by Guy Murchie
The wonder of this secure, almost sacred, individuality of each of us in the ocean of life has been dramatized by an eminent American biologist, Hermann Joseph Muller. He calculated that if we could collect together all the nuclei from all the sperm and egg cells from which the present human population of the earth has sprung, this whole material controlling mankind's heredity could be compressed into the size of an aspirin tablet. Of such extreme tenuousness is the architect's blueprint of human growth, of our body shape, our quality - while the great mass of building material that is physically ourselves has come quite literally from the food market.
The way in which all men are thus linked through humanity's pool of genes is a discovery that inevitably leads students of genetics to believe in human brotherhood. It is a great absurdity of the so-called race problem in the United States, for instance, that anyone who admits having any African or Hebrew ancestry is classed as a black or a Jew regardless of his or her appearance. This idea is sheer snobbery. A person may in consequence have to have only 10 percent of "Negro blood" to be called a Negro or a black, while he would be required to have more than 90 percent of "white blood" to be called a white. When it gets to be realized someday that there is no absolute criterion of race, that all of us literally have some white, some black, some yellow and some other kinds of heredity, the race issue may well fade away into the notebooks of anthropologists where it belongs.
I am not naive enough to suppose that an Arab guerrilla sneaking a bomb into a Jewish market in Jerusalem or a white policeman loading a rifle to defy blacks in the heat of a riot in South Africa could easily be persuaded that he is engaged in a family squabble, but surely the significance of "race" is exaggerated in his mind and is in sore need of reasonable definition. Actually the problem of how to define the word "race" has been tantalizing anthropologists, ethnologists and geneticists for centuries, while the number of "races" identified by competent scholars has ranged from two to two hundred. Some of these authorities have classified humanity according to skin color, some according to head shapes, nose shapes, hair, ear wax, fingerprints, blood types and combinations of these and in other ways. But when it gets down to cases, such attempts have not worked well, for all Chinese do not have yellow skin nor long heads or round heads, and all people with straight black hair are not Chinese. Blood types, taste blindness, susceptibility to disease, innate intelligence, physical aptitude and most other human traits are distributed fairly uniformly throughout humanity. It is true that the people of some continents show a few traits more conspicuously on the average than the people of other continents, but it is unusual for any trait to be so infallibly associated with any one group of people that it can identify them as belonging to one race. The nearest such traits would probably be the black skin pigmentation of the Negro, which evidently evolved in the tropics because it is vital in filtering out excess ultraviolet light and controlling the synthesis of vitamin D, and the Mongoloid eyelid of the oriental, which seems to have great survival value as the best protector of the eye's inner corner from the frequent dust storms of central Asia. But there are numerous exceptions even to these.
Reviewing all these worthy attempts, I can find no more generally accepted, if vague, definition than Dobzhansky's that "races are populations which differ in the relative commonness of their genes."
Reasoning from this definitive statement, it is clearly possible, though rare, that two brothers can have relatively few genes in common and be as unlike as a Negro and a Chinese. In fact if the definition of a Negro or a Chinese is an individual with a certain blend of genes (as Dobzhansky suggests), then obviously it is possible for two brothers to be actually a Negro and a Chinese and conversely for a member of one race to have a brother in another.
Before you toss this idea aside as far-fetched or implausible, please consider that brothers and sisters sometimes differ as much as their parents and that, since parents can be of different races, it is logical that brothers or sisters may in such cases be of different races also. Come to think of it, isn't this an uncommonly elegant example of the brotherhood of man?
Another significant thought occurs to me. Although your brother or sister is more apt to have a set of genes like yours than is any single one of your cousins chosen at random, the fact that you have so many more cousins than siblings builds up the chance that someone among their multitudes may very well have genes closer to yours than has either your brother or sister. Indeed a friend of mine who is a probability researcher at M.I.T. calculates that this is almost certainly true, which is a way of saying that each of us is so much a kin of humankind that all the world's children are your children and mine, and not only spiritually but genetically as well.
