Genetics of Original Sin

by Christian De Duve

  The wiring of the brain is an epigenetic phenomenon

  The wiring of the human brain is a striking case of epigenetics in the Waddington sense. Only the general features of the brain are genetically determined. Its detailed wiring is superimposed upon the genetic blueprint, it is epigenetic. It couldn’t be otherwise. The human brain contains about one hundred billion neurons, each of which is connected with some ten thousand other neurons, adding up to about one million billion interneuronal connections. Our genome contains only about three billion bases, not nearly enough to determine that many interneuronal connections, even if—which is hardly conceivable—each base should code for a connection. This fact opens hopes for the future, offering a way for us to escape the possible fatality of genetic determinism. This escape is particularly meaningful, as it concerns the brain, the organ through which we make decisions and perform actions.

  The way the wiring of the brain is established epigenetically has been elucidated by the investigations of Jean-Pierre Changeux, in France, and Gerald Edelman, in the United States. According to these scientists, growing neurons continually send out projections in all directions. Acting like “feelers,” these projections, upon chance encounters with each other, form transient connections that quickly come apart again if they are not used. If a stimulus repeatedly goes through such a connection, it becomes stabilized into a synapse. Both of these scientists have stressed the analogy between this mechanism and Darwinian selection. Chance offers a vast array of possible connections among which a small number get selected by use. Edelman calls it “neural Darwinism.”

  The implications of this epigenetic process are critical. The human brain is shaped to a large extent by the impulses to which it is exposed during the first years after birth, even, perhaps, while in the womb. The process continues all life long, by education, training, and learning. Even an old brain can make new connections. But the first years are crucial. Children de prived of contact with other humans for the first years of life are permanently stunted psychologically.

  Education starts in the cradle

  These findings have a profound significance for the topic of this chapter. If we wish to take advantage of the plasticity of the brain to counter the defects imprinted in us by natural selection and escape the tyranny of our genes, we must start in the cradle and continue afterward in the early educational environment to which a child is exposed, in a nursery, kindergarten, or primary school, or at play with peers or parents and other grown-ups. In other words, for children to be changed, their parents and teachers must first be changed.

  This looks like an impossibility. It requires parents and teachers to be changed in adulthood. Furthermore, in order to be effective on a global scale, the change would have to affect hundreds of millions of largely illiterate parents, as well as their children’s elementary schoolteachers. Instant change, over a single generation, is clearly impossible. Evolution, step by step, toward the desired situation is a more realistic ambition. Even if started on a small scale, such a movement, if sufficiently contagious, could snowball into worldwide enlightenment.

  Many such attempts have been made in the course of history. Think of pacifist religious groups, the Amish and Quakers, the advocates of nonviolence, from Christ to Buddha to Gandhi, conscientious objectors, the communes and flower children of recent years, “make love, not war,” and so on. None of these movements has snowballed. Some have even degenerated into violent defense of nonviolence. But this is no reason for despair. With increasing awareness of the disaster we are facing if we do not change course, future initiatives could meet with greater success.

  Political and, especially, religious leaders are particularly well placed to propagate the recommendations the world needs

  Even a large-scale movement is not unthinkable. History shows that mass indoctrination of adults by single individuals is possible. Political leaders have done so repeatedly, but mostly within the confines of national borders and with aims that were far from pacifistic. But some philosophers and, especially, religious leaders have managed to influence huge masses across national boundaries. They, more than anybody else, are in a position to help spread the epigenetic changes needed to save the world.

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  Option 4: Call on Religions

  C hurches have been the foremost dispensers of education to the young during much of history and they still play a major role in this crucial process in many parts of the world. Even in the United States, where public schools are run by local lay authorities, Churches still exert important influence, by way of school boards and other supervising bodies. Their involvement is weaker in Europe, where religious neutrality of the public school system is strictly enforced and respected; but religious influence remains significant, through private and, sometimes, even state-supported schools.

  Churches are also much involved in adult education, through sermons, homilies, and other exhortations they deliver to their congregations at their gatherings. They are thus ideally placed to spread the epigenetic corrections to our genetic heritage that are urgently needed to save the world from irreparable, human-inflicted damage.

  Churches could play an exceptional role in saving humankind

  In a way, this is what religions traditionally have striven for. Invention of the myth of original sin, with its attendant need for salvation, may well represent the earliest human appreciation of our fundamental, inborn behavioral defects and the necessity that they be corrected. In particular, the Christian message of love, peace, tolerance, and forgiveness is exactly what is called for in our troubled world. Historically, this message lies at the root of much of civilization, and it is shared, beyond ideological differences, by many of the adepts of the major religions, as well as by numerous nonbelievers. Unfortunately, the message is in danger of being lost, stifled by the tendencies it was meant to correct. Churches have not escaped the genetic “original sin” that plagues the whole of humanity. Several factors inherent to their nature prevent them from playing the role one would wish them to carry out.

