article by Constance Holden 5.) In any case, Francis Crick had been deprived even of such a preliminary awareness of the naturalness and dignity of this eternal Judaeo-Christian intellectual drama. And being so prematurely, suddenly, and scandalously exposed to the conflict between the basic anatomical facts and his own, «homegrown», childish, arbitrary, scandalously illogical interpretation of the biblical narrative of the man’s origins, Crick reacted instantaneously, non-deliberatively, and violently. So much so that he made the scientific quest of his life, his mad pursuit, contingent upon its effective antireligious implications : «I realized early that it is detailed scientific knowledge which makes certain religious beliefs untenable.» ([Crick 1988], p. 11.) So much so that much later, of the age 86 and just two years before passing away, Crick was still enthusing the public with the same adolescent ardour that «people like myself get along perfectly well with no religious views» (from the aforementioned interview in The Telegraph) …
3°. An aside on the universal and, in particular, scientific value of the biblical exegesis. To be sure, Francis Crick is not a rare victim of a flawed, intellectually and spiritually outdated, lightweight and/or irresponsible «religious» education : some people preaching «God» to their neighbours and to their own and neighbours’ children are either totally unaware, or shamefully forgetful that they have chosen to teach the most difficult and profound subject in the world. The problem is far from being new or even modern : thirty years before Crick was born, another eminent Englishmen, John Henry Newman, was grieving at the ignorance of the Bible by, of all people, English catholics : It is to them a terra incognita. The Old Testament especially excites no sentiment of love, reverence, devotion or trust. They hear bold things said against it — or fragments of it quoted detached from its context, and they have no associations with it in their affections.6 Still, the utmost seriousness of Crick’s reaction to the (perceived by him) intellectual incoherence of the biblical account testifies to the sincerity of his original trust into the religious tradition received by him. Even more important, Crick’s lifelong insistence that any such authoritative account should be judged by its coherence and relevance to (in our particular case, biological) reality, is a welcome and long-overdue invitation for all of us, believers and unbelievers alike. Speaking about the Old Testament (as does above John Cardinal Newman, the most distinguished savant among modern saints of the Catholic Church), one should not forget that the Jewish exegetical tradition 7, respected by and developed in the Christian mediaeval exegesis 8, has always insisted that, alongside its three indirect (suggestive, allegoric, and esoteric) meanings, the biblical text has a direct, realistic significance which, nevertheless, is neither necessarily literal, nor
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 4 out of 22 23/07/07 self-evident. More radically, the Judaeo-Christian revelation does introduce, define, dwell on, and even celebrate some at least partially biological in their nature aspects of reality and, in particular and especially, the aspects of human biology. It does so on many occasions, from the origins of man (the Book of Genesis and Psalms), to the detailed laws governing the family life, the laws of impurity, the treatment of leprosy, the dietary, or kosher laws, etc. (all in the Book of Leviticus), to the Virginal conception in the Christian symbol of faith, theology, hymns, and liturgy (the New Testament, as interpreted by all christians before the protestant schism and, today, by the Catholics and Eastern Orthodox). Moreover, any unprejudiced observer cannot help but be struck by both an uncommon and uncanny realism and purposefulness of such «biological» asides and their social and cultural implications. To be more specific, consider just the fact that a society strictly adhering to the Jewish dietary laws could not be a victim of an outbreak of the mad cow disease, similar to that which has struck Great Britain and later the world some years ago. Or, for that matter, reflect on the fundamental and astonishing in its spiritual, intellectual, and cultural implications for the Western society role of the cult of Mary, the Virgin Mother. There is no doubt that it is exactly this supernatural realism — characteristic of all biblical accounts of the Creation, as well as the physical, biological, psychological, and social realities of «common life», albeit expressed in cultural terms absolutely foreign to our modern scientific discourse — which has been the inspiration behind Johannes Kepler’s, Isaak Newton’s or Albert Einstein’s (to stick just with these three names) raising the deepest scientific questions about the world, — even as simultaneously restricting such matters, as our scientific profession mandates, to their prayers, private confidences, philosophical and moral public pronouncements, and to the margins of their scientific publications. It is not less astonishing and engaging intellectual adventure to follow centuries-old commentaries by some great Jewish scholars of the biblical account of the origins of the physical world (Genesis, Chapter 1). Such commentaries, well-fitting into the post-Einsteinian, post- Lemaîtrean cosmological perspective, would be absolutely foreign to, and deprived of any plausible common, logical, and scientific sense even for Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), not speaking about Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), for whom the very existence of an ideal intelligence, embodied in his omniscient but powerless demon 9, replacing the Creator of Kepler 10 , has been contingent upon the perfectly rigid, immutable Euclidean space-time frame : Rambam 11 in discussing Creation, demonstrates that prior to Creation nothing existed. In addition, there was no concept of time, because there were no rotating [celestial] spheres ; the very concept of time is a part of the Creation. […] God created the heaven and the earth in their origin — i. e., He created the entire Universe from absolute nothing. […] As Sforno 12 interprets : [«Bereishis», the first word of the Pentateuch should be translated as] at the beginning of time, the very first moment. Since time did not exist prior to Creation, the verse cannot mean to separate a point in time from what came previously ; rather it describes the instant when creation began, as the first instant. 13 Thus, these commentators were able, hundreds if not thousands years before Stephen Hawking and John Barrow, to correctly and exquisitely appreciate the utmost ontological and epistemological importance of the first few moments of the emerging «from nothing» Universe. What is more, such a stretched over centuries parallel «reading» of the scientific,
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 5 out of 22 23/07/07 philosophical, spiritual, and exegetical Judaeo-Christian sources reveals the inner logic of their common coherent development : the slowly but not less surely realizing promise of the ultimate human empowerment to intelligently and respectfully «fill the earth [Universe] and subdue it» (Genesis 1:28).