Summing up the genetic compass of man as including the entire species within the scope of fiftieth cousinhood, I must admit that I have been unable to find any geneticist who has seriously tried to determine just how many generations ago all the family trees of today's population were merged into one, so the figure fifty is only a rough limit. But those I consulted who worked the closest to this question are agreed on the general order of the fact. And the fact means that your own ancestors, whoever you are, include not only some blacks, some Chinese and some Arabs, but all the blacks, Chinese, Arabs, Malays, Latins, Eskimos and every other possible ancestor who lived on Earth around A.D. 700.
It is virtually certain therefore that you are a direct descendant of Muhammad and every fertile predecessor of his, including Krishna, Confucius, Abraham, Buddha, Caesar, Ishmael and Judas Iscariot. Of course you also must be descended from millions who have lived since Muhammad, inevitably including kings and criminals, but the earlier they lived the more surely you are their descendant.
And a thought-provoking parallel to this earthwide family tree is contained inside your own body, for it has been calculated that a mere fifty generations of cells multiplying their population by repeated fission could create the average human with his approximately 247 cells. This being roughly right, the relationship between all men on Earth is comparable to the relationship between all cells in a man. And as cells metabolize and circulate in the body, so do bodies and their genes circulate throughout mankind, joining everyone to everyone at least once in fifty generations, so that not only does the ancestry of each of us include all fertile humanity of fifty generations ago, but our descendants fifty generations hence in turn will include every living being. If therefore your appetite disdains any kind of man, shake not your family tree. For its fruits appear in every color, in every stage of ripeness or rot, and its branches encompass the earth.
COUSINHOOD BEYOND MAN
This is kinship awareness long overdue. Even more interesting in the large view, it is part of a relationship that reaches beyond man - that extends in fact everywhere, could we just become aware of it. For the family tree was not pruned or polled by Muhammad. Neither is it absolutely bounded by the dimensions of our species. While there is a kind of circulation (a metabolism if you like) among its spiraling boughs that quietly but insistently propels all human genes through humanity within fifty generations - roughly once in a thousand years - this genetic surge can be traced back millions of years to where it connects with kindred currents and ancestral rivers and ultimately the seas and clouds and streamways (visible and invisible) of all life.
Putting it another wise, the collective heartbeat of the colonial superorganism we call man throbs once each generation to pump its vital gene pool through all its arteries and capillaries at the rate of a circuit per millennium, but that is only the genetic metabolic index for one species, Homo sapiens - and inescapably there is a larger flow and a more majestic circulation rate for the whole order of primates (including not only man but apes and monkeys), for the broad class of mammalia (from shrews to whales), the subphylum of Vertebrata (all back-boned creatures from eels to ostriches), the phylum of Chord ata (everything with spinal cords from worms to elephants), then the whole kingdom of animals everywhere, followed by life in all i
ts kingdoms, which, as we will see, may include not only the mineral but other kingdoms not yet designated, possibly some neither imagined nor (to us) imaginable.
Muhammad must have comprehended some of this propinquity of life when he led his believers in a prayer credited to him, in which he enjoined them to "Honor your aunt, the palm, who is made of the same clay as Adam." I wonder, had he been asked, whether he would have been able to say what magnitude of cousinhood joins man to beast or Earth to Moon? In any case, with our present swiftgrowing knowledge of evolution, it is not hard to approximate the date of a common ancestor when, if you can somehow establish a generation length, all you need do further is to divide the number of years since the common ancestor was alive by the number of years between succeeding generations to find the ordinal magnitude of the cousinhood. Thus the great apes are approximately man's millionth cousins, because the presumed common ancestor (Proconsul) lived about as many million years ago as the number of years in a generation averaged between those of man and the apes. By the same reckoning, most of the larger mammals are within the range of ten-millionth cousins of man, and all but the tiniest of animals roughly within that of billionth cousins, while the rest of life, including microbes, plankton, bacteria and viruses, comes generally within the trillionth-cousin magnitude.
