The Seed of the Woman
1. Tennyson, Sir Charles, The Listener, 8 July, 1971, p. 39, in an interview.
2. Acsadi, Gy. and J. Nemeskeri, History of Human Life Span and Mortality, Akademial Kiado, Budapest, 1970, p. 15.
3. Acsadi, Gy. and J. Nemeskeri, ibid., p. 16.
4. Ludwig Aschoff: in the editorial, "Old Age in Mind and Body," Lancet, 9 July, 1938, p. 87.
5. Selyc, Hans: quoted by Stephen E. Slocum, "Length of Life," J. Amer. Scient. Affil, 13, 1, 1961, p. 19.
6. Casarett, George W., "Radiation Slows Down Aging in Dogs," Science News Letter, 30 Aug., 1957, p. 136.
7. West, Irma, G. L. Nielson, Allen E. Gilmour and J. R. Ryan, "Natural Death at the Wheel," Amer. Med. Assoc., 205, 1968, p. 226-271.
8. Simms, H. S.: quoted in Brit. Med. J., 5 July, 1947, p. 14 from. Gerontology, 1, 1946, p. 24.
9. Simms, H. S.: quoted by Ernst LaFrance and Sid Ross, "Can We Live to be 120?", Mag. Digest, Nov., 1950, p. 46.
10. Selyc, Hans, "Is Death Inevitable?", MacLean's Mag., 15 Aug., 1959, p. 13.
11. On this, see Hayflick's findings discussed in reference #123.
12. Korenchevsky, V., "Conditions Desirable for the Rapid Progress of Gerontological Research," Ant. Med. J., 28 Sept., 1946, p. 468.
13. Haldane, J. B. S: reported in Genetics, Paleontology and Evolution, Princeton Univ. Bicentennial Conference (series 2, Conf. 3), 1946, p. 26.
14. Woodruff, L. L.: noted by Florence Moog, "The Biology of Old Age," Sci. Amer., June, 1948, p. 41.
15. Dorsey, George A., Why We Behave Like Human Beings, N.Y., Blue Ribbon Books, 1925, p. 105.
16. Pearl, Raymond, The Biology of Death: Monographs on Experimental Biology, Phila., Lippincott, 1923, 275 pp. , reviewed in Brit. Med. J., 3 Mar., 1923, p. 382.
17. Muller, H. J., "Life," Science, 121, 1955, p. 5.
18. Dobzhansky, Theodosius, "Man Consorting with Things Eternal" in Science Ponders Religion, ed. H. Shapley, N.Y., Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1960, p. 118.
19. Zahl, Paul A., "Need There Be Death?", a contribution in a report published by the New York Joint Legislative Committee on "Problems of the Aging," 1950, p. 134.
20. Zahl, Paul A., ibid., p. 135.
21. Sturgeon: Ontario Government Service Bulletin, I May, 1954.
22. Huxley, Sir Julian, "The Meaning of Death" in Essays on Popular Science, London, Penguin Books, 1938, p. 105.
23. Huxley, Sir Julian, ibid., p. 105.
24. Lancaster, Sir Edwin Ray: quoted by Alex Comfort in "The Biology of Old Age" in New Biology, 18, 1955, p. 19 [publ'd by Penguin Books].
25. Medawar, Sir Peter B., The Uniqueness of the Individual, N.Y., Basic Books, 1957, p. 57.
26. Bidder, G. P: reported under "Senescence" in Brit. Med. J., 2, 1932, p. 583.
27. Barnett, Lincoln, The World We Live In, N.Y., Time Inc., 1955, p. 150.
28. Huxley, Sir Julian, op. cit., (ref.#22), p. 104. Plants that die bearing one crop of seeds can, if kept under conditions that prevent flowering, be made to continue indefinitely in their vegetative form. Their life is extended probably without limit provided that the aging effect of seed and flower production is prevented.
29. The factor of size is dealt with subsequently, see ref. #128.
30. Went, F. W., "The Size of Man," Amer. Scientist, 56, 4, 1968, p. 400A13.
31. Comfort, Alex, "The Biology of Old Age" in New Biology, 18, 1955, p. 18 (published by Penguin Books).
32. Walker, Kenneth, Meaning and Purpose, London, Penguin, 1950, p. 63.
33. Weismann, August, Essays Upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems, tr. E. B. Poulton, S. Schonland and A. E. Shipley, Oxford, 1889, 1892, in 2 vols., Vol. 1, p. 25, 159.
34. Weismann, ibid., Vol. 1, p. 111.
35. Weismann, ibid., Vol. 1, p. 158.
36. Special Communication, Amer. Med. Assoc., 205, 1968, p. 337.
37. Camps, F., The New Scientist, 27 Feb., 1964, p. 558 f.
38. Doskaoh, E., Worldwide Abstracts of General Medicine, 5, 2, 1962.
39. Negovsky, V. A. and V. I. Soboleva, "Delaying the Process of Death," Discovery, Dec. 1964, p. 20.
40. Dr. Leo Davidovich Landau: The Man They Wouldn't Let Die, Alexander Dorozynski, N.Y., Macmillan, 1965.
41. "Death Needs Better Definition," Science J., Feb., 1969, p. 11,13, over the signature of Hadassah Gillon.
42. The problem of determining when death has occurred is particularly acute when the dying individual is a potential donor of some organ such as a kidney, to a living individual who may be seriously in need, because such tissue deteriorates very quickly in the dead and must be removed at the earliest possible moment for transplant. Early in March, 1974, it was reported that a sixty-five year old man who had been injured in a road accident, and whom two doctors had presumed dead, began breathing again in a Birmingham hospital when an attempt was made to remove his kidneys in just such an emergency [Robert Jones, "Organ Grafting Dilemmas," New Scientist, 7 March, 1974, p. 595].
43. "Human Heart Beats After Extraction," New Scientist, 28 Oct., 1965, p. 248.
44. Hiliman, Harold, "When is Death?", New Scientist, 19 Mar., 1970, p. 552.
45. Parkes, A. S.: quoted by R. C. W. Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality, N.Y., Macfadden-Bartell, 1966, p. 16.
46. G.M. Gould and W. L. Pyle in their book Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine [N.Y., Julian Press, 1966] observe concerning this phenomenon: "The hair and beard may grow after death, and even change colour. Bartholinus recalls a case of a man who had short black hair and beard at the time of internment but who, some time after death, was found to possess long and yellowish hair. Aristotle discusses post mortem growth of the hair, and Garmanus cites an instance in which the beard and hair was cut several times from the cadaver. We occasionally see evidences of this in the dissecting rooms. Caldwell mentions a body buried four years, the hair from which protruded at the points where the joint of the coffin had given way. The hair of the head measured eighteen inches, that of the beard eight inches, and that on the breast from four to six inches. Rosse of Washington mentions an instance in which after burial the hair turned from dark brown to red, and also cites a case in a Washington cemetery of a girl, twelve or thirteen years old, who when exhumed was found to have a new growth of hair all over her body. Nails sometimes grow several inches after death, and there is on record the account of an idiot who had an idiosyncrasy for long nails, and after death the nails were found to have grown to such an extent that they curled up under the palms and soles" (p. 523).
47. Ettinger, R. C. W.: in his introduction to R. F. Nelson's We Froze the First Man, N.Y., Dell, 1968, p. 8.
48. Morison, R. S., "Death: Process or Event?", and L. R. Kass, "Death as an Event: A Commentary on Robert Morison," Science, 173, 1971, p. 694-702.
49. Morison, R. S., ibid., p. 695.
50. Decerebrate cats: Sir Charles Sherrington, Man on His Nature, Cambridge, 1963, p. 149f.
51. Decerebrate birds: A. J. Carison and V. Johnson, The Machinery of the Body, Univ. Chicago Press, 1941, p. 422; see also Walter B. Cannon, The Way of an Investigator, N.Y., Hafner, 1968 reprint, p. 121.
52. Decerebrate dogs: G. H. Bell, J. N. Davidson and H. Scarborough, Textbook of Physiology and Biochemistry, London, Livingstone, 1954, p. 860.
53. Decerebrate cats: H. C. Bazett and E.G. Penfield, "A Study of the Sherrington Decerebrate Animal in the Chronic as Well as the Acute Condition," Brain, XLV, 1922, p. 218, 261.
54. Wakerlin, George E., "The Biology of Aging," editorial, J. Amer. Med. Assoc., 16 Mar. 1957, p. 950.
55. Kass, Leon, op. cit., (ref. #48), p. 698.
56. Medawar, Sir Peter B., op. cit., (ref. #25), p. 117.
57. Sauer, Erich, The Dawn of World Redemption, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1953, p. 56.
58. Scheer, Bradley T., General Physiology, N.Y., Wiley, 1953, p. 428.
59. Total life span versus birth-to-maturity ratio = six to one: see Paul A. Zahl, op. cit., (ref. #19), p. 134; and Fritz Kahn, Man in Structure and Function, N.Y., Knopf, 1960, Vol. 1, p. 57. Maturity is marked by birth of first-born.
60. Progeria: see William Reichel, Rafael Garcia-Bunuel, and Joseph Dilallo, "Progeria and Werner's Syndrome as Models for the Study of Normal Human Aging," J. Amer. Geriatrics Soc., 19, 5, 1971, p. 369-375. See also A. L. Rosenbloom and Franklin L. DeBusk, "Progeria of Hutchinson-Gilford: A Caricature of Aging," Amer. Heart J., 82, 3, 1971, p. 287 - 289; and B. Scharnan Danes, "Progeria: a Cell Culture Study on Aging," J. Clin. Invest., 50, 1971, p. 2000 - 2003. For a popular account, see S. Katz, "Old Age at Eleven," MacLean's Mag., 11 Aug., 1962, p. 12f., photograph p. 40.
