So many ideas have popped up recently that it is hard to choose where to begin. Last week, we took a trip down south to help move my wife’s mother from a retirement complex to a full-care facility. For those who have been through this, you probably know the pathos and misery involved. It is a heavy subject that exposes the basis of humanity in one of its most gut-wrenching guises. It provides the most meaningful avenue for an essay, but because it has been an exhausting trip, I will not begin there. Rather, I will begin with the comparatively light subject brought about by one of our “on the road” books concerning the origins of Man.
It is only in lieu of our own personal angst that the subject of human origins can be considered light, because it, too, causes us to consider the basic elements of humanity. In sum, what makes us different from the animals? Are we a breed apart, or only another somewhat more complex gadget in the great power grid of life?
Back in the heady days of my graduate education in anthropology, the professors loved to tease the students with this question. They would raise the standard distinctions between animals and humans made over the decades by earlier academics: is it tool use, or language, or compassion or organization that makes us fundamentally different? To all of these, they would point to animals who also had such characteristics, albeit often in primitive form. Chimps fashion leaves to gather ants and also can learn to speak and understand a limited number of human words; many mammals exhibit what looks to be compassion; and many classes of animals from insects to birds to mammals organize themselves to cooperate in groups very efficiently. No, they would say, we are not distinct from the animals in kind, but only in quality. We may have a greater ability to verbally communicate or to show signs of affection, but we are not alone in having these traits. Rather, we are just another species on a continuum of increasing complexity.
Such is the subject – what is human? - that the book, Prophet of Bones, brought to light in this excellent science fiction thriller by Ted Kosmatka. He starts us off in the near-present on a dig on the isle of Flores in Indonesia where they are excavating the perfectly preserved and relatively recent remains of a pigmy-like humanoid. Bio anthropologists who work in genetics are anxiously awaiting the remains to tease out the time at which Flores Man and modern Man may have diverged from a common ancestor. There is an understanding that genetic change happens at a certain pace, and thus the date of divergence is of crucial importance.
At this point in the story, the author is following a factual study: Homo florensis is an actually postulated species that was found on the isle of Flores ten or so years ago. As far as I know, its designation as a different species is still under heated discussion because so much rides on this for so many anthropologists. In my own department at Michigan in the 1980’s, it was of critical importance that all of us came from one common ancestor (which was embodied fairly recently in the Eve hypothesis that suggests through genetic data that we all came from one woman in Africa, “Eve,” about 100,000 years ago) because racial theories in the bad old days of the early 20th century speculated that races were separated by evolutionary divergence or by intermingling with different divergent species. This gave fodder for those who believed that races had different gifts – primarily intelligence – based on these divergences. My department was radically against this, and some in the department would not even give any contradictory evidence a glancing look.
So it is that science, which is supposed to be based on the objective gathering and analysis of data, can be heavily biased. In this work of fiction, however, the contested point in evolution is different.
This imaginary world is one just like ours except for one critical difference: the theory of evolution was debunked, rather than buttressed, through modern science, much in the same way that speciation was denied out of hand in our own recent past. So it is that, in this imaginary world, religion came to have greater power internationally, and in this, was able to use its power to suppress any evidence that showed that the world was more than the biblically-inspired age of 6, 000 years.
In a certain murky lab in a murky area of the Florida Everglades, a research institute run by an eccentric billionaire learns the truth - that the world is much, much older than 6,000 years - from samples taken from the island of Flores by our hero, Paul (among others), and hides it from the world. Earlier in the book, Paul was on the run with his sample, but when he is finally caught, he is offered a position in the institute to shut him up. The position for someone fascinated with human genetics is alluring. Here in the hidden lab, forbidden experiments are carried out without fear of political meddling because of a web of money and power and information. Anything is permissible, including the hybridization of anthropoids – primarily humans with gorillas and chimps. But with this, horrible monsters were created that disgust Peter and the woman (of course there is a woman) he has pulled into the mess. In an attempt to placate Paul, the eccentric founder, Marshall, explains his actions in this church-run world:
(my paraphrase): “I have been fascinated with what makes a human a human from an early age. When I entered science, I delved into the 23 and 24 genetic pairs of humans and chimps (respectively). There I found that the two species had a 97% correlation – except for that 24th pair in the chimp” (this is mostly true). “This extra pair, I discovered, was merely the result of a human pair that had been snipped in half to make two ineffectual pairs. In other words, what separates humans from chimps is one snip of the scissors on a chromosomal pair. It is as if God were merely experimenting, with one half of his experiment going off to make humans, and the other half, the modern chimps.”
