Roll the bones! :: Stacey E. Ake

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Roll the bones!

"Science," said Richard Feynman, "is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that's not the reason we are doing it."

And sometimes, science replaces sex, as we saw less than two weeks ago with the announcement by ClonAid of the birth of an allegedly cloned human infant.

And thus we entered not merely a new year, but a new era.

And such novelty should be a wake up call for we participants in the science religion debate. For, you see, religion won this technological round.

In his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan wrote:

"In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.'"

Apparently, the Raelians do not.

And this time, religion has surpassed science.

Happy New Year 2003!
And Happy New Era!

--Stacey E. Ake

Roll the bones!

I am confused.

But don't worry. I do not find this such a bad state to be in. Actually, I am rather fond of the state of confusion, having even been known to pay taxes in it! In fact, I might even be tempted to declare that I rather glory in confusion, as it seems proof positive to me that reality itself escapes my conception of it. And it would be a sorry day indeed if ever I came to the conclusion that my conception of reality was somehow equal to or, even worse, greater than reality itself. As Thoreau observed, "the universe is wider than our view of it." I should certainly hope so; otherwise it would be an awful waste of space...and time.

But I digress.

What I am actually confused about is the issue of virginity.

Now, I don't mean this in any sort of "Promise Keepers"-"I won't bed you till I wed you" kind of way. I am actually thinking about what the whole historical hullabaloo about virginity and its loss has always symbolized: the loss of innocence due to the acquisition of knowledge. Or, as William Blake poetically phrased it, this is the problem of the transition between innocence and experience. Add to this contrast the odd but interesting fact that in certain romance languages the verb "experience" is the same as that for "experiment", and I cannot help thinking about science. And, of course, science as a term lends itself to such an interpretation, given that the word stems from the Latin scientia where sciens- means "having knowledge". To make the symbolism even more complex, the Latin term is probably akin to the Sanskrit chyati, meaning "he cuts off", thus linking the word to the Latin scindere which means to split, and making the etymological symbolism ironically complete.

Experience and experiments do have a way of cutting one off, of splitting one off, not simply from the herd but also from the past. This is why certain "paradigm shifts" are considered revolutionary and "earth-shattering". But this is often several hundred years after the fact. In the midst of shifting paradigms, however, there are those who either presciently or fearfully view the world as coming to an end. And, whether we like it or not, they are right.

One world is coming to an end...in order that another may be born.

And whether one views this as a good thing or a bad thing is actually irrelevant, since this is the nature of life. Virginity is not productive; only maternity is. And maternity is the product of both knowledge and experience.

It can also be the product of experiment.

Thus, I come to my real topic: the announcement made, with an apt sense of the mythic, right after Christmas, of the birth of a cloned child named, again with an apt sense of the mythic, Eve.

Religion...I mean science...I mean religion...has gone too far!

Or has it?

What struck me most about this was not the actually cloning. Once you've cloned a sheep, it was only a matter of time and will before cloned humans would appear on the scene. Granted, it is perhaps a little bit like the fact that once you've split the atom, it is only a matter of time and will before you have a bomb. But that fact is not a fact of science, it is a fact of human nature. Some people combine saltpeter, carbon, and sulfur, and think "Fireworks!". Others can only see gunpowder. One man looks at a rock and sees the statue it contains. Another thinks about knocking the apples off the highest part of a tree. And yet a third considers how said rock might be used in slaying a giant. The rock becomes what we make of it: art, tool, or weapon.

And cloned children will become what we make of them, just like any other children. If nothing else, their lives will go on to prove that not even human beings can make human beings. And that's a very good thing for us to learn.

But what interests me is the fact that this premier cloning of a human being did not occur "in the name of" science. It was undertaken and (allegedly) completed in the name of religion. More importantly, it was science undertaken in the name of religion.

Now that puts an interesting spin on things.

