Dr. Denis Alexander2013-05-26T03:02:34-04:00Dr. Denis Alexanderhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=dr-denis-alexanderCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Dr. Denis AlexanderGood old fashioned elbow grease.Made in the Image of God: Human Value and Genomicstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24014942013-01-10T16:20:17-05:002013-03-12T05:12:02-04:00Dr. Denis Alexanderhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-denis-alexander/January 2011 and then in January 2012 I posted two articles exploring the implications of contemporary genomics for the Judeo-Christian idea of humankind made in the image of God (Imago Dei), an ancient idea that has contributed historically to the shaping of moral values, political systems, medical care, education and the justification of human rights. In this article we consider the meaning of the "image of God" language in its historical context and the way in which its vision of human freedom and identity challenges the fatalistic ideas that are often linked to our understanding of the role of DNA in human destiny.
During the past year the first results were published from the "Encyclopedia of DNA elements" project ('ENCODE'), revealing that at least 20 percent of the genome, perhaps more, is involved in regulating the expression of its 21,000 protein-encoding genes. The "selfish gene" had its day in the sun, but has now been replaced by the image of a finely tuned genomic system in which each type of gene product cooperates via an intricate networking complex to generate the music of life. The vast array of epigenetic signals whereby genes are switched on or off ensures a steady flow of two-way communication between the genome and its wider environments.
The human as a complex, interactive and highly integrated system might not on the face of it seem a fruitful hunting ground for those who see the genes as pulling the strings of life. Nevertheless, the past year has continued to see a growing love affair between the social sciences and genomics. This is well illustrated by a recent article in Nature entitled: "The anatomy of politics -- from genes to hormone levels, biology may help to shape political behavior." The author writes that "An increasing number of studies suggest that biology can exert a significant influence on political beliefs and behaviors," reporting that "genes could exert a pull on attitudes concerning topics such as abortion, immigration, the death penalty and pacifism." The political scientist John Hibbing is quoted as saying that "...it is difficult to change someone's mind about political issues because their reactions are rooted in their physiology."
Geneticists have highlighted the suspect nature of such claims from a purely scientific perspective. But in our present context it is the way that the genetic results are reported that is most striking. Note the dualist language involved and its assumption of genetic determinism. Genes and physiology are seen as something different from "us" and "our mind," and they seem to be controlling us, so we can't even change our mind. Humans are presented as pawns of their biology, puppets dancing to the tune of their genetic masters.
What has all this to do with the "big idea" concerning human identity that the Imago Dei provides? More, it turns out, than initially meets the eye. The clash of ideas here between theology and science comes not at the level of the science itself, which, in this case, remains ambiguous and disputed, but at the level of the ideological packaging of scientific ideas. To see where the clash comes from, we first need to understand the revolutionary nature of the Imago Dei idea in its original context in the texts of Genesis.
For millennia it was uniquely the pharaoh or the king who was seen as being in the "image of a god" in the polytheistic political systems of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Adad-shum-ussur, a court astrologer and cultic official in the seventh century B.C. royal court of Nineveh, made clear that the Assyrian king Esarhaddon is the very image of Bel (Marduk), the top god of that era:
A (free) man is as the shadow of god, the slave is as the shadow of a (free) man; but the king, he is like unto the (very) image of god.
Richard Middleton provides further examples in his book, "The Liberating Image," which describes how the stratified urban society of great cities such as Babylon was structured politically, socially and economically round the king's court and the cultic practices of temple worship of the various polytheistic deities of the city. Social destinies were unchanging because rooted in powerful creation myths. Power was in the hands of the privileged few and true freedom belonged only to the king, for only he was in the image of a powerful god.
Would Hebrew thinkers and writers have been familiar with this idea? Almost certainly, yes, since Israel had significant cultural and economic contact with both Egypt and Mesopotamia over prolonged periods, not least during their periods of exile. So how would the original readers of that wonderful theological essay, Genesis chapter 1, have understood these words?:
Then God said, "Let us make adam [humankind] in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." So God created adam in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. [Genesis 1:26-27].