Naturally creatures like bacteria and viruses, with generation spans measurable in minutes, must have thousands of times more generations between them and their common ancestors than do trees, which measure their generations in years, so the larger plants are usually less removed from us (generationally speaking) than some of the insects (say fruit flies) that buzz among them, even though the insects, with heads, legs, eyes, mouths, muscles, nervous systems and social organizations, are obviously closer physiologically and psychologically to us, and the ancestors we have in common with them 800 million years ago lived more recently than did our common ancestors with the vegetable kingdom some 1 billion, 500 million years ago. So cousinhood's range is more logically proportional to the time elapsed since the common ancestor than to the numbers of generations generated by the disparate branches of his descendants. And by this criterion, our quadrillionth cousinhood surely must include the mineral kingdom and even the superorganism of Earth herself with all her elements. Further, by applying celestial genetics from the time Earth's closest ancestor (the sun) spawned his family of planets and moons, we discover close sidereal cousins among the Milky Way's stars and more distant ones in remoter galaxies and supergalaxies - all these being relatives of estimable propinquity, which, if you can stomach specificity to its ultimate, bring every last one of them within an ordinal compass of cousinhood delineable within about twenty figures.
Reverting for a moment to the traditional comfort of Scripture, if you have read Jesus' announcement that "other sheep I have, which are not of this fold ... and there shall be one fold and one shepherd" (John lo: i6), you perhaps did not imagine he could have been thinking of the far ranges of the universe. Yet the profound fact of oneness not only on Earth but in all creation is becoming more and more evident as knowledge expands outward, and nowhere are to be found any absolute boundary lines or uncrossable barriers between any kingdoms of life. Not even between life and nonlife, nor between body and mind and spirit.
These realizations naturally bring to memory many a fascinating surmise, such as Ernst Mach's unexpectedly affirmative reply to the question: does a falling stone obey the stars? - which he explained to science with his now generally accepted theory of inertia, holding that inertia is the natural response of any material object to "the masses of the universe." The celestial navigation instincts of many creatures from walruses to bees to birds (who, as we have seen, follow actual star patterns on their night migrations) is about equally fantastic, as is awareness of the sun's direction by the blind termite who builds his castle from inside yet aligns it for optimum midday heat control. And in countless other ways the sky mingles closely with life and Earth, its oxygen circulating continuously through air, sea, land and blood, completely replenishing itself through photosynthesis (page 52) every 2000 years while its carbon dioxide component is renewed in a mere three centuries.
The volatile stuff of the world, you see, is ever in bubbling ferment, flowing and eddying through the turbulence of the biosphere, the soil surging forward to slake the root, the rock radiating abroad its crystal signature, the wind spiriting invisible spores and plankton across continents and seas, each molecule squirming for equipoise among its fellows, each atom singing in its orbit: the carbon cycle adrift through trees, leaves, soil and sky, the nitrogen cycle hitching every conveyance from digestion to lightning. The sheep grazing dreamily in the meadow is thus revealed to be a vital part of the grass and earth and air, a key segment of the meadow itself - even as the meadow in turn must be a living integrant of the total sheep.
In countless ways all the organisms extend across the supposed boundaries between the kingdoms, being in fact animal, vegetable and mineral at the same time, the degree of each varying from case to case. Did you know that many animals actually have meristems of growth similar to those of plants, the tiny hydra a prime example with not only a specialized growth zone in its flowerlike stalk (illustration, page 528) but branches that sprout in a regular Fibonacci spiral, delicately apportioned like a beech tree at intervals of about 120° from one to the next in what has been described as "a perfect phyllotaxis" or vegetal melody of growth. Jellyfish too have meristems and vegetate rhythmically in the sea, among the smallest of them being the amazing little polyps who not only build coral continents but are considered by evolutionists to approximate the common ancestors of most of the advanced animals on Earth, indeed probably all creatures who use legs, wings, fins or eyes and many who haven't yet evolved that far.
