Monday, July 12, 2010

The Second Coming

Fashionable physics frightens Father’s dreaming child.
Not answers alone, their questions vex to nightmare.

Eternity narrowly escaped too recently, too-familiar
Spectres as pitiless as the sun materialize….

From imperceptible dimensions to infinite
Multiverses with wholly other logistics and laws—
Harboring what rough beasts, what desert birds
With what indignant natures, what insidious intents?—
Too reminiscent of dusty draconic doxologies
Inevitable realms inaccessible to sense
And measurement where Primeval Movers haunt.

Priests in alabaster temples scribe their esoteric math
Heirs of authority chant “believe” and “behave” and “beyond”

Dismiss the fear, dear child. Summon the harshest insults
One can conjure… Call them eunuchs. Call them “Christians”

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Virtues of Heresy

Five years ago a claim that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans mated and bore offspring would have fallen outside the bounds of scientific orthodoxy.  Hundreds of textbooks and articles and popularizing documentaries preached the doctrine of survival by competition alone. The prevalence of such dogmas amused me then, and offend me now.  How myopic and xenophobic and religulous do those sermons appear today!

By all accounts humans tend to be quite sexually opportunistic creatures. As long as our kind has written down their stories half-man/half-beast legends, Nephalim accounts, and anecdotes and prohibitions regarding “bestiality” have abounded. If sheep and dogs and pigs and horses are not safe from our sexual opportunism why would Neanderthals, so anatomically (and, it turns out,genetically) compatible, have escaped? And if Neander was so inclined how did we? Interspecies couplings, while rare, are considered a “natural occurrence” among many mammalian species. Why should we expect otherwise of our own kind?

Not long ago, to entertain the thought was to border on the unthinkable. If Europeans interbreeding with Africans ever inspired disgust and moral outrage, humans with Neanderthals inspired more. If the orthodox doctrine of human homogeneity and its moral of kinship was to be preserved, banish the thought… prohibit the research! Deprived of our 6,000 year Adam we hastily embraced a 60,000 year Adam. Now it appears we must look further back, perhaps 600,000 years… or more if, as I predict, populations of H. Erectus (or other) in Asia will prove to have undergone a similar assimilation. We have opened the genetic Pandora’s Box, and genetic Ham (sapiens), Shem (erectus), and Japheth (neanderthalis) are loosed upon the world.

As much as our hearts may bleed, all this does likely not point to the story of our ancestors making love and not war—history is rarely that tidy—but of engaging in war and deviancy and rape and pillage and bigotry and competition and fragile truces sometimes secured by exotic exchanges of bodily fluids which sometimes produced strange brews in the gene pool.

The old family tree looked like figure 1. Behold how aesthetic! {Look, dad, no fornicating!} But that is not how life works. Lately we revised the tree to figure 2, the moral self-congratulatory model. Now we are moving toward a tree with “vines” of genetic transfer draping virtually all the branches, represented by figure 3. For now, “It's official: Most of us are part Neanderthal” (Discovery News), "Neanderthals live on in non-Africans." The old orthodoxy is dead. Long live the new orthodoxy! Now... let us be heretics.