In its historical context, the implications were revolutionary: the kingly and priestly male roles previously allocated to the privileged few by a pantheon of gods were now being delegated instead by the one creator God to the whole of humanity, male and female. In a stroke the entire ruling and priestly structure of Mesopotamian society was delegitimized. The Imago Dei was being democratized and it was now humankind who were to be the significant players in the arena of earthly life, the mandate to rule underlying their new responsibilities. Above all, humanity was set free by the one true God to determine their own destiny, no longer under the yoke of all-powerful dictators, nor under the baleful astrological control of the moon and stars.
Yet, ever since, humans have become experts at re-enslaving themselves, refusing the responsibilities that come with free-choice and submitting instead to narratives of fate and destiny. It seems ironic that today it is not the creation myths of ancient Babylon but the ideological interpretations of biology that provide the narratives of fate, in which genes "pull" humans toward certain political views and people cannot change their minds because their convictions are "rooted in their physiology."
"It's in his or her DNA" is a new phrase becoming increasingly embedded in our language, referring to something that cannot apparently be changed. On Sept. 8, 2012, Brad Pitt was quoted by the Daily Mail as saying that "America is a country founded on guns. It's in our DNA. It's very strange but I feel better having a gun." No it's not in our DNA, Mr. Pitt, either literally or metaphorically. People have choices -- they are the prisoners neither of their genetics, nor of their physiology, nor indeed of their environments. Human beings made in the image of God are free to chart their own destiny in a way that preserves human value and dignity. On that we can leave the last word to Abraham Lincoln: "...nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows" (Aug. 17, 1858).]]>Made In the Image of God: The Theological Implications of Genomics - Part 2tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.11828922012-01-08T20:10:12-05:002012-03-09T05:12:01-05:00Dr. Denis Alexanderhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-denis-alexander/first article in this series, asking whether recent advances in genomics made any difference to the Judeo-Christian notion of humanity being made in the 'image of God'. That article focused on DNA sequencing data from our closest relatives. This article will focus on the issue of genetic determinism.
Theologians have spent many centuries mining the rich vein of the 'image of God' metaphor. Central to the idea is humanity with spiritual capabilities and responsibilities, equipped for moral decision-making and a relationally rich life in community. Historically, the idea has contributed to the conviction that each human individual has an absolute value, independent of their ethnicity, educational level, health status or income.
Do recent advances in genomics threaten or support such a view of humankind, or are they just neutral? Irrespective of one's belief in God, or not, this is of more than passing interest. Imagine the poor person wrestling for years with the great questions of life and finally deciding to become an atheist, only to then be informed that a cognitive bias derived from his particular set of genetic variants made that decision pretty much inevitable anyway. Such news might be equally unsettling for the person who had just struggled to faith following years of agnosticism. Our deepest human feelings are closely connected with the idea that we choose our own path through life.
The flourishing of genomics in the early part of the 21st century has certainly conveyed the message to many that one's destiny is written into one's genome. Whereas scientists are generally scrupulously careful not to give the impression that there is any such entity as a "gene for" some human trait, by the time the latest discovery appears in the media, such caution is often thrown to the winds. The past year has seen the trumpeting of a "gene for happiness," a "kindness gene" and a "believer gene." It is not even a question of education, but "genes are to decide" if you are a "caring person." Genetic testing websites assure us that "your genes are a road-map to better health," and we all know that road-maps are fixed. Small wonder that there is a creeping genetic fatalism around that subverts the idea of personal responsibility.
Fatalism in itself impacts on human behavior. Studies have shown that subjects exposed to the writings of authority figures doubting free-will are then more likely to cheat. Conversely, workers convinced of the reality of free-will are rated higher in the work-place than those whose beliefs tend more towards determinism.