Empedokles of Agrigentum in Sicily intuitively guessed the kinship in various biological tissues when he wrote in the fifth century B.C. that "hair and leaves, and thick feathers of birds, and the scales that grow on mighty limbs, are the same thing" - a divination that has generally been verified by increasing human knowledge, specifically in the fact that all keratin (the stuff of hair, feather, horn, scale, etc.) is composed of microfibrils packed into crystalline arrays and, more generally, in that the sperms of animals and plants (such as ferns) are similar and embryos almost indistinguishable. Sometimes viruses cause mutations by actually transporting genes from a chromosome in one species to a similar chromosome in another, and it was recently discovered that a certain traceable primate gene was transferred that way from an ape to a cat thousands of years ago, retying those two diverging species into a slightly tighter bond. And now the much closer cousinhood of monkeys and men has been precisely measured in the discovery that human DNA will combine chemically (to the extent of about 40 percent) with monkey DNA, demonstrating that the two DNAs have at least that percentage of similar sections, suggesting that something approaching a half of the genes in monkeys and men are mutual to them both. Mice are obviously less closely related to men, sharing only about a quarter of their genes, yet even ten-millionth cousins like mice and men, who obviously cannot interbreed as whole organisms, were shown in an experiment at New York University School of Medicine in 1966 to be microcosmically congenial when normal cells of each were hybridized with the other's cells in a culture medium and the offspring "colonies of man-mouse cells grew successfully through more than 100 generations" during a period of six months.
As for our more distant relatives, a protein known as histone-4, isolated from the thymus gland of a calf, has turned out to be almost identical with histone-4 protein isolated from pea seedlings, despite the fact that these animal and vegetable organisms could hardly have had a common ancestor more recent than several hundred million years ago. It is enough to convince me that all things are really involved in all things. Then there is the fact that certain kinds of bacteria in the oceans consume molecules of dissolved iron, concentrating them in their bodies over millions of years until they eventually settl
e into vast beds of iron deposit on the ocean floor that during a hundred million more years may be slowly pushed upward into mountains for men to dig into. And in the working of such mines a significant portion of the iron molecules inevitably diffuses into the air so that we unwittingly breathe and eat iron as invisible dust and our marrow forms it into the iron-hungry nuclei of hemoglobin for our red blood cells. Thus, when you walk down the avenue and see a woman blush, you can be certain the red of her cheek is closely related to the steel girders that are the bones of the city around her. Or when you glimpse the planet Mars shining red in the night sky, you can be assured it is akin to that blush because the deserts of Mars are made of iron-bearing sands. And, even more basic, the red light of the planet, like the red light of Betelgeuse, Arcturos, Antares and other red stars, is essentially an abstract frequency, a low pitch of colored light (about 5000 angstroms in wavelength), a kind of visual music of the spheres that can exist anywhere in the material universe - and that, like iron, rust, blood, moon, planet, star and galaxy, it is just one small part of all the things that are involved in all things.
INTERKINGDOM RELATIONS
What I am saying of course is that all the kingdoms interact upon one another continuously. When a farmer plows his field, in effect the human kingdom (a man) is persuading the animal kingdom (a horse) to induce the mineral kingdom (a plow) to influence the vegetable kingdom (corn) to grow food. The kingdoms don't always harmonize, however, and bitter wars are fought between them, as any forester can tell you, with the so-called lower kingdoms winning at least as often as the higher or more intelligent kingdoms. I mentioned earlier the South African grapple plant whose seed case sprouts a dozen sharp claws which savagely penetrate and cling to any foot that steps on them, and which have been known to kill lions who carelessly got them into their mouths, which made eating so excruciating that the lions had no choice but to starve - a case of the "king of beasts" being literally vanquished by a mere vegetable.