61. Progeria: reported in Toronto Evening Telegram, 9 Mar., 1967, p. 9, under the heading, "MDs probe death of boy 'aged 95.'"
62. Reported in San Francisco Chronicle, l7 June, 1970, p. 4.
63. de Beer, Sir Gavin: in a book review, Sci Amer., Sept., 1962, p. 268.
64. On this see J. B. S. Haldane, "On Being the Right Size" in The World of Mathematics, ed. J. R. Newman, N.Y., Simon & Schuster, 1956, Vol. 2, p. 952f.
65. As reported in New Scientist, 25 Mar., 1976, p. 2: the species is Cryptomeria japonica..
66. A tiny organism believed to be two billion years old and still alive, has recently been reported in MD Canada, Feb. 1971, p. 144.
67. Think, Sept., 1939, p. 19.
68. Bonner, J. T., Size and Cycle: An Essay on the Structure of Biology, Princeton, 1965, p. 66.
69. Godwin, H., "Evidence for Longevity of Seeds," Nature, 120, 1968, p. 708f.
70. Juglands australis: Science J., Jan., 1969, under News, p. 16.
71. Black, Michael, "Arctic Lupines Bloom After 10,000 Years," New Scientist, 19 Oct., 1967, p. 148, 149.
72. Bacteria have been recovered from the deepest strata of salt mines, first in Europe and then in America, completely insulated by rock salt. These bacteria on being removed proved to be still viable. They are dated from the strata in which they were found as half a billion years old. See H. J. Dombrowski, Lebende Bakten en aus dem Palaozoicum (1963) for an excellent account of their discovery and characteristics. Theodosius Dobzhansky observed: "Life carries the potentiality of endless self-replication, but the realization of this potentiality is restricted by the resistance of the environment" [in Science Ponders Religion, ed. by H. Shapley, N.Y., Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1960, p. 118].
73. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Bk. I, chap. 3, §9. According to Stanley M. Burstein who has published a complete transcript of all the known works and fragments of Berossus, "Berossus was probably the ultimate source of Josephus for the underlying theory concerning the extraordinary ages of the patriarchs" [The 'Babylonnica' of Berossus, Malibu, Cal., Undena Publ., 1978, p. 29]. What Josephus has said is virtually an exact quote from Berossus whom Burstein had already noted as a very careful reporter of the materials he had at hand.
74. Lenormant, Francois, The Beginnings of History, N.Y., Scribners, 1891, p. 293.
75. Lenormant, Francois, ibid., p. 294.
76. Rawlinson, George, Historical Illustrations, p. 14, quoted by Marcus Dods, The Book of Genesis, Edinburgh, Clark, nd., p. 29, fn.2.
77. Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilization in China, Cambridge, 1954 to the present. Eight substantial volumes have been published so far. See especially, Vol. V, Pt. 3, pp. 1 - 167, "The Golden Age of Alchemy."
78. Needham, J. and Lu Gwei-Dj en, "Sex Hormones in the Middle Ages," Endeavour, XXVII, 1968, p. 131.
79. Polo, Marco, The Travels of Marco Polo, N.Y., Library Publications, n.d., p. 276.
80. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. News, Sept./Oct., 1975, p. 13.
81. Leaf, Alexander, "Every Day is a Gift When You are Over 100," Nat. Geog. Mag., Jan., 1973, p. 99.
82. Warthin, A. S., Old Age, N.Y., 1929, p. 166, 167. Dr. Clive Wood of Oxford pointed out that between 1789 and 1963 the expectancy for white American men who had reached the age of 60 remained almost stationary at fifteen years, for "The old men of the Revolution were as old as the old men of today. There were just fewer of them" ["Longevity, Catalyst of Social Revolution," New Scientist, 24 May, 1973, p. 469].
83. Pearl, Raymond, Man the Animal, Bloomington, Ind., Principia Press, 1946, p. 52.
84. Acsadi, Gy. and J. Nemeskeri, op. cit., (ref. #2), p. 69, 251, 255.
85. Soviet Census: news item, New Scientist, 22 May, 1969, p. 412.
86. Acsadi, Gy. and J. Nemeskeri, op. cit., (ref. #2), p. 22.
87. Gould, G. M. and W. L. Pyle, op. cit., (ref. #46), p. 370.
88. Prichard, James C., Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, London, Houlston and Stoneman, 1936, Vol. 1, p. 127.
89. Pearl, Raymond, op. cit., (ref. #83), p. 47.
90. Davies, David, "A Shangri-La in Ecuador," New Scientist, 1 Feb., 1973, p. 237.
91. Gould, G. M. and W. L. Pyle, op. cit., (ref. #46), p. 378.
92. Gould, G. M. and W. L. Pyle, op. cit., (ref. #46), p. 373.
93. "Inheritance of Longevity," Brit. Med. J., 4 Oct., 1952, p. 767.
94. Gould, G. M. and W. L. Pyle, op. cit., (ref. #46), p. 379.
95. Acsadi, Gy. and J. Nemeskeri, op. cit., (ref. #2), p. 251 and elsewhere.
96. Gould, G. M. and W. L. Pyle, op. cit., (ref. #46), p. 379.
97. Sebastian Kresge: feature article, "Adding Life to Years," Time, 20 Oct., 1958, p. 52f.
98. Kahn, Fritz, op. cit., (ref. #59), p. 57.
99. For Simms, see ref. #8; Selyc, ref. #10; and Huxley, ref. #22.
100. Acsadi, Gy. and J. Nemeskeri, op. cit., (ref. #2), p. 16.
101. Note: Tayler Lewis, in Lange's Commentary on Genesis, has a most interesting editorial comment of some length showing that such a confusion of terms is exceedingly unlikely [Zondervan reprint, p. 271].
102. Raske and Hensler: referred to in Commentary on the Holy Scriptures: Genesis, John Peter Lange, Grand Rapids, Zondervan reprint, p. 271.
103. Wiseman, P. J., New Discoveries in Babylonia About Genesis, London, Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1936, p. 47 ff. especially.
104. Such editing is apparent in the following:
Gen. 14:2, 8 - "Bela (which is Zoar)
14:3 - "Vale of Siddim (which is the Salt Sea)
14:7 - "En-mishpat (which is Kadesh)
14:15 - "Hobah (which is on the left hand of Damascus)
14:17 - "Valley of Shaveh (which is the King's Dale)
The italics in parenthesis are clearly editorial comment to identify a place name no longer likely to be familiar to the reader.
105. Accuracy in copying: not only did the Jewish scribes adopt exceedingly high standards in copying but pagan nations did also. J. Cerny gives a good example from an Egyptian funerary papyrus of about 1400 B.C. which bears the following colophon: "The book is completed from its beginning to its end, having been copied, revised, compared, and certified sign by sign" [Paper and Books in Ancient Egypt, 1952, p. 25, quoted by K. A. Kitchen, Ancient Orient and New Testament, London, Tyndale Press, 1966, p. 140].
106. Urquhart, John, The Bible and Modern Discovery , London, Marshall Bros., 1898, p. 158.
107. Moore, Patrick, Atlas of the Universe, N.Y., Rand McNally, 1970, p. 146.
108. Driver, S. R., Commentary on Genesis, London, Methuen, 3rd ed., 1904; George Barton, Archaeology and the Bible, Phila., Amer. Sunday School Union, 1916; Fritz Hommel, The Ancient Hebrew Traditions As Illustrated by the Monuments, London, SPCK, 1879.
109. Sayce, A. H., Higher Criticism and the Monuments, London, SPCK, 1895.
110. Sarton, George, The History of Science, Harvard, 1952, p. 120.
111. Casarett, George W., "Acceleration of Aging by Ionizing Radiation," Univ. Rochester Atomic Energy Project, U.R. # 492, N.Y., 1957; Howard J. Curtis, "Biological Mechanisms Underlying the Aging Process," Science, 141, 1963, p. 689-691; and "Effects of Radiation on Human Heredity," WHO, Geneva, 1959.
112. Hollander, Willard, "Lethal Heredity," Sci. Amer., July, 1952, p. 60.
113. Here are Hugh Miller's words: "If, during a period so vast as to be scarce expressible by figures, the creatures now human have been rising, by almost infinitesimals, from compound microscopic cells...until they have at length become the men and women whom we see around us, we must hold either the monstrous belief, that all the vitalities, whether those of monads or of mites, of fishes or of reptiles, of birds or of beasts, are individually and inherently immortal and undying, or that human souls are not so. The difference between the dying and the undying, - between the spirit of the brute that goeth downward, and the spirit of the man that goeth upward, - is not a difference infinitesimally, or even atomically small. It possesses all the breath of eternity to come, and is an infinitely great distance...Nor will it do to attempt to escape from the difficulty by alleging that God at some certain link in the chain might have converted a mortal creature into an immortal existence, by breathing into it a 'living soul'; seeing that a renunciation of any such direct interference on the part of the Deity in the work of creation forms the prominent and characteristic part of the scheme, - nay, that it constitutes the very nucleus around which the scheme has originated...If man be a dying creature, restricted in his existence to the present scene of things, what does it really matter to him, for moral purpose, whether there be a God or no?" [Footprints of the Creator, Boston, 1850, p. 38,39].