The reality is that recent genetics research has continued to move steadily away from any notion of genetic fatalism, highlighting the sheer complexity of the genome, and providing some fascinating examples of the ways in which our choices impact upon our own genomes. There is no gene "for" any complex human trait because in fact genes encode proteins or other types of information-containing molecules, and thousands of genes collaborate together during human development in interaction with the environment to generate the unique human individual that each person represents. Those requiring an introduction for the non-specialist are referred to "The Language of Genetics."
Epigenetics adds further layers of variation and complexity. This refers to the chemical modifications of the DNA that cause genes to be switched on or off. It is such epigenetic modifications that generate the 220 specialized tissues of our bodies. Such acquired changes can even be inherited across several generations, certainly in plants and animals, and maybe in humans as well. In choosing to smoke, drink in excess, or take drugs, we also choose to modify our genomes.
So it turns out that even identical twins are not really genetically identical, developing different profiles of epigenetic modification as they go through life. This no doubt contributes to the otherwise surprising result that the age of death of identical twins, who share identical genomes, is comparable with that observed in non-identical twins, whose genomes are as different from each other as any two sibs. In one study of 184 pairs of twins in Spain, the difference in the age of death between the identical twin pairs was seven years on average, but such averages hide the fact that the age differences ranged from a couple of weeks to eighteen years. In the case of the non-identical twins, the difference in age at time of death was nine years, and the range was three to nineteen years. So there was really not that much in it.
What would happen if there was a genetic marker that identified nearly everyone in prison, marking them out as genetically distinct from half the world's population? What would that do to our ideas about genetic fatalism and convictions about moral responsibility? As it happens that marker already exists. Out of 131 countries worldwide, an average of 96 percent of the prisoners are male and, in this case, no complicated genetic studies are needed to know that the genetic marker that identifies this population is the Y chromosome. So universal is the correlation between the Y chromosome and criminality that we can safely say that no other genetic correlation will ever be found between a variant genome and criminality that surpasses this one. And yet we still hold nearly all males responsible for their criminal actions and put them in jail as soon as they're convicted. Furthermore, we note that most people who possess a Y chromosome go through life without committing a crime. So having a Y chromosome, with its unique set of genes, does not "determine" human criminality, although clearly we cannot go to the opposite extreme and say that it is completely irrelevant for patterns of human behavior.
The point in citing such examples is not to suggest that our genomes have nothing to do with our lives. They certainly do, not least in their significant contributions to our personality differences. The point rather is that the latest results in genetics provide no grounds for fatalism, instead highlighting the richness and diversity of the human population, and our own moral responsibilities, including the challenge to be good stewards of our genomes.
An argument for the existence of God this is not. But for those of us whose world-view is shaped by the conviction that we humanity are made in God's image, it is good to know that the latest genetics is consistent with such a perspective. ]]>Made In The Image Of God: The Theological Implications Of Human Genomics -- Part 1tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.8029782011-01-02T19:45:08-05:002011-05-25T18:20:30-04:00Dr. Denis Alexanderhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-denis-alexander/
The publication of the Neanderthal genome sequence in May 2010 set the pace. Not surprisingly -- given that our last common ancestor with the chimpanzee was around 5 to 6 million years ago, compared to a mere half a million years for our last common ancestor with the Neanderthal -- it turns out that we are genetically far closer to the Neanderthals than to the apes. In all, only seventy-eight changes in the genetic letters ('nucleotides') that would change the amino acid sequence of particular proteins were found in the Neanderthal DNA that were the same as the chimpanzee sequence but different in the human. Amongst other differences, 111 duplications of small DNA segments were found in the Neanderthal but not human sequence. Genetically we are closely related twigs on the great evolutionary bush of life.