4°. Praising and questioning Crick’s intellectual curiosity, realism, rigour, and integrity. Francis Crick’s naive adolescent inference from the biblical rib story to a specific macro-biological characteristic of the human body demonstrated, in our opinion, his predisposition to translate into «observable» phenomena those formal concepts which are either too general, or are too uncritically «swallowed» by the scientific community at large. To give just one example how a similar predisposition, in this case, of a mature scientist, has led to a dramatic confirmation and new understanding of an important but controversial and obscure theory, let us go back to the year 1920, when Otto Stern invented his famous Gedankenexperiment, with the unique purpose of establishing that so-called space quantization (implied by Niels Bohr’s model of quantum theory) is experimentally observable. Stern, of course, was fully aware that he is going against the grain of the majority of specialists in the field, for whom «quantization was a kind of symbolic expression for something which you don’t understand»14. Even the most sympathetic to his audacity could not resist to question his sincerity : But surely you don’t believe that the spatial quantization of atoms is something physically real; that is only a timetable for the electrons.15 When space quantization was firmly established by the Stern-Gerlach experiment two years later, the discovery of spin (intrinsic angular momentum) of the electron and other elementary particles, a new and essentially quantum characteristic of matter became inevitable … Summarizing, we can affirm that, to the present author’s taste, Crick’s reaction revealed an intellectually upright mind, and that, in his circumstances, his way of intellectual «revenge» has been judiciously chosen and brilliantly executed. And yet, even after our first reading of Click’s story, we were left with serious doubts that, from less sentimental and more substantial, both spiritual and scientific points of view, his «revenge» was ever or, for that matter, was ultimately perceived by Crick himself as satisfactory. Even more paradoxically, — and it will forever remain a mystery for the present author why, — Francis Crick either did not care, or was not curious enough, or did not grasp, or did not want to voice publicly, for the benefit of all of us, a «correct» explanation of the biblical rib story, explanation which became possible only after and thanks to his and Watson’s discovery of the DNA helix, and which is not only biologically sound, but is also pregnant with novel biological insights into the origins of man … The present author, not being a biologist, neither by education nor by the main scientific connections and environment, — a scientist in the first place, mathematician by training, mathematician and theoretical computer scientist by trade, one of the pioneers of algorithmic complexity theory, currently involved in quantum information processing and molecular biology research, — has discovered molecular biology rather late : first, as a subject of his vivid interest, about twenty years ago, and then, as his third professional occupation, about four years ago. There is no doubt in our mind that our interest in molecular biology has something to do with Crick's «biblical ordeal» : anybody even remotely acquainted with things spiritual cannot help but recognize the intensity of a deep and desperate prayer in both the anguish of Crick’s young years, as
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 6 out of 22 23/07/07 it is clear from his autobiography, and his subsequent, never ending and livid public denial of God, — a denial overtly personal, provocatively blasphemous, passionate, solemn, triumphant, — and yet almost absurdly aspiring to some measure of objectivity and even even-handedness : It seemed to me of the first importance to identify these unexplained areas of knowledge and to work toward their scientific understanding, whether such explanations would turn out to confirm existing religious beliefs or to refute them. [Crick 1988], p. 11. The intensity of this modern human drama, — with its rich psychological, educational, intellectual, spiritual and, yes, scientific themes and modulations, — has gradually become, almost against our will, so much our own that, after more than a decade of studying molecular biology, marvelling, doubting, mulling over and over, and finally taking up the gauntlet, we had one day the privilege to overhear, as it were, the «divine response» to Crick’s prayerful intellectual challenge to the veracity of this particular instance of the Judaeo-Christian revelation. This privilege is both delightful, as this text hopefully should gradually make clear, and sad — because the original addressee of the response is no longer with us. On the most basic level, — the level where Crick’s story started sixty to seventy years ago, — the «response» has nothing «divine» in it and concerns our curious lay contemporaries, young people of Crick’s age at the moment Francis «let slip to a friend […] that women had one more rib than men». To be more specific, we speak here about modern undergraduates for whom the words genes and chromosomes are as familiar as were to Crick ribs, and who might be curious enough to check a more broad meaning of the original biblical Hebrew word (cf. the epigraph to the above section 2°) , universally and too narrowly translated as rib. In fact, the English side, with its rich semantics from the pure material edge and jamb to the abstract aspect and point of view, should be much more appropriate as the equivalent term, — if only among its many meanings would be also rib, as with the original . This not being the case — unfortunately for English teenagers reading this Biblical story without an exegetical accompaniment, — all translations into English stick traditionally with the anatomical rib. French teenagers should feel themselves luckier : the French côte for rib has at least two suggestive additional meanings, freeing it from the exclusive and narrow anatomical interpretation : bord de mer (seaside) and versant de colline ou de montagne (slope of hill or of mountain). Now, even putting all these linguistic niceties aside, one could still easily imagine a biblically more or less literate and / or conscientious undergraduate «letting slip on an occasion to a friend» that, being «familiar with the account in Genesis in which God makes Eve from one of Adam’s ribs», or sides, they understand that women are made from a proper subset of the genetic material of which men are made. This would just mean — the common knowledge today — that the Y- chromosome and its few genes are the genetic «privilege» of men … As to Francis Crick, — skipping for one or another reason this answer to his adolescent biblical embarrassment, the answer rudimentary and evident but, as we hope to show below, biologically very promising, — he simply passed to the second part of his program to get rid of «things that appear inexplicable and are used to support religious beliefs», namely, to the phenomenon of consciousness. Here, however, Crick’s ideological matrix, deprived of its original authentic spiritual and
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 7 out of 22 23/07/07 intellectual anguish of a desperate prayer and of its thirst for an unconditioned truth, failed : with all due respect to Crick’s intellectual labours in this fascinating field of research, one should admit that his conceptual vision of the origins and nature of consciousness, with its heavy reductionist neurobiological bias, not only did not produce any significant scientific breakthrough, but was, even at the height of his activity, either contested or simply ignored by the vast majority of researchers (cf. the report Scientist at Work | Francis Crick, New York Times, 2004 16). Interestingly enough, — and of crucial importance for the understanding of Crick’s intellectual drama, — here, as in his quest for the nature of life, Francis Crick and his close collaborator Christof Koch, according to the same report, «sidestepped the issue» of the ultimate nature of consciousness : Rather than getting bogged down in the depthless ooze of qualia [and] […] asking the philosophical [but why only philosophical ?] question of what consciousness is, they have restricted themselves to trying to understand what is going on at the neurological level when consciousness is present.
§2. An attempt of a post factum exegetical interpretation of a scientific discovery.