114. In his Commentary on Genesis 1-5, Luther explores the implications of Adam and Eve's potential immortality in interesting ways. On Genesis 2:17 he wrote: "Adam was created in a state of innocence...Therefore if Adam had obeyed this command, he would never have died for death came through sin. Thus the remaining trees of Paradise were all created for the purpose of helping man and maintaining his physical life sound and unimpaired.
"For us today it is amazing that there could be a physical life without death...If (Adam) had remained as he was he would have done the other things physical life demands until at last he would have been translated to the spiritual and eternal life.
"This, too, we have lost through sin, because now the present life is separated from the future life by that awful intermediate event, death. In the state of innocence that intermediate event would have been a delightful one; by it Adam would have been translated to the spiritual life or, as Christ calls it in the Gospel, to the angelic life (Matt. 22:30)."
Subsequently on the same verse he wrote: "It is as if God were saying:
'You can indeed remain in the life for which I have created you. And yet you will not be immortal in the same way as the angels. Your life is, as it were, placed in the middle: you can remain in it and afterwards be carried to an immortality that cannot be lost; contrariwise, if you do not obey, you will become a victim of death and lose your immortality.'"
In other words, Luther is saying - as Augustine had said - that there were two kinds of immortality. There was the immortality which means that the individual need not die, and the immortality which signifies that the individual cannot die. The first is contingent, contingent upon obedience: the second is absolute. The first is potential but not certain unless the requisite conditions are fulfilled: the second cannot be lost under any conditions whatever. As Luther puts it, "This (first kind of) immortality had not been made so sure for him that it was impossible for him to fall into mortality."
In commenting on Genesis 3:23, 24 Luther notes that "Adam was not created to remain forever in this physical life, but from this physical life and from the physical eating he was to pass over into spiritual life...no death intervenes on that occasion...Adam, without any intervening death would have exchanged his mortal life for an immortal one." That is to say, he would have exchanged his contingent immortality for an absolute immortality.
115. Note on Romans 5:12.
Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.
"As by one man, sin entered into the world, and death by sin": by one man, single and singular. I think this is a profoundly important phrase: not "by two people" as might have been supposed since Adam and Eve were both in collaboration. It is apparent that the seed of the man is the viaduct that carries the corruption Adam introduced into the body to all succeeding generations.
It may be remarked that non-canonical literature on the subject of man's fall is just as likely to attach the entrance of death to Eve as to Adam. Thus Sirach 25:24 reads: "From a woman sin had its beginning and because of her we all die." So also a Latin work from a group of Jewish writers on Adam, edited by Meyer (1878) and titled Vitae Adae et Evac ("Lives of Adam and Eve": see G. Kittel, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1964, Vol. II, p. 856, fn. 191), and Strabo, Bk. 1, p. 137 f., and Bk. III, p. 646. In a sense this is true; but there is an element of only half-truth about it, and therefore of half-falsehood, which Scripture studiously avoids by never attributing the entrance of death to Eve. The seed of the man and the seed of the woman play antithetical roles in the redemptive history of man. Thus physical death was introduced, it entered, it was a novelty for human kind, and it entered by man not by woman, and it is passed on from generation to generation via the male seed. The seed of the woman is not the viaduct of death, but of life.
Paul continues, "and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." The last part of this sentence has occasioned a great deal of controversy. Lange's Commentary [Grand Rapids, Zondervan reprint, 1960, Vol. X at Rom. 5:12, p. 177 - 180] gives a most useful summary of this debate. The assumption is commonly made that the word sin here means a sinful act. In Adam's case this is, of course true; his disobedience. But is this true thereafter? Do we die physically because we become active sinners, or are we active sinners because we are physically dying creatures? Or to put the matter slightly differently, do we finally return to the dust because we, individually, commit sins that have the effect of making us mortals, or do we commit sins because of the weakness of the flesh (Rom. 8:3) which "weakness of the flesh" is demonstrated by the final death of our body?
The usual view, if I read the commentaries correctly, is that the former is the truth of the matter and the intent of Paul's words. Physical death overcomes each one of us in due course because we inherit some spiritual malaise that turns us into active sinners, the penalty of which is physical death. But not a few commentators have seen the situation in reverse. We become sinners because we inherit from Adam by natural generation a defective body that becomes a source of infection of our spirit as we mature. The initial corruption of the spirit (or soul) by its union with the body has been a view very widely held from the earliest times. It was explicitly maintained by the following who are representative.
New Testament: Paul (Rom. 7:17, 18).
Patristic: Augustine (354-430).
Medieval: Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033 - 1109), Anselm of Laon (d. 1117), Hugo St. Victor (c. 1096 - 1141), Peter Lombard (c. 1095 - 1161), Stephen Langton (d. 1228).
Reformed: Ulrich Zwingli (1484 - 1531), Zacharius Ursinus (1534 - 1583),
Andreac Hyperius (1568), Benedictus Aretius (1589), Bartholomaeus
Keckerman (1611), J. H. Hottinger (1620-1667), Amandus Polanus
(1624), Francois Turretin (1632 - 1687), Johannes Wollebius (1626),
Samuel Endemann (1777).
Jewish: Standard Jewish Encyclopedia (1962) under soul.
The question of how soon this occurs, at what young age, is not at issue here. It is assumed to be in youth, for so Scripture states it (Gen. 8 :21; Jer. 22:21; 32:30 and cf. 2 Kings 24:8,9) but obviously this could be interpreted rather broadly depending upon how quickly a particular culture encourages the maturing processes. But certainly there is an age of innocence before the malaise has time to express itself. Babies die, though innocent. The possibility of dying has therefore also become the lot of those who have not yet reached the age of accountability. Meyer was one of the earlier commentators of modern times who acknowledged the force of this argument.
It might be argued that when an infant dies, it is really "killed," by disease in one form or another. But we know now that our bodies appear to be dying anyway, from the day of our birth - if not even prenatally.
So mortality replaced immortality by the action of one man and this physiological defect was then transmitted by natural procreation to all his descendants. This defect now appears to be at the root of our spiritual death which seems in the end as inevitable as physical death. Augustine said: Persona corrupit natura, natura corrumpit personam: "A person (i.e., Adam) corrupted (human) nature, (human) nature corrupts the individual." This is why the law fails to produce moral behaviour. The pure spirit with which each new body is endowed by a creative act of God is soon infected by the corruption in the body.
When God gives this spirit, what was previously only a body is constituted a person. Conscious life thereafter turns this person into a personality: but sadly, time also turns innocence into guilt, and this process is somehow initiated by a defective body. It is a form of somato-psychic influence, of which medicine is becoming increasingly aware in cases of chronic forms of poisoning due to industrial pollution of our environment, for example.
Paul longed to be rid of this "body of sin" (Rom. 7:24) and confidently asserted that physical death alone could guarantee the final perfecting of the spirit. When the perfected spirit is reintroduced into a perfected resurrection body, the whole man is at last made perfect.
Now the universality of this experience by which we all become active sinners is a clear demonstration of the universality of the root cause. That which has rendered every naturally procreated body a dying organism is shared by us all. This is the universal cause of a universally observed effect. Born mortals, we become inevitable sinners if we live long enough. If we die prematurely, we remain innocent of moral guilt but, alas, we die physiologically nevertheless.
And so the phrase "for that all have sinned" can be translated (as many claim) "on account of the fact that all have sinned." Active sinfulness then becomes the proof of the common root cause, the cause being that physical death passes upon all men by inheritance.
F. W. Farrar, in his Life and Work of St. Paul [London, Cassell, Pelter, Galpin, 1879, Vol. II, p. 215, fn.2] wrote: "There can be no doubt that epho ('for that') means in as much as. Since the argument of Paul seems simply to be that sin was universal and that the universality of death was a proof of this [emphasis his], it certainly seems advisable to understand epho in the sense of 'in accordance with the fact that.'" With this agree the majority of grammars which refer to this passage, such as Dana and Mantey [Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament, Toronto, Macmillan, 1957, p. 106], other aids to study such as Vincent [Word Studies in the New Testament, N.Y., Scribner's, 1890, Vol. III. p. 62] and Abbott Smith [Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, Edinburgh, Clark, 1964, p. 166], Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (under various word headings, especially Vol. I, p. 427, fn. 14), and Expositors Greek Testament [ed. W. R. Nicoll, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans reprint, 1976, Vol. II, p. 627 f.].
In summary, it seems that we are justified in understanding Paul's words to mean that Adam, endowed with immortality by the Creator, forfeited that immortality by his sin and entailed to all his descendants the poisoned constitution which he had acquired, the proof of this entailment being the universality of human wickedness.
We can interpret these words in Romans 5:12 to mean either that all are mortal and dying, and as a consequence became sinners; or that all have an inherently sinful nature by spiritual entailment from Adam and that this condemns the body of every individual to physical death. The grammar of the sentence does not speak unequivocally and we have to decide which is cause and which is effect. About the only telling factor, in helping us to make the decision, is the knowledge that an innocent baby may die as easily as a guilty old man or woman. Physical death can overtake those who have as yet committed no sins, which seems to demonstrate that it is at work before any display of a disobedient spirit.
116. It is appointed unto men once to die (Heb. 9:27). This being so, we must assume that both Enoch and Elijah have yet to keep this appointment. There are some commentators who believe that the two witnesses referred to in Revelation 11:3 f. are none other than Enoch and Elijah who, after giving their testimony for an unspecified length of time, will be overcome and slain. Their dead bodies will lie in the street for three and a half days (vv. 8 and 9), a figure which has particular significance in that there is a widespread belief that the lapse of three days is required to certify that the deceased really is dead. The two witnesses are then raised from the dead and both ascend into heaven (vv. 11 and 12). If this surmise as to their identity is correct, then man's appointment with death has been truly universal, even with respect to the Lord Jesus Christ.