(He continues) “If we can read the difference in humans in the genome, I cannot see it. Behaviorally there is also little difference. We are primates, and like all primates, we are characterized by our competitive nature. Even among chimps, dominant behavior occurs even when it has little or nothing to do with physical need. In humans, we might even say that all of civilization is built upon this simian trait. Where in all of this is the soul? Where is the difference that gives humans a soul but not others? Where in my chimp-human hybrids, in these monsters, do you find soul? We are only one of the animals, and God is only a researcher with no goal, no morals, with nothing more in mind than any other experimental scientist.”
Phew. Heavy stuff for a world ruled by religion, but heavy enough for us as well, as we in the real world have also asked these questions. The first is fairly easy to answer – no, you cannot find soul in genes, just as you cannot find it in, say, the nose or the foot. This is apples and oranges. Second, that genes affect us behaviorally is more subtle, but with the same caveat: chemically –affected behavior is not the stuff of soul. Rather, I would argue, it is the stuff that soul works upon. Which points to the next question: exactly what in the human shows that we have souls that transcend biological conformity with the animals?
Animals. In the world of Traditional, or Primitive Man, many groups believed that each animal species came from a “master” spirit that made each of its kind and sent it forth with certain indelible characteristics. From this we can see that animals in general were not seen as individuals, but as certain physical types, just as, say, a Toyota Corolla is a type of car. We might say, then, that it is individuality which separates humans from the animals, for in individuality we have individual will. With individual will, we can make moral choices that are informed by soul. However, we have seen from anthropological observations and experiments that some animals are capable of some sort of individualistic behavior through language and other human-like traits. Human-chimp hybrids might have a much greater sense of self, and thus of will – which gives rise to the possibility of choice and moral direction. Would they, too, have souls, even though so much more of their behavior would be controlled by genetic influences that are beyond the power of their will?
It is probable that all of this has been dealt with by theologians in the past, and that my forthcoming theory is heretical, but in this case, I plead ignorance. Anyway, this is what occurred to me as we listened to the CD’s while driving through the vast flat fields of the Heartland:
Soul is based on free will, which gives us the possibility of deciding between two or more actions. Soul is that element in us that is directly related to God, and which informs us of the choices we should make to be in line with God. We cannot dig out soul or test it in a lab. Rather, its existence is evident in our conscience – in our innate sense of right and wrong. (Socio-biologists would argue that the conscience is merely a program for group survival, but to dig that up here would make a long essay much, much longer.) The degree to which we have a soul, then, is dependent on the degree to which we have a choice over our actions.
How much choice over its actions does a dog have? Or a chimp? I would say that the quality of an animal’s soul, if it has one, would be measured in the choices it makes within its ability to make a choice. For instance, a dog may not be capable of sharing a dish of food with another dog, but it might have a choice as to whether or not it kills the family cat. This would work for the human-chimp hybrid as well. But does this limited set of choices echo real soul?
Because of mentally damaged or malformed humans, I cannot fully answer this here. Surely, these people still have souls. But for the rest of us, I think “soul”, or at least full soul, is based on our ability to overcome our pre-determined genetic predispositions. We might, in fact, think of these genetic (animal) pre-dispositions as another definition for original sin. Animals cannot fully deny the dictates of their kind; their soul, if they have one, would be smaller, or incomplete. Humans, on the other hand, can fully deny the dictates of their “kind.” It is rare that this happens, but it is what makes up the saint. And what makes up the saint is not a genetic pre-disposition, but a decision to follow a certain course in life.
All sorts of things can flow from this idea – that this, this ability to dominate the body with the will, is the meaning of “made in the image of God;” that “original sin” is so embedded that we need grace to finally overcome our animal dispositions; that this grace might indeed come from, or be aided by, a messiah; that perhaps certain animals have a kind of soul as well (all good dogs might indeed go to heaven); that existence as we know it is actually a reflection of a choice made by humans in the beginning, be that in the biblical Garden or at conception; and so on.
Heavy stuff on the road to Mississippi, but still not like real life itself. Ideas are ideas, but reality hits at times like a baseball bat. Still, they give us pause. What separates us from the animals might appear small, but if it is full soul, it is as big a difference as that between time and eternity. Between limited life and the Power and the Glory. There is a reason, then, for stepping out of this real world, this world of test tubes and corruption and dying. It is there in the soft ether of our thoughts where we can see things from other perspectives, from angles which might act as real-life guide posts for the rest of our natural lives.