5°. Then from the heart of the tempest the Lord gave Francis Crick His answer (as it were ; with the name «Francis Crick» replaced by Job, this is the Book of Job 38:1). From the above modern and elementarily correct «biological exegesis» of the biblical rib story, we dare now enter a much more deeper and dangerous «bio-biblical» waters related to this story. As a matter of fact, the modern research in molecular biology and genetics does not shun to enquire into, as it does not spare the efforts to confirm, at least some biblical accounts. Thus, Neil Bradman and Mark Thomas study the Y-chromosomes small variations (polymorphisms) when transmitted from father to son to «illuminate our understanding of human history and prehistory». The Figure 2 and (the table of) Figure 3are borrowed from their article.
Figure 2. Physical map of the Y chromosome indicating some known genes and gene regions. 1 7 Others are studying the genetic heritage of the caste of Jewish priests, Cohanim and Levites 18, or the genetic traces of the Biblical flood 19, or are even looking for our first ancestors 20, the first man including 21. Ours, however, is here quite a different purpose. Following into steps of the young Francis
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 8 out of 22 23/07/07 Crick, but without his readiness for a panicky retreat from our common Judaeo-Christian heritage, we have proceeded from the biblical account, attempting to advance its plausible scientific, both biological and cognitive interpretations, as far as the known to us results of the modern research permit us to do. In some cases, we were able to suggest a few new directions of such research, inspired by the intrinsic logic of the full biblical account of humans origins.
Figure 3. Before the flood: the generations of Adam according to the book of Genesis * How did Seth feel, outliving his great, great, great-grandson Enoch by 55 years? † And how about Enoch, sensing himself slipping away earlier than his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather? 2 2
Figure 4. Human skeleton. 2 3
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 9 out of 22 23/07/07 We start with a series of informal scientific metaphors which, in their totality, represent a new, coherent and original «biological» exegesis of the Adam-Eve rib story and, more generally, of similar biblical «rib» stories, — the metaphors inspired by the biblical imagery and yet firmly rooted in universally accepted and easily available conclusions of the ongoing research in human genetics. Then, in the next sections, we will discuss the eventual and strictly scientific implications of our «biological exegesis».
Figure 5. Human chromosomes. 2 4 And here is the list of our metaphors : (i) Are not the twelve pairs of ribs of man (Figure 4) a perfect metaphor of the twenty three paired chromosomes, — not only because ribs, as chromosomes, go by pairs, but also because, taken together, they resemble the DNA helix more than any other part of our body ? (ii) Even if not immune to mutations, are not chromosomes nevertheless the most stable, enduring, unalterable «matrices» for «moulding» human body, — qualities exemplified by the firmness and durability of bones, compared to the changing and perishable human flesh ? (iii) Does not «human flesh grow on ribs» or, more generally, «on bones» (as in the Book of
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 10 out of 22 23/07/07 Ezekiel 37:7-8, with «the bones coming together» and «flesh growing on them and skin covering them»), as the human body «grows on» the 23 pairs of the chromosomes coming from the initial fertilised egg ? (iv) The rib «taken by God from the man» to be later «built into a woman» belonged to a pair of his «ribs», — of what pair of human chromosomes could be it a metaphor ? Does there not exist only one pair of types-non-identical (dimorphic) human chromosomes, the pair X-Y chromosomes of men (cf. Figure 5), with the rest of the chromosomes (called autosomal) going normally by identical by their types pairs ?
Figure 6. The human X (left) and Y chromosomes, magnified about 10,000 times. 25 (v) Furthermore, do not women have the chromosomes pair X-X, and thus, as our imaginary undergraduate let already slip to a friend, one type (Y) of chromosomes less than man ? With the X chromosome being a very decent, ordinary sort of chromosome and having more than its fair share of genes that are involved in what might be viewed as most important personality factors, including intelligence, reproduction, sexual behaviour, etc., — corroborating the metaphor of a woman «built from a [single] rib». (vi) Finally, what about the missing rib of the man, with «God filling in flesh in its place» ? According to Susumu Ohno (1928-2000), a respected molecular biologist, «the dimorphic sex chromosomes likely evolved from a pair of autosomes, followed by Y-chromosome degeneracy and X-chromosome dosage compensation».26 This modern and universally accepted vision is surprisingly close corroborating the biblical account, and has the additional merit to «explain» the famous, long standing biological enigma of the miniscule Y chromosome, looking like a scrap of «something» much bigger (cf. Figure 6). (vii) Surely, he above double-edged exegetical and biological insights into both the Biblical rib story and human genetics question the common wisdom which either wholeheartedly denies any epistemological value of theology in general and of the Biblical exegesis in particular, or, in its more charitable mood, claims that «theology looks at “why” while science looks at “how”» (cf. the Note 4 above).
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 11 out of 22 23/07/07 As a matter of fact, science is ultimately as much interested in «why» as theology does, and vice versa. Take Kepler’s example : «In trying to describe how fundamental discoveries are made, the work of Johannes Kepler provides a wonderful example : … There was a problem that dominated Kepler much more than the problems solved by his three famous laws : he wanted to know why there were just six planets in those particular orbits» 27 . And even if «from the reductionist point of view this question that so dominated Kepler was the wrong question», it was Kepler’s perseverance in his attempts to solve exactly this problem by all available to him intellectual and cultural means, — first, imitating the Platonic-Pythagorean tradition with its five regular solids interpreted by him as «ideas» of five known to him planets, and then introducing in his calculations musical harmonies, — that led him to discover his laws and has enabled Isaac Newton’s classical reductionist synthesis. The very plausibility of Newton’s scientific philosophy, incapsulated in his famous dictum, Hypotheses non fingo (I do not make hypotheses), hindged in fact on the rich fruits of Johannes Kepler’s readiness and wonderful ability to do just the opposite, namely : to make the most sophisticated and, apparently, most «crazy» hypotheses (cf. the reamrk of Niels Bohr quoted below, Note 37).. (viii) Kepler’s precedent helps us also to overcome the following important hurdle : we are fully aware of, and are not ashamed to confess here to our total ignorance of any specific biological or supra-biological mechanisms of human’s origins and evolution (say, of the Darwinist, creationist, or intelligent design inspirations, to mention just these three schools of evolutionary thought) , and our exegetical interpretation of some pecularities of human genetics does not immediately need, nor does it imply the existence of such mechanisms. In particular, the important biological fact that the genetical material of some animals, and in particular, of big primates, display similar peculiarities of the pair of sex chromosomes does not diminsh the importance of our discovery of some striking and involved similarities between the known genetical structure of human biology and the biblical account of human origins. However, it does demonstrate in our opinion the existence of an important lacune in the current biological knowledge of the origins and evolution of species.