But we knew that already. More surprising for many was the provocative finding that non-African humans are genetically closer to Neanderthals than African humans. In fact, the European and Asian genomes that were sequenced appear to contain one to four percent DNA of Neanderthal origin, and the gene flow that occurred appears to have been almost entirely from Neanderthal to human, rather than vice versa. How come? The most likely scenario is that there were a few instances of sexual reproduction between Neanderthals and human individuals belonging to the population that is thought to have emigrated out of Africa to populate the world sometime after seventy thousand years ago, explaining why the Neanderthal DNA sequences are not found in African genomes. The contribution of the Neanderthal genome has remained in European and Asian populations ever since.
To put this in perspective, most of our genes are very similar anyway to those found in Neanderthals and chimpanzees, and to other mammals like mice. We all share a "how-to-build-a-mammal" instruction manual, and the relatively minor genetic differences between us (minor relative to those we share in common) are the icing on the cake, as it were, that make us a human rather than a mouse, a chimp or a Neanderthal.
The year 2010 saw yet another twig appear on the hominin branch of the evolutionary bush, this time one even closer to the Neanderthals than our own. This story begins with the discovery by a Russian team of a sliver of finger bone from a remote Siberian cave in the Altai Mountains, known as the Denisova Cave. The team stored it away, thinking it was from one of the Neanderthals that frequented the cave between thirty thousand and forty-eight thousand years ago. But when DNA extracted from the bone was eventually sequenced, the results -- published just before Christmas -- revealed a population distinct from both humans and Neanderthals.
The finger appears to belong to a novel hominin population that shared a last common ancestor with Neanderthals more recently than humans, and overall is genetically closer to Neanderthals than to humans. It is too early to say whether the so-called 'Denisovans' represent a separate species and fossil data will be required to clarify that question. But what the results do suggest is that Melanesians -- the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and islands northeast of Australia -- have inherited as much as one-twentieth of their DNA from the 'Denisovans', indicating that some limited inter-breeding took place between these ancient populations. Most fascinating of all is the idea that multiple hominin lineages were coexisting in Europe and Asia, along with modern humans, as recently as twenty-thousand to forty-thousand years ago.
Do these findings have any particular theological significance? It is difficult to know why this should be the case. In the Judeo-Christian tradition humankind uniquely is made "in the image of God". The suite of capabilities that emerged during human evolution is necessary but not sufficient to do justice to this much discussed theological insight. Our particular genetic instruction manual generates large frontal lobes, advanced cognitive abilities, rationality, language, consciousness and the ability to choose between right and wrong. It is this suite that gives us the ability to pray, worship and engage in communal religious practices.
But the idea of being made "in the image of God" is not encompassed simply within a static list of such human qualities. Theologians have drawn attention to the dynamic, relational aspects of the concept. It is humanity-in-relation-to-God, together with God-given responsibilities to humans in relationship with each other, that are thought to be more central to the idea. When did such spiritual capabilities and responsibilities first come into being? It is really difficult to know, but the answer certainly seems more rooted in God's intentions and purposes for humankind than in genetic change per se. Students can spend a long time being trained in the finer points of drama, but the play only gets off the ground when the actors are finally given their lines.
It seems quite likely that more twigs will continue to appear on the hominin branch of the bush of life as genomics continues to extend its reach. Such discoveries as such do not appear to raise any new theological questions. But other 2010 discoveries did highlight two genomic insights that do have relevance for religious views of human identity. The first insight comes from further Genome Wide Association studies that continue to subvert any lingering commitments to genetic determinism, for example the idea that there are genes "for" a particular human trait. The second insight comes from the finding that we are all more genetically different from each other than we realized even a few years ago. Genetics is underlining the uniqueness of each human individual. By the end of 2011 it is estimated that more than 30,000 human genomes will have been sequenced. Watch this space. Theological reflections on these findings will be the topic for Part 2.]]>How Evolution Gets Used and Abused in the Science-Religion Debatetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7077332010-09-07T19:32:56-04:002011-05-25T17:35:19-04:00Dr. Denis Alexanderhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-denis-alexander/
This trend goes back a long way, as well illustrated by the authors in the recently published Biology and Ideology: From Descartes to Dawkins (Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers, eds, Chicago University Press, 2010). The 13 essays in this volume illustrate the many and varied ways in which biology in particular has been utilized for a wide range of political, religious, and social purposes from 1600 to the present day. The purposes may be beneficial, benign, or harmful in their outcomes, but all are "ideological" in the broadest sense of not being intrinsic to biology itself.