117. With reference to Hebrews 12:2, in his Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, [Edinburgh, T. &. T. Clark, 4th ed.], J. H. Thayer under the Greek anti gives the following meanings: (1) it properly seems to have signified over, against, opposite to, before, in a local sense. Hence (2) indicating exchange, succession, for, instead of (something). Dana and Mantey [op. cit., p. 100] say in this connection: There is conclusive proof now that the dominant meaning for anti in the first century was instead of. Professor Whitesall (Chicago) made a study of anti in the Septuagint and found thirty-eight passages where it is rightly translated instead of in the Revised Version. Since anti is used in two atonement passages in the New Testament, such a translation needs careful consideration. Notice the following: Genesis 22:13, "and offered him up for a burnt offering instead of (anti) his son"; Genesis 44:33, "Let thy servant, I pray thee, abide instead of (anti) the lad a bondsman to my lord"; Numbers 3:12, "I have the Levites from among the children of Israel instead of (anti) all the firstborn." These three sentences unmistakably deal with substitution. This translation applies especially to the following: Matthew 2:22; Luke 11:11; 1 Corinthians 11:5; and Hebrews 12:2, "Jesus...who instead of (anti) the joy that was set before him endured the cross." The New Testament: An Expanded Translation by Kenneth S. Wuest has also adopted this rendering [Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1959].
An excellent illustration of the use of the Greek word anti with the meaning of "instead of" but translated by the English word for will be found in the King James Version at Isaiah 61:3 which reads, "To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes...the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness." The Septuagint Greek version has here translated literally this as: "Glory instead of ashes...the garment of glory instead of a spirit of heaviness." Bagster's edition of the Septuagint so translates the first phrase but then adopts the English word for in the second, presumably for the sake of avoiding reiteration.
In the Hebrew of Isaiah 61:3 the words "glory for ashes" are represented by the Hebrew word tachath. It is a pity that in The New Testament in Hebrew and English, published by the Trinitarian Bible Society and chiefly the work of Louis Ginsberg I believe, the translator was influenced and misled, I regret to say, by the English versions. Instead of being guided by the Septuagint usage where the Hebrew tachath meaning "instead of" is replaced in Greek by anti, Ginsberg replaced the Greek anti in Hebrews 12:2 by a Hebrew word ba'abor, which means "because of" or "on account of."
Actually, in the Hebrew original of Isaiah 61:3 tachath occurs three times. In each case Rotherham has rendered it "instead of," as is proper.
The Greek word anti is frequently used in the Septuagint with this meaning. See for example, Genesis 2:21; 4:25; 9:6: 22:13; 29:27; 30:2; 36:33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39; 44:33; 47:17; etc. This is not to say that the Hebrew word and its Greek equivalent anti never have the sense of "because of," but only that the meaning "instead of" where ever it is found in the Hebrew regularly requires the form tachath, which the Septuagint has then replaced by anti. A particularly good illustration of how the English word for could be misinterpreted, is to be seen in Genesis 47:17 where the King James Version made the meaning explicit by inserting the words "in exchange for" in its first occurrence. The verse therefore reads as follows:
"And they brought their cattle unto Joseph: and Joseph gave them bread in exchange for their horses, and for the flocks and for the cattle of the herds and for the asses: and he fed them with bread for all their cattle for that year."
If the King James Version had not inserted the words "in exchange for," the transaction could have been interpreted to mean that Joseph supplied feed for the animals. This is not the intention of the exchange: it was the owners, not the animals, who were supplied with food. They traded their cattle for bread. Verse 18 makes this clear, for although they managed to save their lives, they lost all their possessions in so doing. All they had left to barter for bread was their land and themselves as slaves (v. 19). And in the end, these too became Pharaoh's possessions (v. 23).
It therefore seems entirely appropriate to translate anti in Hebrews 12:2 by the words "instead of." To render it any other way requires an unnatural and unlikely exegesis. Can one really suppose that the Lord faced the eternity of that ordeal of separation from the Father in a spirit of joyful anticipation because of the prospect at the end of it, when such a prospect was just as certain whether He subjected Himself to such a frightful ordeal or not? Would He not have been joyfully received into glory even if He had not suffered the penalty on the cross?
118. Coon, Carleton, S., The Story of Man, N.Y., Knopf, 1962, p. 67.
119. Skutch, Alexander, "The Parental Devotion of Birds," Sci Mon., April, 1946, p. 369.
120. Hirst, J. Crowther, Is Nature Cruel?, London, James Clark & Co., 1899. This work is a most valuable assessment of the amount of pain actually inflicted on their victims by predators. It is based on studies of some 60 individuals mauled severely by wild animals. Almost without exception they experienced no pain at the time. Interestingly, the same has now been reported for those attacked by sharks. A good summary of Hirst's findings (which may be more accessible to most readers than his book) will be found in the British Spectator, 3 June, 1899, p. 782, 783.
121. Plankton: Fred Bodsworth, The Natural History of Canada: the Pacific Coast, Toronto, McClelland, 1970, p. 97.
122. There is some evidence now that the sperm which do not actually fertilize the ovum nevertheless contribute by their disintegration to the total environment in which the fertilized ovum will survive and develop in its earliest stages by forming some essential part of its nourishment [B. Baccetti and B. A. Afzelius, The Biology of the Sperm Cell, Monographs in Developmental Biology, #10, Basel, Karger, 1976, p. 78].
123. In recent years the concept of the inherent immortality of excised tissue in vitro has been challenged by the findings of Leonard Hayflick who reported that cells derived from human foetal lung tissue cultured under rigidly controlled conditions would survive only 50 + 10 doublings [Exper. Cell Res., 25, 1961, p. 585]. These findings were reported in great detail and were confirmed by others later. (See also L. Hayflick, "The Limited in Vitro Lifetime of Human Diploid Cell Strains," Exper. Cell Res., 37, 1965, p. 614-636.)
In 1974 Hayflick contributed a paper under the title "Cytogerontology" in Theoretical Aspects of Aging in which he again summed up his findings to that date. In this same volume S. Gelfant and C. L. Grove wrote, with reference to Hayflick's findings: "These studies originally reported by Hayflick and Moorehead in 1961 showed that normal animal cells cannot be maintained in vitro indefinitely, but rather have a limited life span. The life span is expressed in the proliferative capacity of the cells in culture and it is also directly related to the age of the donor from which the cultured cells were taken. The maximum life span of human diploid cells in vitro is about ten months. This life span represents approximately 50 cell population doublings, and it applies to cells taken from the youngest possible tissue, that is, from foetal tissue. By comparison, shorter life spans and progressively fewer cell population doublings are observed in cultures originating from adult and old human tissue." [Theoretical Aspects of Aging, ed. M. Rockstein, N.Y., Academic Press. 1974, p. 107, 108].
David E. Harrison, on the basis of Hayflick's reported results, confidently asserted that "his work refuted the fifty-year-old dogma that normal cells could be immortal in tissue culture" [Letter to the Editor, Science, 192, 1976, p. 614 under a heading "Hayflick's Achievements"]. Harrison clearly had in mind such experiments as those conducted by Alexis Carrel L., J. [Exp. Med., 15, 1912, p. 516] and A. H. Ebeling [ibid., 17, 1913, p. 273] in which chicken tissue cells were maintained for years until the experiment was terminated by failure of the equipment.
It is important to note that Hayflick's experiments involved normal diploid cells. Under certain conditions of cell culture abnormal (heteroploid) cells may suddenly appear for some reason, and these cells are capable of maintaining their viability indefinitely.
Hayflick is careful to note in his paper "Cytogerontology" that "the in vitro end point measured by us as loss of capacity for division is simply a very convenient and reproducible system, but may have little to do with the actual cause of in vivo aging" [in Theoretical Aspects of Aging, p. 94].
It should also be noted that Hayflick himself, in 1968. had reported:
"Restudy of the experiments in culturing mouse cells has brought to light a highly interesting fact. It has been found that when normal cells from a laboratory mouse are cultured in a glass vessel, they frequently undergo a spontaneous transformation that enables them to divide and multiply indefinitely. This type of transformation takes place regularly in cultures of the fibroblasts (i.e. cells of connective tissue) of man and other animals. These transformed cell populations have several abnormal properties but they are truly immortal: many of the mouse derived cultures have survived for decades" ["Human Cells and Aging," Sci. Amer., Mar., 1968, p. 32].
There are therefore at least two possible explanations for Alexis Carrel's findings and for the findings of a number of others since: the culture medium may have contributed something to the extended survival of the cells which was lacking in Hayflick's experiments, or the cells themselves may have spontaneously transformed to an abnormal condition. It was for this reason that Hayflick later underscored that his cells were normal. He specifically states that they are not the same as the HeLa cells from cervical tissue which George O. Gey of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine had started with in 1952 and which were still growing and multiplying in glass cultures in 1968, and may even yet be flourishing. These exceptional cells did not have the usual 46 chromosomes of a normal human cell but anywhere from 50 to 350 per cell. They were cells that sometimes behaved like cancer cells and would form tumors when implanted in live animal tissue.