  Religions are founded on beliefs, not on rational thought

  A major weakness—and, paradoxically, also strength—common to most religions is their reliance on belief, that is, unquestioning faith in affirmations by an authority that has no other legitimacy than its own claim to hold the truth, supported by a powerful ability to convince. Belief in a creator God, for example; in the veracity of the biblical record; in resurrection of the dead, with, in the end, eternal bliss (or doom). Belief in animism or reincarnation; in the efficacy of prayer or in the power of certain sacramental gestures and rituals. Belief, especially, in the authority, sometimes, even, infallibility, of a hier archy that has invested itself with the right to decide what is true. Acceptance without proof of such claims flies in the face of reason and can no longer be upheld in our modern world, trained, since the days of the Enlightenment, to exercise what the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1635) has called “methodic doubt.” Yet, a major fraction of human beings living on Earth today go on adhering to a system of beliefs of one kind or another and to reject rationality, or even to oppose its teaching, on religious grounds.

  This paradox has an explanation. As pointed out by many contemporary thinkers, the need to believe, especially within the context of a group, is ingrained in human nature, probably carved into it by natural selection because those populations that believed in something had a greater chance of surviving and producing progeny under prevailing conditions, whatever the plausibility, or lack of it, of the object of the belief. Historically, religions have catered to this need in a uniquely effective fashion, by proposing powerful myths that directly appeal to the sense of wonder and awe humans have experienced in the face of the mysteries of the world ever since the days when their brains first became capable of generating such sentiments.

  Religions have fulfilled this function for almost all of human history. Only in the last two millennia or so have, first, philosophy and, later, t
he sciences, started to pursue this quest by a new approach based on the use of reason, logic, observation, and experimentation, under the guidance of intellectual rigor and honesty. This new form of search has gained few adherents so far. By and large, a majority of believers, often egged on by their leaders, have failed to follow the scientific approach, in spite of the spectacular practical achievements—nuclear power, space travel, genetic engineering, the cure and prevention of many diseases, to mention only a few—it has made possible. In much of the world, the power of Faith remains supreme and religions maintain a largely unquestioned authority. A perverse aspect of this situation is the feeling of certainty that goes with it.

  Many religions present themselves as defenders of the truth

  Another major obstacle preventing religions from carrying out a truly educational function is the claim by many of them to be, almost by definition, the holders of the supreme Truth. They may make token gestures toward tolerance, ecumenism, universal brotherhood, and the like. But the very fact of believing implies rejection of different beliefs. It leaves no room for compromise or rational discourse. Conceding that your neighbor could be right implies admitting that you could be wrong.

  As an aggravating circumstance, such a feeling of certainty almost inevitably generates missionary zeal, the wish to convert those who think otherwise. Such attempts are mostly done by peaceful means in the world today. In the past, the “propagation of Faith” often degenerated into repressions, tortures, conflicts, and wars, the bane of our genetic heritage and the very curse religion could be expected to free us from. The Catholic Church, although it has become pacific in recent times, has behind it centuries of cruel inquisitions and merciless persecutions, crusades, and other bloody expeditions that aimed at evangelization but used the bringing of salvation to heathens as a pretext for killing, plundering, and conquering. Other Christian Churches have had their share of religious wars. Strifes between Protestants and Catholics have shaped much of European history and have torn Ireland up to very recent days. Religious intolerance, added to economic hard ship, has been behind several of the migrations that gave birth to the United States.

  For the two other major monotheistic religions, it is not just their past that is weighing them down. They are engaged at this very moment in deadly, religiously inspired wars. Islamic factions fight each other mercilessly in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere. Jihadists direct their attacks against their archenemy, Israel, and against much of the Western world, exploiting religious beliefs to preach hatred and fanaticism, up to persuading young men—and now women—to sacrifice their lives for the privilege of killing “infidels.”

  The Jews, in spite of—perhaps partly because of—having suffered so much from oppression, persecution, and extermination, with the horrors of the Holocaust as culminating ordeal, have, with the creation of a religious state deriving its legitimacy from a millennia-old biblical past, planted the seeds of a new tragic conflict. I realize that this is a complex situation, which is variously appreciated by Jews all over the world and even in Israel. It cannot be compared to the kind of worldwide terrorism waged by extremist Islamic factions. But the core Zionist objective of “recovering Judea and Samaria” and reclaiming its biblical roots cannot be denied.

  To blame religion alone for these many excesses would be grossly oversimplified. Economic pressures, political influences, and nationalistic passions all play a role. But the “Gott mit Uns” (God is on our side) rallying cry pervades many conflicts, right down to the “war on terror” of recent years.