6°. An aside on the legitimacy of our looking for scientific inspiration in biblical verses.
Pronounced : «Tafásta Merúbah Lo Tafásta» «Capturing too much, you do not [really] capture [all that].» Which, in the context of an intellectual inquiry involving speculative conjecturing, might mean : «It is prudent to restrict an extrapolation to minimal foreseeable corollaries. Otherwise, you risk one day to have to prove something which either has nothing to do with the intended meaning of your enquiry, or is absolutely outside your reach.» Babylonian Talmud, the Treaties : Rosh HaShanah 4b; Yuma 80a; Succah 5a, 5b; Kiddushin 17a.
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 12 out of 22 23/07/07 The way we have chosen to proceed here — from a remarkable scientific discovery inspired by the discoverer’s disdain for a biblical account of the origins of man, to a rehabilitation of this account based on his discovery, to its novel and going into absolutely new detail interpretation, to a draft of a new scientific theory based on this interpretation — such a way of scientific reasoning is an unheard novelty in modern science and would probably come as an unpleasant surprise to the majority of our scientific colleagues. Sure, it was most natural for saint Anselm of Canterbury to arrive in his spiritual chats with Benedictine brothers, of whom he was the superior, at his remarkable ontological proofs of God’s existence (which later became the inspiration for, and paradigms of a rigourous reasoning modern logic and philosophy 28), by insisting on the intellectual integrity of the Psalm words that «it is only insane who is saying in his hearth “there is no God”» (Psalms 14:1, 53:1). Sure, six hundred years later, Isaak Newton spared no time to study the Books of Prophets, Talmud, and other sources in his search for «divine» harmonies of both the Universe and History hidden in the Sacred books 29 . Sstill, he never dared to make public the results of his theological research 30, and one can only speculate today to what measure and how his «theological obsession» has inspired and shaped his mathematical and physical theories 31. As to the modern times, however, the present author is aware of only one case when a respected researcher has been originally inspired by a biblical account of the Creation, to lately advance his pure scientific theory, now universally accepted. We speak here about Georges Lemaître, a Belgian scientist and Catholic priest, and his Big Bang version, 1927 32, of Einstein’s relativity theory, experimentally confirmed by Edwin Hubble in 1929 33. A young doctor in mathematics, possessing also the bachelor degree in Saint Thomas’s philosophy and entering the priests seminary in Belgium, writes in 1921 a six page note The first three words of God 34. The note is conceived as an «essay of scientific interpretation of the first verses of the hexameron [the six days of the Creation]». Still, even Lemaître, a deeply religious man and a priest with a mystical streak 35, has never dared to publish either this note or anything similar to this implicit statement of belief that «the first verses of the hexameron», or for that matter, any other important text of the Judaeo-Christian revelation might have a promising «scientific interpretation», not speaking about the possibility that some of such texts might implicitly carry viable, unique in their originality, and otherwise unavailable scientific insights. — To investigate such a possibility in the case of the Biblical rib story is the stated purpose of the present paper. And here is our message to our eventual agnostic and / or reductionist interlocutors, both from and outside the scientific community : it is prudent not to extrapolate our postulates (any postulates, including the reductionist ones) with the stated or an implicit purpose to restrict the inspirational freedom of our scientific enquiries. To start with : it is not a secret that we are currently living through a profound counterintuitive restructuring of the inspirational, philosophical, and even logical foundations of the scientific enquiry, with formally unspeakable36 , unthinkable, unbelievable becoming also something typical, habitual, applicable 37 , and with the craziness criterion of the eventual soundness of new theories being in a steady ascendancy, since at least fifty years 38. Thus, if the the spiritual Eightfold Path of Buddhism was good enough to inspire the Eightfold Way classification of hadrons discovered by Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne’eman in 1961, — what should be the reasons of an eventual a priory, categorical, no right of appeal denial of the
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 13 out of 22 23/07/07 legitimacy of using biblical or other Judaeo-Christian insights in the scientific enquiry ? Or if an aesthetic argument, in some cases almost inseparable from very personal belief in Creation, is good enough, as was the case of Louis de Broglie’s or Paul Dirac’s work in quantum mechanics, — why the intellectual beauty and eloquent conceptual austerity of the biblical rib story cannot be the source of new insights into human biology ? And if we respect the right of Albert Einstein to refer to the «inner voice» of his intuition concerning the Creator, in continuing his questioning (ultimately, very fruitful, even if eventually settled not to Einstein’s likening) of the legitimacy of the probabilistic argument of quantum mechanics 39, — why should be banned scientifically sound and eventually experimentally verifiable implications of a theory inspired by a vision coming, as many other scientific insights, from the sources of manifestly non-scientific origins, — in our case, by the vision of the Creator being also the biological «Molder» of the humanity ? This said, we should confess to our eventual interlocutors from innumerable branches of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, both from and outside the scientific community, that the most difficult part of our fifteen years long enquiry leading to the present paper has been our facing the challenge of not succumbing to a triumphant, easygoing ways, looking for scientific shortcuts and public ideological victories, — with the historical examples, old and modern, of such «scientific» failures abundant. By the way, one of such failures of historic proportions became the aforementioned Laplacean ideological scheme «expanded into an ideal for scientific theories whose cogency is often not questioned.» 40, with his omniscient demon, illiterate on both the quantum and cosmic scales, ultimately confined to the mechanical prison of (very roughly) human dimensions. Einstein was one of the first to see it : «We must not be surprised, therefore, that, so to speak, all physicists of the last [19-th] century saw in classical mechanics a firm and final foundation for all physics, yes, indeed, for all natural science, and that they never grew tired in their attempts to base Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, which, in the meantime, was slowly beginning to win out, upon mechanics as well.» 41 It is true, of course, that a scientist should be free to choose his inspirational sources and to explicitly refer to them. His science, however, should won its place thanks only to its scientific novelty and cogency. No descent scientist can follow the example of our naive, passionate colleagues, professing their materialistic faith in their public pronouncements and even scientific publications, as a magic formula «Open, Sesame Open !» of the following shining example : «[T]he central metaphor of cognitive science, “The brain is a computer”, gives us hope. […] We could say that the computer metaphor is the first, best hope of materialism.» 42 What strikes an unbiased observer in this and similar affirmations of the modern reductionist faith, or if you prefer, ideology, is how far are they away from Newton’s fundamental reductionist postulate, Hypotheses non fingo, quoted above. Take, for example, the above computer metaphor. Computer, as we know it today, is the fruit of more than hundred years of sustained intellectual and, lately, technical efforts of the best Western minds, starting with the logician George Boole (1815 - 1864), the mathematicians and logicians Georg Cantor (1845-1918), Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer (1881-1966), Alan Turing (1912-1954), John von Neumann (1903-1957), etc., etc.