So many ideas have popped up recently that it is hard to choose where to begin. Last week, we took a trip down south to help move my wife’s mother from a retirement complex to a full-care facility. For those who have been through this, you probably know the pathos and misery involved. It is a heavy subject that exposes the basis of humanity in one of its most gut-wrenching guises. It provides the most meaningful avenue for an essay, but because it has been an exhausting trip, I will not begin there. Rather, I will begin with the comparatively light subject brought about by one of our “on the road” books concerning the origins of Man.
It is only in lieu of our own personal angst that the subject of human origins can be considered light, because it, too, causes us to consider the basic elements of humanity. In sum, what makes us different from the animals? Are we a breed apart, or only another somewhat more complex gadget in the great power grid of life?
Back in the heady days of my graduate education in anthropology, the professors loved to tease the students with this question. They would raise the standard distinctions between animals and humans made over the decades by earlier academics: is it tool use, or language, or compassion or organization that makes us fundamentally different? To all of these, they would point to animals who also had such characteristics, albeit often in primitive form. Chimps fashion leaves to gather ants and also can learn to speak and understand a limited number of human words; many mammals exhibit what looks to be compassion; and many classes of animals from insects to birds to mammals organize themselves to cooperate in groups very efficiently. No, they would say, we are not distinct from the animals in kind, but only in quality. We may have a greater ability to verbally communicate or to show signs of affection, but we are not alone in having these traits. Rather, we are just another species on a continuum of increasing complexity.
Such is the subject – what is human? - that the book, Prophet of Bones, brought to light in this excellent science fiction thriller by Ted Kosmatka. He starts us off in the near-present on a dig on the isle of Flores in Indonesia where they are excavating the perfectly preserved and relatively recent remains of a pigmy-like humanoid. Bio anthropologists who work in genetics are anxiously awaiting the remains to tease out the time at which Flores Man and modern Man may have diverged from a common ancestor. There is an understanding that genetic change happens at a certain pace, and thus the date of divergence is of crucial importance.
At this point in the story, the author is following a factual study: Homo florensis is an actually postulated species that was found on the isle of Flores ten or so years ago. As far as I know, its designation as a different species is still under heated discussion because so much rides on this for so many anthropologists. In my own department at Michigan in the 1980’s, it was of critical importance that all of us came from one common ancestor (which was embodied fairly recently in the Eve hypothesis that suggests through genetic data that we all came from one woman in Africa, “Eve,” about 100,000 years ago) because racial theories in the bad old days of the early 20th century speculated that races were separated by evolutionary divergence or by intermingling with different divergent species. This gave fodder for those who believed that races had different gifts – primarily intelligence – based on these divergences. My department was radically against this, and some in the department would not even give any contradictory evidence a glancing look.
So it is that science, which is supposed to be based on the objective gathering and analysis of data, can be heavily biased. In this work of fiction, however, the contested point in evolution is different.
This imaginary world is one just like ours except for one critical difference: the theory of evolution was debunked, rather than buttressed, through modern science, much in the same way that speciation was denied out of hand in our own recent past. So it is that, in this imaginary world, religion came to have greater power internationally, and in this, was able to use its power to suppress any evidence that showed that the world was more than the biblically-inspired age of 6, 000 years.
In a certain murky lab in a murky area of the Florida Everglades, a research institute run by an eccentric billionaire learns the truth - that the world is much, much older than 6,000 years - from samples taken from the island of Flores by our hero, Paul (among others), and hides it from the world. Earlier in the book, Paul was on the run with his sample, but when he is finally caught, he is offered a position in the institute to shut him up. The position for someone fascinated with human genetics is alluring. Here in the hidden lab, forbidden experiments are carried out without fear of political meddling because of a web of money and power and information. Anything is permissible, including the hybridization of anthropoids – primarily humans with gorillas and chimps. But with this, horrible monsters were created that disgust Peter and the woman (of course there is a woman) he has pulled into the mess. In an attempt to placate Paul, the eccentric founder, Marshall, explains his actions in this church-run world:
(my paraphrase): “I have been fascinated with what makes a human a human from an early age. When I entered science, I delved into the 23 and 24 genetic pairs of humans and chimps (respectively). There I found that the two species had a 97% correlation – except for that 24th pair in the chimp” (this is mostly true). “This extra pair, I discovered, was merely the result of a human pair that had been snipped in half to make two ineffectual pairs. In other words, what separates humans from chimps is one snip of the scissors on a chromosomal pair. It is as if God were merely experimenting, with one half of his experiment going off to make humans, and the other half, the modern chimps.”