With the benefit of hindsight, historians more than others are in a good position to discern such uses and abuses of biological ideas. Whereas the twentieth-century abuses of genetics in eugenics and in racist ideologies are obvious and thoroughly described in the present volume, less obvious are the subtle ways in which the same biological ideas have been used during the same period for quite opposite ideological purposes in different countries, as described by Prof. Shirley Roe and Prof. Peter Hanns Reill. The supposedly "materialistic" biology that in France was utilized by the philosophes to subvert the social order in the eighteenth century was in Britain used as a key resource for natural theology, whereas in Germany it was being used politically as an analogy for the structure of nation-states.
Today the ideological uses of biology continue on as much as they ever did. In his chapter entitled "Creationism, intelligent design, and modern biology," Prof. Ronald Numbers describes how the biological theory of evolution has been invested with ideological overtones, particularly in North America, ever since Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859. For some evolution became a philosophy that threatened to undermine notions of man "made in the image of God." For others, evolution became a political threat to the social order, subverting campaigns to achieve greater rights for the oppressed.
This was particularly the case for the original President Obama who never was, the thrice-defeated Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, and campaigner for liberal reform, William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925). Early in 1922, as Numbers recounts, Bryan helped to launch a crusade aimed at driving evolution out of the churches and schools of America. But Bryan's motivation was as much political as religious. He had become alarmed by the way that the philosophy of "might is right" reputedly fueled German militaristic ambitions during the First World War. Benjamin Kidd's Science of Power (1918), a book that influenced Bryan, purported to demonstrate the historical and philosophical links between Darwinism and German militarism.
It was Bryan's campaign that helped launch the creationist movement of the early 1920s, leading in turn to the infamous Scopes Trial of 1925. The movement benefited from another leading campaigner of the same era, the Canadian Adventist George McCready Price, who agreed with Bryan that the First World War, during which Germany put "the ruthless ethics of Darwinism ... into actual practice," provided ample evidence of the threat evolution posed to human freedom.
What Numbers brings out so clearly in his chapter is the way in which the theory of evolution was socially transformed into a bogey-man for virtually anyone who had an axe to grind. Rather than simply explaining the origins of biological diversity, it became an icon of materialism, or militarism, or atheism, or socialism, or capitalism. In fact evolution has been deployed since 1859 in support of almost every "ism" that exists, many of them mutually exclusive. All kinds of ideological barnacles became attached to the theory to the extent that the actual biology was obscured in the process.
Ironically, as Prof. Alister McGrath makes clear in his chapter entitled "Evolutionary biology in recent atheist apologetics," the presentation of evolution by the "new atheists" is in fact very similar to that of the creationists and more recent proponents of Intelligent Design. Opposite poles are often more similar to each other than either side might be prepared to admit.
In the hands of Prof. Richard Dawkins, evolution becomes an ultra-Darwinian philosophy in rivalry with the idea of creation. Dawkins argues that there are at present only three possible ways of seeing the world: Darwinism, Lamarckism, or God. The last two fail to explain the world adequately; the only option is therefore Darwinism. In such claims, McGrath notes, evolution becomes exalted to a metanarrative, infused with the ideological rhetoric of atheism.
The ideological uses and abuses of science are bad for science education, because so often the science gets lost in the rhetoric. They are also bad for religion, because scientific theories are always provisional, open to refutation, and simply not up to the herculean task of refereeing between pro- or anti-religious arguments. Darwinian evolution, for example, just happens to be the inference to the best explanation for the origins of all the biological diversity on planet earth. It's a stunningly successful theory, but it's best just to let scientific theories do the job that they're good at, and not invest them with ideologies that have nothing to do with the science.
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