Rona Cherry and Lawrence Cherry, under the heading "Uncovering the Secrets of a Longer Life," noted that while cells from fetuses died around the fiftieth division, cells from young adults divided about fifty times before dying, and those from mature adults only about twenty times [The New York Times Magazine, 12 May, 1974]. This circumstance seems a clear validation of Hayflick's findings that cells so cultured in vitro do have a limited life span.
Accordingly, Hayflick considers that normal animal cells are programmed with a limited life. This may be true of animals by divine design, to prevent over-population. It may be true of human beings now because of the penalty imposed on man for his sin. It need not have been true of Adam as created.
Paul T. Libassi notes that if Hayflick's experiments reflect aging in the whole organism, "man's biological clock is wound for about 110 - 115 years" [The Sciences, New York Academy of Sciences, 14, (9), 1974, p. 7]. This seems remarkably close to a statement made in Genesis 6:3 that after the Flood man's life span should not be allowed to exceed 120 years. To take the words to mean that God would grant the old world only 120 years of grace before the Flood would destroy it, is - in Kalisch's view - "utterly at variance with the context." Kalisch has a long note on this passage that pretty well covers (and invites rejection of) all the then current alternative interpretations [Historical and Critical Commentary on the Old Testament: Genesis, M. M. Kalisch, London, Longmans, 1858, p. 175ff.].
August Weismann, with extraordinary foresight, addressed the same question of whether there is really a limit placed upon cell multiplication many years ago when he wrote: "The hypothesis upon the origin and necessity of death leads me to believe that the organism did not finally cease to renew the worn-out cell-material because the nature of the cells did not permit them to multiply indefinitely, but because the power of multiplying indefinitely was lost when it ceased to be of use" [op. cit, ref. #33, Vol. 1, p. 25]. Unicellular forms seem to have no such limitations imposed upon them, so that the base of the food chain is virtually guaranteed so long as conditions that will support life are maintained.
One criticism of Hayflick's experiment may have to do with the nature of the culture medium. In a special report under the title "Cellular Theorics of Senescence" [Science, 186,1975, p. 1105, 1106], Jean L. Marx noted that "Lester Packer of the University of California, Berkeley, and James R. Smith of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Martinez, California, added vitamin E to cultured Wl-38 cells. These cells which they obtained from Hayflick are the same human embryonic cells that normally have an in vitro life span encompassing only about 50 divisions. But in the presence of vitamin E, an antioxidant that can interfere with reactions mediated by free radicals, the cells continued to divide and to have youthful characters for about 120 population doublings: after that they, too, became senescent and died out. Packer and Smith estimate that the concentration of the vitamin in the enriched culture medium is approximately the same as that in serum in vivo. Packer said that these results do not necessarily conflict with Hayflick's hypothesis that the cells have a built-in 'biological clock' that determines the number of population doublings. He thinks that they may have such a programmed potential but that it is not always attained. Addition of antioxidants to the (cell) environment may allow the cells to reach their full potential for dividing and thus achieving an apparently lengthened life span."
Here, then, we have the same cells treated with a culture medium that more nearly approaches the medium in which cells would be bathed in a healthy body with a proper diet, living not for 50 doublings but for 120. If modern man has a life potential of, say 70 years, the new potential for cell population doublings should ideally give him a theoretical life span of approximately 170 years - which comes close to the Vilcabamba, Azerbaijan, etc. people. Moreover, it should be remembered that these cells are taken from human tissue of man as he now is, not as he once was in pre-Flood time - and certainly not as he was before he fell.
Indeed, it now appears that the so-called "Hayflick limit" may, in a sense, be an artifact, that is to say, "the inevitable consequence of normal culturing procedures." It should in fact be quite possible to produce "an immortal steady state culture." Such a population "might be propagated indefinitely." [See R. Holliday, et al., "Testing the Commitment Theory of Cellular Aging," Science, 198, 1977, p. 366f.]
Even more recently, E. Bell and co-workers have questioned whether the Hayflick phenomenon is a sign of aging or whether it is not rather evidence of cell differentiation. They observe: "The notion that diploid cells age in vitro is based on the observation that they undergo only a limited number of population doublings...In this article we examine these assumptions and provide evidence for an alternative interpretation - namely, that cessation of proliferation of diploid cells...represents a step of differentiation and not one of senescence.
Hayflick's technique of subculturing is seen to be an "upsetting" factor in cell culture which "forces" the cells to "exchange immortality for specialization." They conclude that "cells of organisms need not be programmed intrinsically to die." ["Loss of Division Potential in Vitro: Aging or Differentiation?", Science, 202,1979, p. 1158 - 1163].
124. Gershon, Drs. Harriet and David, Technion-Israel Inst. of Technology, Dept. Biol., Haifa: "Inactive Enzyme Molecules in Aging Mice: Liver Aldolase," Proc. of Nat. Acad. Sci., 70, 1973, p. 909. Dr. Clive Wood of Oxford has suggested that the appearance of "errors" in cell reproduction is under direct genetic control. "The cell carries its own aging program which ultimately results in programmed death" ["Longevity - Catalyst of Social Revolution," New Scientist, 24 May, 1973, p. 470]. The word "error" must, therefore, be used in a rather special sense.
125. Many years ago Sir William Dawson remarked upon this both for plants and animals. From a study of post-Pliocene mollusks and other fossils he concluded that "new species tend rapidly to vary to the utmost extent of their possible limits and then to remain stationary for an indefinite time." [The Story of the Earth and Man, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1903, p. 360]. It has been found true for birds, according to Ernst Mayr [Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, Phila., Wistar Inst. Symposium Monograph, No. 5, 1967, p. 47]. Charles Brues reports the same for insects ["Contributions of Entomology to Theoretical Biology," Sci. Mon., Feb., 1947, p. 130]. Adolph Schultz has confirmed it for primate populations [The Origin and Evolution of Man, Cold Springs Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology, 15,1950, p. 50]. And it has been remarked upon for man by Ralph Linton [The Study of Man, N.Y., Appleton-Century, 1936, p. 26ff.]; LeGros Clark ["Bone of Contention," Huxley Memorial Lecture, J. Anthrop. Inst., 88, 2, 1958, p. 136-138]; and Ralph Goldschmidt ["Evolution as Viewed by One Geneticist," Amer. Scientist, 40, 1952, p. 97]. This built-in variability is an advantage to man, for it allows him to breed lines of domestic animals selectively to suit his own special needs.
126. Muller, H. J., "Life," Science, 121, 1955, p. 8.
127. Edney, E. B. and R. W. Gill, "Evolution of Senescence and Specific Longevity," Nature, 220, 1968, p. 282.
128. Size: see an excellent discussion of this point by J. B. S. Haldane, "On Being the Right Size" in The World of Mathematics, ed. J. R. Newman, N.Y., Simon and Schuster, 1956, Vol. II, p. 952ff. In this connection with man, see a valuable paper by F. W. Went, "The Size of Man," Amer. Scientist, 56, 4, 1968, p. 400 - 413. See also T. McMahon, "Size and Shape in Biology," Science, 179, 1973, p. 1201ff. I have a copy of a diary kept by a Parson for forty years in the latter half of the eighteenth century. He tells how he went to see, in Norwich (England), a giant pig which was nine feet long and four feet high! He observes as a by-the-bye that it had to be supported on its legs and when it fell over was unable to raise itself [Woodforde, James, Diary of a Country Parson, ed. John Beresford, Oxford, 1926, in 5 vols., Vol. 1, p. 245].
129. Good, Ronald, in a review of a book by Lee R. Dice, Natural Communities, [Ann Arbor, 1952], in Nature, 11 July, 1953, p. 46. A very refreshing volume.
130. In 1967 The National Academy of Sciences sponsored a special congress to deal with the problem of the cause of the extinction of a great number of species in Pleistocene times. Some sixty-two pages of animals that were extinct are listed, some of these pages covering as many as forty different species, and the total involving at least two hundred genera. The conclusion of the Congress as a whole was that "this global extinction pattern" was the result of over-kill by early man. Other possible causes, such as climatic change, are not considered to be of primary importance. It was concluded, however, that man's over-kill of many species of interest to himself had the effect of depriving other species of their natural source of food so that they, too, suffered extinction indirectly. It appears that man has always been the great disturber indeed and still is. As late as 1627 he killed probably the last of the European aurochs. During the last 2000 years about 200 species of mammals and birds have become extinct, 70 of them within the last 50 years - and the rate is increasing. About 350 species of vertebrates, nearly a third of them mammals, are currently endangered [The Living World of Animals London, Reader's Digest Assoc., 1970, p. 370; Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search For a Cause, ed. Paul S. Martin and H. E. Wright, New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, Vol. VI of the Proc. of the VII Congress of the International Assoc. for Quaternary Research, 433 pp; also Lynn White Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science, 155, 1967, p. 1203 - 1207].
131. Jones, F. Wood, Trends of Life, London, Arnold, 1953, p. 18.
132. du Nouy, Comte, Human Destiny, N.Y., Longmans Green, 1947, p. 61.
133. An illustration is the peripheral circulation which performs some very important functions in the regulation of man's body temperature and thus his viability. This peripheral circulation is found to be strikingly different in some of the most commonly used experimental animals, including those believed to be nearest to man in their biological make-up [R. H. Fox and O. G. Edholm, "Peripheral Circulation in Man," Brit. Med. Bull., 19, 1963, p. 112]. J. D. Hardy remarks particularly upon the differences between man and some species of monkey in the matter of body temperature regulation. In fact he concludes one of his reports by saying: "In summary, although the monkey was selected originally for this type of experimentation because it was hoped that its physiology in respect to temperature regulation might be nearer to man than that of the domestic cat or dog, it would seem that the monkey does not simulate man in its method of regulating body temperature" ["Control of Heat Loss and Heat Production in Physiological Temperature Regulation," Harvey Lecture Series, XLIX, N.Y., Academic Press, 1953A, p. 242-270]. See also the author's "Is Man An Animal?" in Evolution or Creation, Vol. 1, Doorway Papers Series, Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1976, p. 208-320, which deals at some length with these questions.