(He continues) “If we can read the difference in humans in the genome, I cannot see it. Behaviorally there is also little difference. We are primates, and like all primates, we are characterized by our competitive nature. Even among chimps, dominant behavior occurs even when it has little or nothing to do with physical need. In humans, we might even say that all of civilization is built upon this simian trait. Where in all of this is the soul? Where is the difference that gives humans a soul but not others? Where in my chimp-human hybrids, in these monsters, do you find soul? We are only one of the animals, and God is only a researcher with no goal, no morals, with nothing more in mind than any other experimental scientist.”
Phew. Heavy stuff for a world ruled by religion, but heavy enough for us as well, as we in the real world have also asked these questions. The first is fairly easy to answer – no, you cannot find soul in genes, just as you cannot find it in, say, the nose or the foot. This is apples and oranges. Second, that genes affect us behaviorally is more subtle, but with the same caveat: chemically –affected behavior is not the stuff of soul. Rather, I would argue, it is the stuff that soul works upon. Which points to the next question: exactly what in the human shows that we have souls that transcend biological conformity with the animals?
Animals. In the world of Traditional, or Primitive Man, many groups believed that each animal species came from a “master” spirit that made each of its kind and sent it forth with certain indelible characteristics. From this we can see that animals in general were not seen as individuals, but as certain physical types, just as, say, a Toyota Corolla is a type of car. We might say, then, that it is individuality which separates humans from the animals, for in individuality we have individual will. With individual will, we can make moral choices that are informed by soul. However, we have seen from anthropological observations and experiments that some animals are capable of some sort of individualistic behavior through language and other human-like traits. Human-chimp hybrids might have a much greater sense of self, and thus of will – which gives rise to the possibility of choice and moral direction. Would they, too, have souls, even though so much more of their behavior would be controlled by genetic influences that are beyond the power of their will?
It is probable that all of this has been dealt with by theologians in the past, and that my forthcoming theory is heretical, but in this case, I plead ignorance. Anyway, this is what occurred to me as we listened to the CD’s while driving through the vast flat fields of the Heartland:
Soul is based on free will, which gives us the possibility of deciding between two or more actions. Soul is that element in us that is directly related to God, and which informs us of the choices we should make to be in line with God. We cannot dig out soul or test it in a lab. Rather, its existence is evident in our conscience – in our innate sense of right and wrong. (Socio-biologists would argue that the conscience is merely a program for group survival, but to dig that up here would make a long essay much, much longer.) The degree to which we have a soul, then, is dependent on the degree to which we have a choice over our actions.
How much choice over its actions does a dog have? Or a chimp? I would say that the quality of an animal’s soul, if it has one, would be measured in the choices it makes within its ability to make a choice. For instance, a dog may not be capable of sharing a dish of food with another dog, but it might have a choice as to whether or not it kills the family cat. This would work for the human-chimp hybrid as well. But does this limited set of choices echo real soul?
Because of mentally damaged or malformed humans, I cannot fully answer this here. Surely, these people still have souls. But for the rest of us, I think “soul”, or at least full soul, is based on our ability to overcome our pre-determined genetic predispositions. We might, in fact, think of these genetic (animal) pre-dispositions as another definition for original sin. Animals cannot fully deny the dictates of their kind; their soul, if they have one, would be smaller, or incomplete. Humans, on the other hand, can fully deny the dictates of their “kind.” It is rare that this happens, but it is what makes up the saint. And what makes up the saint is not a genetic pre-disposition, but a decision to follow a certain course in life.
All sorts of things can flow from this idea – that this, this ability to dominate the body with the will, is the meaning of “made in the image of God;” that “original sin” is so embedded that we need grace to finally overcome our animal dispositions; that this grace might indeed come from, or be aided by, a messiah; that perhaps certain animals have a kind of soul as well (all good dogs might indeed go to heaven); that existence as we know it is actually a reflection of a choice made by humans in the beginning, be that in the biblical Garden or at conception; and so on.
Heavy stuff on the road to Mississippi, but still not like real life itself. Ideas are ideas, but reality hits at times like a baseball bat. Still, they give us pause. What separates us from the animals might appear small, but if it is full soul, it is as big a difference as that between time and eternity. Between limited life and the Power and the Glory. There is a reason, then, for stepping out of this real world, this world of test tubes and corruption and dying. It is there in the soft ether of our thoughts where we can see things from other perspectives, from angles which might act as real-life guide posts for the rest of our natural lives.
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