  It must be added that this criticism concerns mostly religions issued from the Bible. On the whole, Eastern religions are less inclined to proselytism and are more pacific. I know them too little to say more about them.

  Religious doctrines have a major impact on ethical directives

  A particularly delicate domain is that of ethics, long the preserve of religions and still based largely on religious or philosophical principles. Many present-day controversies, on topics such as homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, stem-cell research, and other sensitive issues, illustrate the impact of doctrine on ethical judgments. The ban against as innocuous a practice as contraception, still unyieldingly enforced by some major religions, shows how far this influence may be pushed.

  Science has little to say in this domain, except for what the French biologist Jacques Monod (1910–1976) has called the “ethics of knowledge,” respect for truth, with utter honesty, rigor, and integrity; a powerful prescript, but restricted to the intellectual sphere. On many other issues, science does not have the capacity to pass judgment. It is unable to decide what is good and what is bad.

  Science may have little to say on ethical problems, but it is not voiceless. It can clarify numerous discussions with its findings—stem cells are a case in point. It can also render service by more clearly defining the likely outcomes of certain policies. Problems related to the environment, for example, call for ethical decisions of fundamental importance. It is urgent that religions state their position on this issue, which concerns the very future of humanity and that of the living world of which it is a part and on which it is dependent. The ethics of environmentalism are yet to be defined. What are our duties with respect to planet Earth? A number of thoughtful religious leaders are now addressing this question and the results are promising. There will be more about this in the next chapter.

  Hopes for a future life could hamper efforts in favor of present life

  Preoccupation of several major religions with a hypothetical afterlife complicates the question of our planetary duties. They teach, in more or less explicit fashion, illustrated by the examples of saints and other blessed individuals, that gaining a worthy place in the other world is more important than leading a happy life in this one, to the point that deprivation, suffering, hardship, even martyrdom and, in some cases, murder by suicide are sometimes made into virtues and celebrated as worthy prices to pay for a bliss to come, promised to be all the more beatific, the greater the sacrifices accepted to attain it. Prospects, such as the deterioration of our planet, the destruction of the biosphere, or the extinction of humankind, which loom on the horizon as major menaces weighing on the future, have long been viewed by many religions—and still are by some today—as inevitable outcomes, not to be opposed but to make ready for. Doomsday, the Apocalypse, Armageddon, the Last Judgment, Avenging Angels, and other end-of-the-world scenarios are prominent parts of religious mythologies.

  Are religions to be fought or can they be enlisted?

  What are we to conclude? Objectively, there are few reasons to be optimistic. Speaking only of the Church I know best, the Catholic Church, it is certainly less bellicose and less intolerant than it was in the past. But it remains dominated by a clerical hierarchy often more concerned with fine points of dogma or with secondary details of sexual behavior than with the real problems of humanity, more attentive to faith than to facts. And yet, it could play an exceptional role. The pope, with hisunique prestige and authority over one billion faithful, is one of the few people in the world who could single-handedly alter the future course of human affairs. Numerous pontiffs have taken advantage of this privilege to attempt to influence the world, but without escaping from the dogmatism that surrounds and supports their authority. The other Bible-based religions could likewise greatly help to improve the global human circumstance but all too often remain hamstrung by their own doctrinal biases.

  Is that a valid reason to abandon all religion? To this question, the most vocal and militant defenders of secularism and atheism respond by an emphatic YES. One may, however, wonder whether this response is opportune. In my opinion, it has two defects. First, it is inefficient. It seems mostly to reach those who are already convinced and hardly touches the others or, even, proves counterproductive, prompting them to rise up in arms in defense of their cherished beliefs without even giving the opposition a fair hearing. In addition, rejecting religions ignores the numerous
benefits they have accomplished and go on accomplishing throughout the world.

  Churches are engaged in many valuable activities

  Churches do much more than propagating creeds and issuing ethical directives. They have done, and continue doing, a lot of good in the world. They play a major role in education, health care, social work, help to the disabled, assistance to the disadvantaged, and other charitable undertakings, especially in the Third World. They certainly deserve encouragement and support in such worthy endeavors. In addition, they also serve valuable social functions. Chapels, churches, and cathedrals may have, like temples, mosques, and synagogues, lost much of their primary raison d’être as “places of worship,” but they continue to offer, as they have done for times immemorial, conducive settings for reflection, meditation, and contemplation, as well as for such collective activities as teachings, moral exhortations, happy celebrations, sorrowful leavetakings, and other group occasions of deep human significance. Such settings deserve to be preserved even if the manifestations that take place in them are slated to evolve as a function of changes in societies. As I can testify from personal experience, a funeral service in a beautiful church, with the sound of movingly sung Fauré’s In Paradisum, conserves its special poignancy even though there is no paradise for the dear departed to enter.