134. Sherrington, Sir Charles, Man on His Nature, Cambridge, 1963, p. 33, 34.
135. The nations of antiquity often have traditions that seem to be reflections of the two Trees in the Garden of Eden, though the role of the two trees is sometimes reversed. There was in the old world in classical times a very widespread association in certain festivals between the drinking of an alcoholic beverage (which might be seen as a recollection of the forbidden fruit) and the acquisition of immortality (which would seem to be related rather to the Tree of Life). The ancient gods of Greece and Rome drank fermented wine (nectar) or ate a food associated with such wine (ambrosia) to preserve their immortality.
Ambrosia was commonly described as the "food of the gods," and nectar as the "drink of the gods." There is no question that both were related and sometimes the terms were used interchangeably, or reversed in meaning. The ancient Greek Poetess, Sappho (seventh century B.C.) and Anaxandridas (d. 520 B.C.) both say that ambrosia was a drink. Homer refers to it however as like an ointment or an oil for anointing the bodies of the dead to preserve them from corruption, whereas he describes nectar as resembling red wine and states that its continued use brings immortality [Iliad, XIV, 170; and XIX, 38].
The word ambrosia is held by some authorities to be of Greek origin, composed of a (not) and brotos (mortal), i.e., not mortal, immortal. Liddell and Scott suggest an etymological connection with the Latin root MORT-.
Homer also refers to ambrosia as being an unguent for the treating of wounds, an observation again reflected in the widespread use of fermented wine in the same connection. This practice is observed in Luke 10:34, where the good Samaritan treated the severely wounded man that he found beside the road on his way to Jericho by "pouring oil and wine" into his wounds.
Ambrosia was a central element in several Festivals observed in Greece (and elsewhere) in connection with Dionysus, "the god of peasants." It was a time of celebration for the grape harvest and, according to Johannes Tzetzes (c. 1120-1183) a Greek author who wrote commentaries on Homer and Hesiod, it was held when the must of the newly harvested grapes had fermented. Other non-Hellenic peoples adopted these festivals but turned them into orgies which the more sober Greeks felt were "scandalous."
Hindu mythology has a drink termed Amrita, believed to be derived from Sanskrit a- (not) and a root word related to the Latin mort-, and the Greek brot-. The gods of the Scandinavian pantheon preserved their perpetual youth by eating apples guarded by one named Idun. It is tempting to see this guardian figure as a corruption of the word Eden!
Clearly, there has been preserved among the nations a certain connection between alcohol and immortality, a reversal of the biblical connection obviously, and perhaps an illustration of just the kind of reversal that mythology experienced when it made the serpent the symbol of health.
136. Wasson, Gordon R., "Fly Agaric (Amenita muscaria) and Man," in Ethnopharmacological Search for Psycho-Active Drugs, ed. Daniel H. Efron, published U.S. Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare, Public Health Services Pub., No. 1465, 1967, p. 413.
137. Horsley, Sir Victor, Alcohol and the Human Body, London, Macmillan, 1908, p. 54.
138. Carlson, H. J. and V. Johnson, op. cit., (ref. #51), p. 341.
139. Watson, George, Nutrition and Your Mind, N.Y., Harper and Row, 1972, p. 104.
140. Seixas, Frank A., "Medical Consequences of Alcoholism," Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, 252, 1975, p. 5.
141. Williams, Kenneth, "Medical Consequences of Alcoholism," Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, 252, 1975, p. 296.
142. Hellman, Robert S., "Medical Consequences of Alcoholism," Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, 252, 1975, p. 297.
143. Hellman, Robert S., ibid., p. 304.
144. Lieber, Charles S., "The Metabolism of Alcohol," Sci. Amer., Mar., 1976, p. 25.
145. Dimitrijevic, D. T., "Alcoholism of The Parents in the Pathogenesis of Neuroses in Children," Med. Arch., Sarajevo, 12, 1, 1958, p. 81-85.
146. Ruch, T. C. and J. F. Fulton, Medical Physiology and Biophysics, Phila., Saunders, 1960, p. 809.
147. Everett, Glenn, "Alcoholism: A Matter of Genetics?", a brief note in Christianity Today, 16 Feb., 1973, p. 53.
148. Aamark, C., "A Study in Alcoholism: Clinical, Social, Psychiatric and Genetic Investigation," J. Acta Psychiat., Supplem. 70, Copenhagen, 1951, 283 pp.
149. Kaij, L., Alcoholism in Twins: Studies on the Aetiology and Sequels of Abuse of Alcohol, Stockholm, Imqirst and Wiksell, 1960, 144 pp.
150. Doepfmer, R. and H. J. Hinckers, "On the Question of Germ Cell Damage in Acute Alcohol Intoxication," Z. Haut-U., Geschlechstkr, 39, 1965, p. 94 - 107.
151. Lemere, F., et al., "Heredity as an Etiologic Factor in Chronic Alcoholism," Northwest Med., Seattle, Wash., 42, 1943, p. 110-111.
152. Popham, Robert E., "A Critique of the Genetotrophic Theory of the Etiology of Alcoholism," Quart. J. of Studies on Alcohol, 14, 1953, p. 228-237.
153. Singh, J. A. L. and R. M. Zingg, Wolf Children and Feral Man, N.Y., Archon Books, Harper and Row, 1966, p. 294.
154. Protti, Giocondo, "The Luminous Woman: The Mystery of Anna Monaro," Ill. Lon. News, 19 May, 1934, p. 780.
155. It has been found that vitamins (especially A, C and thiasnine), antibodies, products of metabolism, the sulfonamide compounds and other drugs cross the placental membranes. It has also been found that penicillin and streptomycin administered to the mother appear rapidly in human foetal blood. It has been reported that hormones, narcotics and chemotherapeutic agents are transmitted across the placental barrier.
In a brief note in the New Scientist (8 Dec., 1977, p. 632) it was recently reported: The US Food and Drug Administration wants to have alcoholic drinks labeled to warn pregnant women that excessive alcohol consumption could harm their babies. According to one US federal organization, The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, something like 1500 babies born in the US each year may be mentally or physically damaged because their mothers drank too much alcohol when they were pregnant. Dr. Donald Kennedy, the FDA Commissioner, says that two glasses of wine or one and a half (imperial) pints of beer a day is an excessive alcohol intake.
Another recent report in New Scientist (11 Jan., 1979, p. 76) indicates that the strictly poisonous nature of alcohol in human tissue is being increasingly recognized. Under the somewhat undignified heading "Mother's ruin is baby's downfall," it is noted that evidence has now clearly indicated the often severely detrimental effect on the unborn and newly born of the mother's alcohol intake. The number of pregnant mothers studied is very substantial and the evidence confirms experiments with animals that there is a marked foetal effect of alcohol poisoning via the mother. The effect of alcohol poisoning appears to be direct and not indirect.
At least 20 different patterns of drinking can lead to some form of congenital damage. But it is not yet clear precisely how alcohol disrupts embryonic development, nor whether it is a poison in its own right or disrupts the flow of nutrient to the embryo. Whether by direct or indirect action, its effects on the embryo are "strikingly toxic."
156. Konowalchuk, J. and J. I. Speirs reported their findings in the Journal of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 32, 1977, p. 757. Polio, herpes simplex, echo, and coxsackie viruses were all suppressed or inhibited. Polio virus infectivity was reduced by a factor of 1000 when incubated at 40C at pH7 for 24 hours with grape juice. Wines were less effective.
The authors believe that the amount of inhibition exercised by the juices is related to the concentration of tannin-like phenolic compounds present. Inhibitory activity is confined to the extract from the skin of the grape rather than the pulp. The mechanism of inhibition probably depends on the phenolics' ability to bind especially to virus protein, upon which the ability to infect depends.
157. Richard J. Harrison and William Montagna in their book Man remarked upon the necessity of death and the potential hazard it would be to life as a whole if the majority of creatures were not "programmed" to die [N.Y., Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969, p. 354f]:
"One can conceive that under ideal circumstances tissues could remain unchanged and animals live forever. This 'foreverness' seems to be man's goal in studying the aging processes. Had this goal been achieved in the past, the numbers of each species would, eons ago, have exceeded the limits of their natural ecological niches. The total inhabitable surface of the earth and the oceans, lakes, and streams would have long ago been overpopulated, and the competition for survival would have been magnified to such an extent that the destruction of life might have resulted...
"It is singularly true of animals with a circumscribed reproductive function that when this function ceases the individual dies, as if nature had ordained that organisms that are no longer useful in genetic succession are ipso facto useless and must be eliminated. Some justification can be found for such belief when one analyzes the situation in all vertebrates except man [emphasis mine]. The perpetuation of each species, after all, can only be assured by reproductively vigorous animals. Hence the elimination of those no longer able to reproduce seems to establish a natural order of things."
All this is true provided that the only purpose in the system is that each species shall survive. The question of what a species is to survive for is unasked. If individual worth has some significance, then the mere serving of a reproductive function in the life of the species is not enough to determine how long an individual organism is to survive. To die off as soon as reproductive capacity is ended, does indeed suggest that life was allocated only for this purpose. But man may live long after he is no longer reproductive. His life therefore must serve some further objective.