Raelian beliefs aside, we are in the strange position of having an issue (human cloning) that has heretofore been polarized within the science religion debate suddenly bridged by, well, religion making use of science. Previously, there were the science guys, black hats only, please, selfishly pursuing the dehumanizing process of human cloning. In the other corner, in the white hats, were the religionists, decrying this technological development. Now, I understand that this representation is a caricature, for just as there are scientists who opposed cloning, there are religious folk who support it, but I also understand that as of late December of 2002, the entire world is now aware that one sets of white hats has also taken up the black hat, thus revealing the situation for what it is: inherently grey.

Moreover, this religious group (and I resist the labeling of the Raelians as a cult, if only on the principle that all the major religions appear to have begun as cults of one sort or another, and we do not know what the future holds; consider the transition in our own lifetimes of the perception of both the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses in the public eye) has cloned and will no doubt keep on cloning, not despite its religious teachings, but because of them. Furthermore, their reasons for cloning have to do with both their origins or creation story and their apocalyptic or ending story. At this juncture, one is not given the impression that this is a group intent on the Severino Antinori dark horse run for a Nobel Prize. As a matter of fact, they have refused to DNA test the infant. Cynics will say, and justifiably so, that the reason for such Raelian reluctance is the fact that no cloned child was born. Point taken. On the other hand, it very well could be that the reason for such reticence was the one that was publicly stated: in order to protect the family's privacy. No doubt Louise Brown might have appreciated similar consideration surrounding her birth.

And, finally, I have to admire on some level any group that looks at both the religious creation story and the scientific evolution story, and spits on both of them as unconvincing. Now, I personally could not hold to the Raelian creation of human beings by space aliens theory, if only because I do not find it to be any kind of answer but rather a postponement of inquiry; however, it is interesting to note that if these folk have truly cloned a human, then a religious opposition to the current scientific paradigm has advanced contemporary science faster than the science of that scientific paradigm. Ironies, it would seem, do abound. Moreover, it was the Raelians' religiously motivated disregard for what is often called "basic human morality" (whatever that means) that has no doubt allowed them to get a jump on the Antinoris of the world, because such scientific cloners as Antinori would have had to seek a safe moral haven before their research could begin. And lest anyone think that the Raelians have disregarded human dignity in their efforts, please consider that, according to their beliefs, they are somehow promoting that dignity-as they understand it.

But all this is mere conjecture; what is true is that, if a human cloned baby has been born, the world has changed. If not, it is a portent that the world will soon be changing, as there will be scientifically verifiable claims of a similar nature in the near future. Innocence, of a certain kind, has been lost.

But what is the knowledge we have gained?

The obvious answer is that we now know how to clone a human. But I do not think this is the right answer. I subscribe, along with H. L. Mencken, that "for every problem, there is a solution, which is simple, neat, and wrong". Hence, the idea that we have gained the knowledge of how to clone a human being is a misleading answer, if only because we've had this knowledge for over half a decade. Rather, I would like to think that we have gained (yet once again!) the knowledge that human beings, rather like adolescents, live to push the envelope. We crave to go "where no one has gone before." Essentially, like children, we desire to grow up. We wish to have knowledge and experience. And the Raelians have revealed that even religion can de co-opted into that pursuit.

Despite this new addition to humanity and its ever-increasing store of knowledge, life will go on. Those of us "of a certain age" have realized that, for the last few years, we have been teaching a generation of students that has always lived with HIV and AIDS, something that many of us thought impossible or unthinkable a mere 20 years ago. I am of a generation that has always lived with the knowledge and threat of nuclear weapons. I am also of a generation that, when necessary, resorts to the in vitro fertilization technique, originally of Louise Brown fame, to produce its children. And while, in some circles, the debate exists about the ethicality and efficacy of this procedure: in other circles, the procedure is merely considered one solution to an apparently intractable problem. In other words, we progress and persist, advance and adapt; we also err and mistake, overcome and move on.

And this is our nature.

For we are the teenagers that drive the car too fast to see whether we can control it. We are also the same teenagers several hours later rolling around in the back seat, seeking knowledge and experience.

Because that is our nature, too.

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Published 2003.01.07

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