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 14 out of 22 23/07/07 Thus, if brain is really computer, Who conceived and constructed it ? Surely, the best hope of materialism is not that it was Who but What : some hypothesized and extremely far-reaching but never proved ability of the Inorganic Matter to self-organize herself to produce, in this order, organic matter, life, animals, humans with their brains, and the ability of humans to learn and to self-organize to finally produce computer and, at the apex of its self-organisation, the materialist school of thought … In fact, what «the computer metaphor» is best permitting «us» to do today, is to learn how to exploit the human brain to its material limits, — not to understand why we are still able to hope, to believe, to love, and to delight in the oeuvres of faith, of hope, of love of those who lived before us and are our companions today, — in spite of all horrors that modern science and its mercenaries and forced labourers have already inflicted on the humanity during the last hundred or so years and are menacing to inflict on even more terrible scale : according to Sir Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, «humans could face extinction in this [21th] century if we do not change our ways»43. … And if we finally are able to face this challenge and to be sufficiently satisfied with our efforts to present them to the public, it is because we discovered, as Albert Einstein has succinctly put it, and as many, many others discovered before and, hopefully, will discover after us : «Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist Er nicht. — Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.» 44
§3. Entering an exegetically inspired scientific enquiry.
7°. The full biblical account of the origins of humans and its eventual «biological» implications. According to the Book of Genesis, the biblical story of the creation of the first man and woman (Genesis 1:26-27, 2:18, 21-24) is the first of at least four stages of «divine modelling», each one involving apparently some biological «adjusting», which humans, as we know them today, have passed through : • the original creation of the man (Genesis 1:26-27) ; • the creation of the woman «from a rib of the man» (Genesis 2:18, 21-24) ; • the man and woman becoming mortals (Genesis 3:19) ; • men and women have been allocated the average ceiling age of 120 years (Genesis 6:3). After establishing, in the section 5°, the most remarkable and far-reaching informal conceptual agreement between the biblical rib story and the human genetics, we conjecture that each one of the above «stages of creation», and not only the biblical rib story, represents also a «biological event», captured by the following vague and very preliminary «quasi-biological hypotheses» : (i) first, at some «historically specific point», it appeared a single Man whose biological condition implied, or at least not prevented, or hampered his «biological immortality» ; (ii) second, at some (posterior to the previous one) «historically specific point», a couple man- woman has genetically emerged «from», and «replaced» the single Man ; (iii) third, at some (posterior to the previous one) «historically specific point», it has appeared the humanity as we know it today, and that this appearance could be described as a biological «big bang», with its double effect on humans : the lost of the «biological immortality» and the acquisition of the biological posterity ; (iv) fourth, this «lost of biological immortality» involved two distinct and «historically specific steps», with the second «step» reducing the average life expectation of humans from half-dozen-to-
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 15 out of 22 23/07/07 dozen of hundreds to the dozen of dozens years.
8°. Is a strictly biological interpretation and, eventually, verification of these «hypotheses» feasible ? From the mainstream biological point of view, but also ontologically and epistemologically, the enormous difficulty to concede some a priory plausibility to our «hypotheses» (even in the eventuality of ignoring or, at the very least, temporally excusing their exact biblical source and the exegetical inspiration) is not different from the difficulty of several generations of Western physicists and astronomers, from the early 17th century to the late 19th century — whatever might be their religious beliefs — to imagine a mouldable universe and to allow for the possibility of a real scenario of what is called today Big Bang, — a momentary historical cosmological event not fitting into the universally accepted scientific causality protocol. Only with the advent of general relativity theory, the mouldable universe became thinkable, and only with the experimental discovery of the Cosmological Redshift, became thinkable a cosmological Big Bang, — two complementary, theoretical and experimental, hypotheses which ultimately have been successfully confirmed. Both are now recognised as perfectly fitting into the biblical vision of a creational cataclysm leading to an instantaneous emergence of the evolving universe, with its space, time, and physical laws, — the universe as we know it today and are intending to continue to investigate. This is not a casual, and even less so frivolous analogy : there is a suggestive similarity between spectral lines of the light emitted from sources far away from Earth and carrying a precious information about these sources, some of them already non-existent at the moment when the light has reached the Earth, — and the genetic codes of living (DNA) or dead (aDNA 45) organisms which, too, carry a precious information from and about its origins and evolution. Taking into account the current level of the technique of genetical traceability, we expect that it would be eventually possible to biologically interpret and then experimentally confirm at least three described above hypothetical momentary, portentous, and cataclysmic, or big-bang-type genetic events (ii)-(iv) in the evolution of human species, — the events not fitting into any known evolutionary (natural selection including) protocol, — with the double purpose to find traces of the related momentary changes in human genetics and to localise them in time. As to the first biologically hypothetical event, the creation of the Man, its scientific verifiability is today as difficult (but, as we believe, ultimately not impossible) to imagine and understand as the state of the «universe» at the precise moment of the Big-Bang, and not some fractions of the second after it.