Animals would, if given unlimited longevity, soon swamp every available nook and cranny of the globe. But man was never originally planned to come to an end by dying but by being "graduated" to another sphere of living without passing through death. In such an order of life, the earth would never have been "knee deep in human bodies." This signifies that he is something more than just a reproductive machine. But translation of animals below man does not seem to have been part of the plan, and death for them must therefore have been programmed. Yet there is still no hard evidence that life per se has to be terminated in death as a natural process of wearing out by the exhaustion of its vital resources. It is simply that the longer an animal lives the greater are its chances of being killed. All life had to be constituted with the possibility either of dying or of being translated, otherwise there is no safety valve against overpopulation.
158. Maatman, Russell W. (Dept. Chemistry, Dordt College, Sioux Centre, Iowa), "Inerrancy, Inspiration and Evolution: the Position of Russell W. Maatman," J. Amer. Sci Affil, 24, 2, 1972, p. 88.
159. Blum, Harold, Time's Arrow and Evolution, NJ., Princeton, 1951, p. 76.
160. Sciama D W S quoted by R. E. D. Clark from Sciama's The Unity of the Universe (1959) in The Christian Stake in Science, Exeter, Paternoster Press, 1967, p. 113.
161. Wheeler, John A., "Our Universe: the Known and the Unknown," Amer. Scientist, Spring, 1968, p. 18.
162. Huxley, Sir Julian, quoted by E. L. Mascall, The Importance of Being Human, N.Y., Columbia Univ. Press, 1958, p. 6.
163. Huxley, Sir Julian, ibid., p. 7.
164. Simpson, C. C., "Some Cosmic Aspects of Evolution" in Evolution and Hominuation, ed. Gottfried Kurth, Stuttgart, Fischer, 2nd ed., 1968, p. 2.
165. Bennant, Gordon, "Human Sexual Development," Science, 180, 1973, p. 588.
166. Price, Dorothy, quoted by Graham Chedd, "Struggling into Manhood," New Scientist, 5 June, 1969, p. 524. As Chedd notes, it is now believed that maleness is dependent not merely upon the presence of the Y chromosome but, at two critical points, upon two masculinizing substances, one as yet unidentified and the other testosterone or something very like it. It is virtually certain that these two substances appear only in the presence of the Y chromosome but apparently they may not be manufactured by the developing organism at the appropriate time and when this happens the fetus becomes feminized instead.
Ursula Mittwoch, an outstanding authority in this area in Great Britain, observed: "It is now accepted that the embryonic testis plays a major role in mammalian sexual development. If testes are present in the young embryo, a male phenotype will develop, whereas if the embryonic testes are removed the phenotype will resemble that of a female whatever the chromosomal sex of the embryo" [emphasis mine: "Do Genes Determine Sex?", Nature, 1 Feb., 1969, p. 446]. From which we conclude that not only does the human embryo have the capability of developing into either a male or a female regardless of the presence of the X or Y sex chromosomes but the genetic male may rather easily emerge as a female if certain irregularities in sequential development occur.
The same author in another paper on the subject underscores the now apparent indeterminacy of the X and Y chromosome by saying, "Indeed, the assumption of sex-determining genes is beset with difficulties. Furthermore, the facts of embryology suggest an inherent bisexuality" ["Sex Differentiation in Mammals," Nature, 6 May, 1967, p 554]. Mittwoch quotes Korens in Berlin as having stated that there can be no question of the segregation of genes for sex differences during gamete formation, but that on the contrary the gametes transmit the hermaphrodite condition on which the characteristics of one or the other sex are imprinted during subsequent development. It is because the potentialities for both sexes are present in both male and female determining germ cells, that Korens postulated the existence of some additional sex determinants ["Do Genes Determine Sex?", Nature, 1 Feb., 1969, p. 446].
This is a point which has been emphasized also by A. D. Jost who says: "The concept has been progressively developed that in the absence of any sex gland the body is fundamentally neutral sex, and that maleness or femaleness is imposed by male and female hormones produced by the sex glands....As early as 1913, E. Steinach was convinced that the early embryo was neither unisexual nor bisexual but asexual or indifferent until sex is imposed by the sex glands." And later he adds, "I have come to the conclusion that the simplest explanation of gonadal differentiation would accept that some mechanism - perhaps the production of a special local hormone, correlated with the presence of the Y chromosome in the male [which Jost elsewhere terms an 'inducer' substance] - triggers an early and rapid development of the testis in the rudimentary sex organ which otherwise would follow the slow pattern of development characteristic of the ovary" ["Development of Sexual Characteristics," Sci. J., June, 1970, p. 67, 70].
In a similar vein, R. G. Edwards wrote: "The essential unanswered question about primary sexual differentiation is the mechanism which causes switching of the gland into male or female development. Various theories have been expounded involving the more rapid synthesis of DNA and cell division due to the smallness of the Y chromosome, the heterochromatic regions of the X and Y chromosome, and balance between the medullary and cortical regions of the gonad. Early in differentiation, an inducer-like substance evidently determines whether development will be ovarian or testicular. Once determined, the gonad will evidently not support the growth of germ cells of the other sex" ["Sex and the Developing Embryo," Sci J., Sept., 1969, p. 89].
167. Ideally, it appears that the X or Y chromosome initiates the programmed development of the appropriate sex glands internally (ovaries or testes) and the external genitalia as well as the accessory organs of the whole reproductive mechanism. While the gonads are developing into paired ovaries or testes, the germ cells are migrating to these glandular structures in which they will be housed and further prepared for later presentation as ova or spermatozoa. Migration of the germ cells is believed to take place at first through the vasculature by amoeboid movement [R. G. Edwards, "Sex and the Developing Embryo," Sci. J., Sept., 1969, p. 89].
According to C. R. Austin, primordial cells "are seen first in tissue that originates from the fertilized egg but lies outside the true body of the embryo and are thus said to have an extra-embryonic origin. Shortly, in the course of embryonic development, the cells migrate from this site into the body of the embryo and move towards the genital ridges, regions in which the future gonads, the ovaries or testes, are to develop" ["The Egg and Fertilization," Sci J. ,June, 1970, p. 37].
So we have first, genetic or chromosomal sex determination. This is followed by a gonadal determination whereby either testes or ovaries are formed. These gonads produce hormones which stimulate development of the appropriate reproductive organs of either sex. Finally, by visual inspection of the external organs, the sex of the neonate is assigned by the attending physicians or by the parents and the child is thus cast in a special role by society which hopefully will reinforce, and be in harmony with, the physiological constitution.
168. Fritz Kahn observed.- "In all mammals including man, the sex gland is very often accompanied by more or less well defined elements belonging to a gland of the opposite sex...On the one hand, it is not uncommon to find children whose external genitalia exhibit such a combination of male and female structures at birth that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to decide whether the infant is a boy or a girl. A child is born with a closed genital cleft like a boy but the ostensible penis is small like a clitoris, and the sex glands (testes) cannot be found because they have remained in the abdominal cavity. Or, on the other hand, two glands have become prominent like a boy's testicles but the genital cleft has remained open like a vagina and one faces the question as to whether the child is a girl with descended ovaries or a boy whose scrotum has remained open" [Man in Structure and Function, N.Y., Knopf, 1960, Vol. II, p. 734]. This helps to point up the difficulties which may face an attending physician who, for various social reasons, must make a quick decision.
D. R. Keller of Basel, writing on hermaphroditism, remarked, "From our discussion, it is clear that while sex when fully differentiated is easy enough to recognize, it is rather difficult to define biologically. Indeed, according to Lillie, there is no such thing as sex but rather several dimorphous states with contrasting characters. It is evident that this applies to all living creatures" [Ciba Symposium, 2, 3, 1940, p. 485].
The number of individuals who experience a conflict between their inner drives and their assigned sex and role in society seems to be on the increase. Peter Scott, in an article entitled "Identifying Gender," and speaking of the newborn whose sex is not easy to determine, observes: "Most of these babies are normal females (that is, their sex chromosomes are those of a female) who have been to some extent masculinized by male hormones which have either arisen within the baby's body or within the mother's body or have been administered to her during pregnancy." He lists at least six criteria that under ideal conditions might be used, but in real life are not all of them useful either because they are applied too late in life or because they delay assignment of sex too long. These are: (1) internal organs (there is not usually time for this kind of examination); (2) external genital organs (fully formed breasts would be identified too late to correct an error in assignment of sex at birth); (3) type of sex chromosome; (4) characteristic hormones; (5) assigned sex by the physicians or parents; and (6) gender role in society [New Scientist, 24 July, 1969, p. 182].
169. According to Hamilton, Boyd and Mossman: "True hermaphroditism is very rare, and among humans there are only twenty proven cases" [W. J. Hamilton, J. D. Boyd, H. W. Mossman, Human Embryology, Baltimore, Willams & Wilkins, 1945, p. 220]. This was given on the authority of H. H. Young, Genital Abnormalities: Hermaphroditism and Related Adrenal Diseases, written in 1937. In 1946 Charles W. Hooker noted five new cases reported during that single year and states that this brought the total known to him up to 35 or 36 at the time ["Reproduction" in Annual Review of Physiology, 8, p. 470]. In 1957 John L. Morris describes a number of cases of confused sex in some of which both male and female gonads were present in the same individual, and some clearly structurally opposing their chromosomal pattern. He notes that there were by then at least 50 histological cases reported. Some of the subjects underwent surgery to correct the malfunction of both internal and external organs and were able to bear normal children thereafter ["Intersexuality," J. Amer. Med. Assoc., 163, 7, 1957, p. 538-542].
