The Founder

 

Since the Babylonian exile, the story of Noah has become a poignant symbol for the rebirth of Judaism and the founding of a new, cosmopolitan, people. Their true home became (and still is) a portable country ­– the Torah, Noah's Ark in the shape of a book. For the rest of us, Noah is the second founder of life on Earth, a second Adam. We certainly owe the old sailor a debt of gratitude; not only for our existence, but that he was no prohibitionist and teetotaler (Genesis 9: 21).

If the story were true, our genes would be the testimony to the event. We have learned to read this testimony and map out the history of the human race since our ancestors left Africa. But it is a message that is leaving out the great deluge.

According to the story, the gods asked Noah to take on board of his craft pairs of “every clean beast by sevens” while of the “unclean” animals he was to take just one pair (Genesis 7: 2). Between these two categories, this inevitably should lead to a numerical difference not only in the rate of reproduction, but in the number of mutations. Among the clean animals there should occur seven times more mutations than among the unclean, while the unclean beasts, due to inbreeding, should be plagued by a substantially larger ratio of genetic diseases and deformities. There is an example. 12,000 years ago, the cheetah fell victim to an epidemic – perhaps a kind of cat-flu or the feline version of AIDS – that reduced the entire species to just two individuals in the Kalahari, who had lived there in separation from their species. Since then the cheetah suffers from the effects of inbreeding. But this is just the cheetah; for the rest of the world this never happened. What "Great Flood" are we talking about anyway? The rising sea level after the last Ice Age?

Or could it be this story is about something else entirely?

When we think of colonizing deep space we usually depict this exodus as something very similar to the heroic migrations of the Polynesians in the Pacific. With a difference: the Polynesian seafarers did load their outrigger vessels with seeds and a few domestic animals that didn’t cost them a bean. Although never sure that there would be anything at all beyond the horizon, they could be pretty certain that, if they found an uninhabited island, it would provide at least building materials and water, and with their cargo of livestock and seeds could be made inhabitable at virtually no costs at all. Colonizing the planets of the Alpha Centaury system in this style, on the other hand would run up enormous bills. It would require a flotilla of large spacecrafts, transporting not just the bare necessities in the hope of finding on the arrival a hospitable planet, it would also mean to carry a portable version of our entire civilization and culture. And if this venture would be a one-way mission, going boldly where even radio-waves take decades and centuries to bridge the distance, if at all, who on Earth would be willing to foot the bill for an investment of no possible returns?

There is of course a cheaper option; something a non-profit foundation might be willing to finance. Instead of sending people in large spacecrafts with costly life support systems, we send just their frozen embryos, together with seeds and the embryos of domestic animals. Such a vessel would be very much smaller, and on arrival, an on board artificial intelligence – let’s call it “mentor” – would scout the region for a suitable planet, land the craft and initiate the in vitro breeding of the cargo, later even teach the toddlers the first basics of survival. The rest they would have to find out themselves. The adults of this ark’s first generation may have forgotten mentor’s real name – “HAL 9000” – and simply call it “God.” It’s possible. Who knows! The Sumerian kings in their cuneiform genealogies insist their ancestors came down to Earth from the sky.

Nothing in their civilization suggests the degree of technology needed to travel deep space, but that does not mean they couldn’t have crawled out from an incubator and then be left to their own devices – a lack of ingenuity was not the problem: “And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard” (Genesis 9: 20). Then again, it would be written all over our gene.

There are live-forms prior to the “landing.” Our genes make us the member of a large family, every living being on Earth is related to us and 600 million years ago the ancestor of the humble cauliflower was our closest cousin. Which begs the question whether this universality of DNA and RNA here on Earth could extend to the voids of deep space? Do the creatures in the Sloan Nebula have the same genetic code as we do? If so, every landing on a foreign planet will risk the encounter with nasty bacteria, ending the mission before it begins. Or, the indigenous gene has evolved on a very different chemistry. In which case the new arrivals are safe, except for the big ugly smelliphant with foot long serrated teeth, bad breath and armor-plated scales head to tail. In other words by now, we, as the descendants of Noah, would notice a fundamental difference in the genetic makeup, between “us,” and life on Earth from before the landing. Again, there is no evidence.

And yet, when I look at my garden, at the birds chirping in the trees, at the sleek and neat appearance of most of our mammalian companions, domestic and wild, I can’t help noticing a marked improvement over the ugliness of the Jurassic. With all due respect to Koko, I prefer the human face to the prettiest of apes. Call me a species-chauvinist, but I like the way we look. Are we finding the image in the mirror pleasing because our tastes adapt to appearance, or has somebody or something been messing with our gene?

Sediments on the ocean floor indicate that there had been eight ice ages over the last 700,000 years; a veritable engine of evolution, pumping out improvements of the mammalian type in quick succession. Our appearance is part of this story. Or was there something else?

© – 2/28/2009 – by michael sympson, 1,100 words, all rights reserved