9°. Conclusion : dispelling plausible misinterpretations. Three plausible misinterpretations of our intentions and claims should be spelled out, analysed, and dispelled, with the first one concerning our possible unspoken assumptions, the second one our possible unspoken intentions, and the third one our possible unspoken conclusions. (1) Let us first address a suspicion that we are implicitly promoting, and then building our scientific enquiry on the so-called God hypothesis 46, with the idea of such a formal hypothesis, or axiom, or proposition, going back to at least Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) 47. Imitating Isaak Newton, we would claim, however, that Hypotheses non fingo. As a matter of fact, the scientific value of our study and a demonstration of the effectiveness and suggestive power of our «biblical heuristics» hinges not upon some «divine assumptions», but on an eventual discovery of new, pure biological phenomena which would confirm, for example, that in some
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 16 out of 22 23/07/07 distant passé the genetical signature of human beings has been subjected to a few abrupt changes negatively affecting human longevity, — with such an idea being today absolutely foreign to both human palaeontology and human genetics. (2) Neither are we suggesting that the intellectual freedom of a researches should be a priori subjected to some external cultural or, for that matter, Judaeo-Christian criteria. Quite to the contrary : the principal, a posteriori point of departure for our reflection has been the explicit, dramatic, pervasive, almost scandalous presence of such criteria — sure, interpreted in a very negative, distorted, handicapping way — in the mad scientific pursuit of Francis Crick. True, the modern hagiographies of lives of well-known scientists prefer to ignore the meaning and the importance of such an intellectual drama, presenting their heroes as a sort of a superman without fear and doubts 48. And yet, the Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib story teaches us at least three important lessons : • First, Crick has been awaken to the attractiveness of scientific curiosity, method, and their mad pursuit by his discovery that the biblical account does not live up to its « promise » of the universal explainer. It is clear that such an apparently childish interpretation of the Judaeo- Christian tradition speaks volumes about Francis Crick perception of the reality and his natural, deeply embedded interest in correct, universal intellectual explanations. • Still, Francis Crick’s confidence that such explanations should exist is the direct corollary of the assimilated by him Judaeo-Christian vision of the world as a garden created for the enlightenment and the care of the humanity. • Because the reality revealed by Crick’s, and for that matter, any other scientific discovery worth of its name, teaches us more, incomparably more than we might be able to « teach » anybody, — strengthening our confidence that we are facing the world having and governing by the Meaning, from which we draw our multiple scientific meanings. (3) No are we attempting here to imitate or to produce a new proof of the existence of God, with the ideas of such «modern» proofs going back to at least mediaeval Jewish thinkers 49, to Saint Anselm of Canterbury (cf. Note 28 above), Saint Bonaventure (1217-1274) 50 , and Saint Thomas D’Aquin (1227-1274). With the discovery of the Big-Bang, this tradition has been rejuvenated by both Christian apologetics (the remarkable intervention of the Pope Pius XII 51 being the most conspicuous and controversial instance of such arguments) and the Jewish Orthodox theological polemics 52 . With all due respect to the aforementioned, and similar, theological and philosophical achievements of the Judaeo-Christian Weltanschauung, we needed here neither the hypothesis that God exists, nor a proof of His existence. To use a very informal metaphor : being a child of a big and loving family, you need, you receive, and you fully enjoy something absolutely, incomparably more rich and existential than any formal proof of your family existence (passports, addresses, etc.). The present paper is just a very modest tribute to this joy, a sort of a family album, which you have the right to share with, or even to bestow upon others, — but only if they are willing to accept it. Still, with time, work, and luck, it might become something more, — a scientific breakthrough. And if such a childish perception of the scientific endeavour offends some of our readers, the following quote from Isaac Newton’s published heritage might reconcile us, at least to some degree :
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 17 out of 22 23/07/07 I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. 53
10°. Acknowledgements. (1) The author is grateful to Professor Graeme Mitchison, of Cambridge, for his touching recollections of Francis Crick 54 and for his patience and good will in reading and severely criticizing a few previous drafts. The «Mitchison’s razor», as we called it in our exchanges, was most helpful in our addressing here the potential legitimate worries of our agnostic colleagues. (2) Several other colleagues have shown a deep interest in the topic of the paper and made some interesting suggestions, most importantly, Professor Benjamin Enriquez, of Strasbourg, and Professors Ilya Dvorkin and George Ryazanov, of Jerusalem. (3) Father Bradford, of the Jerusalem Fraternity, Strasbourg, was very kind to revise the draft of the present paper and to correct my home-grown English. His vivid interest in the topic and methodology of my work have been most gratifying. (4) For their interest and advices, I am deeply grateful to my son David, of Lyon, and to my friend Father Tadeusz Bienasz, of Wien. (5) An early draft of the paper was read and appreciated by Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, of Wien, to whom I am deeply grateful for the frank exchange of opinions on the historically crucial, and as important today as ever, role of the Judaeo-Christian Weltanschauung for the scientific enterprise. This said, it is going without saying that neither the aforementioned persons, nor any other person or institution bear the slightest responsibility for the concept, contents, form, and conclusions of the present paper.
______Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 18 out of 22 23/07/07 1 Roger Highfield reported in 2003 : Speaking to The Telegraph, Crick, 86, said: «The god hypothesis is rather discredited».… Crick argues that since many of the actual claims made by specific religions over 2,000 years have proved false, the burden of proof should be on the claims they make today, rather than on atheists to disprove the existence of God. 2 Francis Crick, What a Mad Pursuit : A Personal View of Scientific Discovery. Weidenfeld and Nickolson, London, 1988. 3 The Web-site of Janet Stein Carter, Number of Ribs, http://biology.clc.uc.edu/courses/bio105/ribs.htm 4 The following sample of Ms J. Stein Carter’s «explanations» on her site gives an idea how the message of the biblical rib story can be downplayed, excused, forgiven, or explained away : Notice what this doesn’t say. It doesn’t say anything about how many ribs Adam had before or after this «surgery», and especially it says nothing, whatsoever, about how many ribs Eve had! Nowhere does it say that Eve had more ribs than Adam. Who made that assumption without checking? Wouldn’t it be just as logical to guess (also without checking) that if she was created «second» that God might have made her with the same number of ribs as the new, reduced number that Adam now had? Wouldn’t it really be more logical to guess that God might have created her with the same number of ribs as Adam just to avoid confusion? Genesis doesn’t say one way or the other, so the only way to know is to cut open cadavers and start counting. Who has done that - the theologians or the biologists? My guess is that, once again, if human misinterpretations are set aside and if it is remembered that theology looks at «why» while science looks at «how», there is no «conflict» between what the Bible, itself, is saying and what biologists know to be true about our bodies. 5 Constance Holden, Darwin’s Place on Campus Is Secure — But Not Supreme. Science 311, 10 February 2006, p. 771.
6 From a letter of Newman to William Monsell, April 9, 1883. Quoted by J. Derek Holmes and Robert Murray, Introduction to John Henry Newman, On inspiration of Scripture. Geoffrey Cahpman, London, 1967, p. 5. 7 Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz, ArtScroll Bereishis, Vol. 1, Mesorah Publications, New York, 1977. 8 Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale. Tomes 1-4. F. Aubier, Éditions Montaigne, Paris, 1959-1964. 9 For his Essai philosophique sur les probabilités (Éditions Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1795), Pierre-Simon de Laplace invented this ideal personage to give an exceptionally clear and succinct presentation of his determinist, reductionist, mechanistic scientific doctrine :
«We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future.] An intellect which at any given moment knew all the forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom: for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.» Words similar to this passage appear throughout Laplace’s work, and first appear in 1773, when he was 24.» (John Collier, Holism and Emergence : Dynamical Complexity Defeats Laplace's Demon. Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Altenberg, Austria, 2002.) (P.-S. Laplace, Philosophical Essays on Probabilities. Transl. by F. W. Truscott and F. L. Emory, Dover, New York, 1951.) 1 0 One of Johannes Kepler’s major works, Harmonices Mundi, where he presents among other things his third law of planetary motions, ends (as it begins) with a prayer : «If I have been allured into brashness by the wonderful beauty of thy works, or if I have loved my own glory among men, while advancing in work destined for thy glory, gently and mercifully pardon me: and finally, deign graciously to cause that these demonstrations may lead to thy glory and to the salvation of souls, and nowhere be an obstacle to that. Amen.» (Johannes Kepler, Harmonices Mundi, Godefroi Tampachus, Frankfurt & Linz, 1619, Book V, Chapter 9.)
11 Rambam ::= Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (1135 — 1204) : one of the most illustrious figures of post Talmudic times. He was a rabbinic authority, codifier, philosopher, and court physician to the ruler of Egypt. (Borrowed from Wikipedia)
12 Sforno ::= Obadiah ben Jacob Sforno (1475 — 1550) : an Italian rabbi, biblical commentator, philosopher and physician. Obadiah was an indefatigable writer, chiefly in the field of biblical exegesis. The characteristic features of his exegetical work are respect for the literal meaning of the text and a reluctance to entertain mystical interpretations. (Borrowed from Wikipedia)
13 Adapted from the original writings of Rambam and Sforno by Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz, ArtScroll Bereishis, Vol. 1, p. 30, Mesorah Publications, New York, 1977. 1 4 Max Born. In : Max Born, My Life : Recollections of a Nobel Laureate. Scriber, New York, 1978, p. 78. 1 5 Peter Debye. In : Walther Gelrach, Eine Auswahl aus seinen Schriften und Briefen. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1989; 1 6 Margaret Wertheim, After the Double Helix : Unravelling the Mysteries of the State of Being. New York Times, April 13, 2004. 1 7 The image is borrowed, with permission, from the article of Neil Bradman and Mark Thomas, Why Y? The Y chromosome in the study of human evolution, migration and prehistory, Science Spectra N° 14, 1998. 1 8 Neil Bradman, Dror Rosengarten, and Karl L. Skorecki, The Origins of Ashkenazic Levites: Many Ashkenazic Levites Probably Have a Paternal Descent from East Europeans or West Asians. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Ancient DNA and Associated Biomolecules, July 21-25, 2002. 1 9 Hugh Ross, Y-chromosome Reveals Evolutionary Limits, Facts & Faith 11, n. 2 (1997), p. 5-6, and Y- chromosome Reveals The Genesis Flood Account (posted on the Web). 2 0 Peter A. Underhill, et al., Adam and Eve probably never met, Nature Genetics pp 358 - 361 and pp 253 - 254. As the BBC News see it (30 october 2002), «based on these studies, our most recent common ancestor is thought to be a woman who lived in Africa some 143,000 years ago, the so-called Mitochondrial Eve.» 2 1 D. Batten, Y-Chromosome Adam? Technical Journal 9(2):139-140, August 1995. 2 2 The table is borrowed, with permission, from the aforementioned article of Neil Bradman and Mark Thomas. 2 3 The image is borrowed, with permission, from the Web-site of the Smarthome : www.smarthome.com/images/hw0166big.jpg 2 4 The image is borrowed, with permission, from the Web-site of the Access Excellence @ National Health Museum : http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/VL/GG/human.html.
2 5 The image is borrowed, with permission, from the article of Huntington F. Willard, Genome biology: Tales of the Y chromosome, Nature 423, 810-813 (19 June 2003). 2 6 Susumu Ohno, Sex Chromosomes and Sex-Linked Genes.Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1967. The above quote defines the premise of a recent paper by Gerald J. Wyckoff, Joyce Li, and Chung-I Wu, Molecular Evolution of Functional Genes on the Mammalian Y Chromosome. Molecular Biology and Evolution 19 (9), pp. 1633-1636 , 2002. 2 7 Lincoln Wolfenstein, Lessons from Kepler and the Theory of Everything, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 100 (9) 5001- 5003, 2003. 2 8 Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, The Newman Press, Westminster, Maryland, 1950, Volume II, Chapter XV. Reprinted by Doubleday, New York. 2 9 Newton’s biographer insists on his «obsession with the [King Solomin’s] temple plan and dimensions. […] Being the man he was, he plunged into an extensive program of reading in Josephus, Philo, Maimonides, and the Talmud scholars». Richard Westfall, Never at Rest : A Biography of Newton, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 346-348. 3 0 Sir Isaak Newton. Theological Manuscripts, edited by H. M. McLachlan, Liverpool University Press, 1950. 3 1 Loup Verlet, La malle de Newton, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1993. 3 2 Georges Lemaître, Un univers homogène de masse consante et de rayon croissant, rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques. Annales de la Société scientifique de Bruxelles 47, 1927, pp. 49-59. 3 3 The story of Hubble’s discoveries and of the achievements of Lemaître’s predecessors, Willem de Sitter (Leiden, the Netherlands) and Alexander Friedmann (Petrograd, Russia) could be found in the book of Alexander S. Sharov and Igor D. Novikov, Edwin Hubble, The Discoverer of the Big Bang Universe, Cambridge University Press, 1993. 3 4 Les trois premières paroles de Dieu, July 29, 1921. Published in Mgr Georges Lemâitre savant et croyant, edited by J.-F. Stoffel, Centre interfacultaire d’étude en histoire des sciences, Louvain-la-Neuve, 1996, pp. 107-111. 3 5 Dominique Lambert, Un atome d’Univers : La vie et l’œuver de George Lemaître. Éditions Lessius, Bruxelles / Éditions Racine, Bruxelles, 2000. 36 The term unspeakable is borrowed from the title of the book Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, by John S. Bell (2nd edition, with a new Introduction by Alain Aspect. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Britain, 2004). It was Bell who, thirty years after the discovery of the EPR paradox (see Notes 30 and 32 below) , has opened the door to a commonly accepted today understanding, — experimentally confirmed and widely applied in the new field of Quantum Information Processing, — of the reality of Einstein’s spooky actions at a distance. As Ian C. Percival spells it out in his talk at the November 2000 Conference in commemoration of John Bell (arXiv:quant-ph/0012021), «“Philosophy” is an unspeakable word for many physicists, but it was not for John Bell. He turned the question of local reality, or nonlocality, from a philosophical question to one of physics, by proposing an experimental test, the breaking of inequalities between quantities that are measurable in the laboratory.». 3 7 «Quantum mechanics predicts the existence of entangled states that have counterintuitive properties. These states can involve two or more objects, and their unusual properties mean that when we perform a measurement on one object, the others become instantaneously modified, wherever they are. Entangled states are needed for teleportation experiments, in which one can transfer the (quantum) properties of one object to another in a different location, and in quantum communication and computation.» (J. Ignacio Cirac, Entangled Atomic Samples. Nature 413, 27 September 2001, p. 375.) 3 8 As Abraham Pais mentioned somewhere : «Wolfgang Pauli gave a speculative talk on elementary particle physics at Columbia University on January 31, 1958, after which Pauli turned to Bohr and said, “You probably think these ideas are crazy.” Bohr replied, “I do, but unfortunately they are not crazy enough.”» 3 9 «Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.» From a letter to Max Born, December 12, 1926, according to Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, Avon Books, New York, 1972, p. 414. In due time (May 1935), Einstein’s distaste has found its formal expression in the publication of the so called EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) paradox (Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, Nathan Rosen, Can Qantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete ? Phys. Rev. 47, 1935, p.777). In retrospect, it is clear that the EPR paper has demonstrated either that quantum mechanics fails to provide a complete description of physical reality, — Einstein’s choice and hope : «no reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this» (Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord : The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. Oxford University Press, New York, 1982, p. 456), — or that physical reality hides behind its «reasonable facade» some perviously unknown, unspeakable, and unthinkable feature, — as Einstein formulated it, the spooky actions at a distance. Ultimately, EPR-paradox became Einstein’s «greatest contribution to the field» (Alastair Rae, Quantum Physics : Illusion or Reality ? 2nd edition, 2004 (1st edition 1986), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Britain, p. 34.)
40 John Collier, Holism and Emergence : Dynamical Complexity Defeats Laplace's Demon. Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Altenberg, Austria, 2002. 4 1 Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, pp. 20-21, in : Paul Arthur Schilpp, editor, Albert Einstein : Philosopher- Scientist, Cambridge University Press, London, 1970. 4 2 Jerry R. Hobbs, The Origin and Evolution of Language : A Plausible, Strong-AI Account. In : Action To Language via the Mirror Neuron System, Michael A. Arbib, editor, University of Southern California, 2005. 43 Martin J. Rees, OUR FINAL HOUR: A Scientist's warning : How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in This Century--On Earth and Beyond. Basic Books, New York. According to some accounts, Rees has also generously bet $1,000 that a bioterror or «bioerror» incident will claim one million lives by 2020 (as of April 3, 2006, the bet could be found on the web-address : http://www.longbets.org/9) : Just when you've stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb, along comes Sir Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, with teeming armies of deadly viruses, nanobots , and armed fanatics. … For many technological debacles, Rees places much of the blame squarely on the shoulders of the scientists who participate in perfecting environmental destruction, biological menaces, and ever-more powerful weapons. (Therese Littleton, review of Rees’ book, Amazon.com.) 4 4 Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord : The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. Oxford University Press, New York, 1982, p. vi. 4 5 Henry Nicholls, Ancient DNA comes of age. PLoS Biol 3(2): e56, 2005. 4 6 One of the most explicit and outlandish attempts to cash on such a «hypothesis» represents the book of Michael Corey, The God Hypothesis : Discovering Design in Our Just Right Goldilocks Universe. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD, 2002. 4 7 By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite — that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality (Definition VI). God, or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists (Proposition XI). Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, 1677. Translated from the Latin by R.H.M. Elwes (1883), MTSU Philosophy WebWorks Hypertext Edition © 1997, http://frank.mtsu.edu/~rbombard/RB/Spinoza/ethica1.html#Axioms 4 8 Ct., for example, Matt Ridley, Francis Crick, Discoverer of the Genetic Code, Atlas Books, Perdue University Press and Harper-Collins, London. 4 9 Starting with Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, 1135-1204), whose seventeenth proposition in his classical Moreh Nevuchim (The Guide for the Perplexed, Dover, New York, 2000) reads: «All that which is moved has necessarily a motor.» (Moreh Nevuchim, ii. 16). See also Duties of the Heart (Chapter V on Unity), by Rabbi Bachya ben Asher (1255-1340), Feldheim, New York, 1996. 5 0 The intellect has in itself [...] sufficient light to repel this doubt and to extricate itself from its folly. Whence the foolish mind voluntarily rather than by constraint considers the matter in a deficient manner, so that the defect is on the part of the intellect itself and not because of any deficiency on the part of the thing known. St. Bonaventure, Quaestiones Disputatae de Mysterio Trinitatis. 5 1 Cf., for example, the paper of Professor Dominique Lambert, Pie XII et Georges Lemaître : Deux visions distinctes des rapports science-foi. In : J.-F. Stoffel, Centre interfacultaire d’étude en histoire des sciences, Louvain-la-Neuve, 1996, pp. 81-111.
5 2 Cf., for example, the books of Gerald L. Schroeder, Genesis and the Big Bang. The Discovery of Harmony between Modern Science and the Bible. Bantam Books, New York, 1990 ; The Science of God. The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom. Free Press, New York, 1997 ; The Hidden Face of God. The Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth. TOUCHSTONE, Simon and Shuster, New York, 2002. 5 3 Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, 1855, vol II, Ch. 27. 5 4 He had an inexhaustible tenacity that kept him worrying at a problem for long stretches of time. And “worry” is the word, for there was a kind of nagging unease that kept him forever searching and coming back to what might have been considered established ground. (Graeme Mitchison, Francis Crick (1916 - 2004) : Recollections. Journal of Genetics 83, 2005, p. 221.)