M. Bobrow and M. H. Cough of the Medical Research Council in England reported in Lancet a number of cases of otherwise completely normal young men with no testes whatever, the vas deferens ending "blind" behind the bladder. It has been estimated that as high as two or three in every thousand are biologically neither straightforward males nor females. Rarely are such individuals able to have children... ["Bilateral Absence of Testes," Lancet, 14 Feb., 1970, p. 366]. And now we learn from John Money and Anke A. Ehrhardt that over the last twenty years more than 900 cases of hermaphroditism and related reproductive and psychosexual disorders have been seen in the psychohormonal research unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore [Science, 180, 1973, p. 586]. And this is only one reporting agency.
As a matter of fact, Morris' opening statement is: "While the differences between the sexes are the subject of considerable emphasis, male and female are not mutually exclusive, and both have certain anatomic and endocrinal characteristics of the opposite sex. The six-week old embryo is ambisexual, with gonads which may develop into either ovaries or testes, and two systems of tubules, the Wolfram and the Mullerian ducts, which develop into the male or female reproductive organs respectively. Sexual differentiation commences about the seventh week, but many rudimentary structures of the opposite sex persist after birth" ["Intersexuality," J. Amer. Med. Assoc., 163, 7, 1957, p. 538]. According to Money and Ehrhardt who probably have more experience in this area than any other researchers, true hermaphroditism by definition is that condition of incomplete external sexual differentiation at birth in which both testicular and ovarian structures are represented internally in the gonads. There may be one ovary and one testis, or even a pair of each: although most frequently both gonads are of mixed structure. That is, they are ovotestes.
An ovotestis is a gonad which has developed both its cortex and its medulla components, where normally either the cortex or the medulla would have developed at the expense of the other. The rule is that when the medulla develops, the cortex gradually disappears until only a trace remains, and the structure becomes a testis: when the cortex develops, the medulla gradually disappears leaving only a trace, and the structure becomes an ovary. When both medulla and cortex develop equally, an ovotestis results, in which the medulla produces spermatocytes (later to become spermatozoa) while the cortex simultaneously produces oocytes (later to become ova). [L. John Money and Anke A. Ehrhardt, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, Baltmore, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972, p. 38, 39].
It is thus apparent either that the incidence of confused sexuality is actually increasing (possibly due to the widening use of denatured foods and/or inappropriate medication during pregnancy [See Isabel W. Jennings, Vitamins in Endocrine Metabolism, London, Heinemann, 1970, 148 pp.]), or existing cases are receiving greater publicity. The news media in recent years have reported a number of instances of surgical intervention which has successfully corrected previous sexual indeterminacy, suggesting a changing attitude on the part of the public towards this unfortunate condition.
In the New Testament the word eunuch is used to signify a male castrated according to the practices of the nations at the time: but it is also used in the spiritual sense to signify an individual, man or woman, who has deliberately sacrificed all that is involved in sex life in order to dedicate himself or herself entirely to the Lord's service. When the Lord refers to this circumstance in Matthew 19:12, He also notes that in the physical sense there are some who are actually born eunuchs, i.e., born without sex organs. Such abnormalities are not solely a modern phenomenon.
170. Whether there is a positive effect of such twin prenatal influence in humans or not, is perhaps an open question. The case is quite otherwise with animals, where such effects are well-known. D. R. Keller in an article entitled "Hermaphroditism in the Animal Kingdom," mentions pigs and cows as among the more familiar examples. He observes: "Especially in the pig have a relatively large and varied number of cases of hermaphroditism been observed and studied for a long time." Of cows he says, "A particular form of abnormal hermaphroditism designated at present as hormonal intersexuality, occurs when cows bring forth twins of different sex. The female animal may then exhibit marked male characteristics. Such 'Freemartins' have been known to farmers and animal breeders from time immemorial. The origin is ascribed to hormonal action arising from the male embryo, stimulating the female fetus to develop in a masculine direction. Embryologists have demonstrated that the production of testicular hormone can begin earlier than that of ovarian hormone, because the testis in mammals begins to differentiate in an earlier developmental stage than the ovary. Consequently the testicular hormone can exert an inhibitory effect on the development of the genital apparatus in the female twin. Such Freemartins may exhibit varying degrees of intersexuality owing to the circumstance that the two placentas can fuse at various times during embryonic life" [Ciba Symposium, June, 1940, p. 478].
P. K. Basrur et al have reported similar abnormalities in a horse which was registered as a male at birth but exhibited several intersexual aberrations of internal and external genitalia. This was attributed to an interchange of blood cell precursors and primordial germ cells between heterosexual twins through vascular anastomoses in the foetal membranes during pregnancy ["Further Studies on the Cell populations of an Intersex Horse," Can. J. of Comparat. Med., Oct., 1970, p. 294-296].
Such disturbing hormonal influences may reach the fetus from the mother where hormones are administered in treatment of threatened abortion. Money and Ehrhardt refer to data on genetic females whose mothers were given large pregnancy-saving doses of progestin. All these infant girls suffered from progestin induced hermaphroditism (androgenization) of the external genitalia which was surgically corrected. The authorities state that these girls nevertheless retained in some aspects the masculinization which the operation was intended to correct against [Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972, p. 95ff., especially p. 99 on Tomboyism in girls].
Operational intervention is not usually thought of as upsetting the normal sexual development, but rather correcting for it. However, there are cases where normal development has been upset by accident. One such example is that of a child, raised as a girl, though actually a boy "whose penis was completely lost due to clumsy circumcision at seven months" [Money and Ehrhardt, ibid., p. 118].
To my knowledge, the term "parasitic castration" has not yet been applied to man, but it has been found in animals. G. E. and N. MacGinitie state: "Barnacles of the genus Sacculina are among the most unusual parasites in the animal kingdom. At one stage of its development the barnacle larva attaches itself to a 'hair' on a crab's body and penetrates the covering of the hair and travels down its hollow tube to the interior of the crab. It develops inside the crab, but the only external manifestation of the parasite is a formless reproductive sac that grows in the region of the crab's abdomen. The creeping spreading growth destroys the testes of the host, whereupon organs of the other sex begin to develop and to produce female reproductive hormones. These hormones will initiate the growth of secondary sexual characteristics, such as a wider abdomen and female genital pores. Thus, as a result of parasitism, an almost complete sex reversal occurs. Biologists sometimes call this 'parasitic castration.'" [A Natural History of Marine Animals, N.Y., McGraw, 1968, p. 261-263].
V. H. Mottram. in his Physical Basis of Personality and speaking of a hen which after a year of normal "henny" characteristics had become dominating and cocky in her relations with the rest of her Sisters, notes that she grew feathers, comb and spurs appropriate to a rooster and begat a number of chickens "before her sacrifice on the altar of genetics." Then it was discovered that avian tuberculosis had destroyed her ovaries and that from undifferentiated germinal tissue she had grown testes. Since birds (unlike other animals) are heterosexual, the possession of a V chromosome leads to a female sex and it may therefore be that the female can more easily convert to a male in the way that among other animals species it is the male which can convert to female [London, Penguin Books, 1949, p. 11].
171. Transexualists are people who wish to become members of the opposite sex not merely in behaviour and dress but by operational intervention if possible. Transvestites wish only to dress in the clothing of the opposite sex. According to an editorial in the British Medical Journal [1, 1966, p. 872] under the title "Transexuality," "Transexuality is more frequently reported in man than in woman, the excess varying anywhere from 50:1 to 3:1, according to different estimates." There is a very large difference between these estimates, but the editorial quotes J. H. Schultz as asserting categorically that true transexuality occurs only in man, never in woman [in Intersexuality, ed. Claus Overzeir, London, 1963]. According to R. G. Edwards, development is always female unless a testis is present, when male patterns of differentiation are then imposed on the fetus almost irrespective of the genotype of the fetus, and he refers to the condition known as testicular feminization. In such cases of hermaphroditism the subjects are generally XY and are often found to possess testes (as would be expected) "but the internal and external genitalia are predominately female and the patient behaves as a woman" ["Sex and the Developing Embryo," Sci. J., Sept., 1969, p. 89].
Isabel Jennings observed: "In the presence of functioning pituitary the gonad in the genetic male begins to secrete androgen...Loss of this activity by castration or by chemical means or by parasitism inhibits this process and feminization occurs" [Vitamins and Endocrine Metabolism, London, Heineman, 1970, p. 140]. By contrast, at least in mammals, the gonadectomized female has no such tendency towards the development of male sexual characteristics. I do not recall any report via the news media of an assigned female being operationally transformed into a male, but there are numerous reports of the reverse, and such reports demonstrate clearly that if the social and environmental conditions are favourable, the transformation can be carried through with success. Moreover, such transformations have occurred in men who had already fully matured and had even fathered children successfully. The Toronto Telegram of 6 March, 1954, carried the story in some detail of an ex-Royal Air Force hero who was the father of two children, aged 10 and 12, who is now to all intents and purposes an entirely different individual - different in name (Robert became Roberta), different in sex, different in habits of life, and different in temperament. The medical report states categorically that in spite of having fathered two children and raised them to adolescence, "she is undoubtedly a woman."
They also say that they had known of no previous case where the change had occurred so late in life (at 35 years of age). As we have already noted (see ref. # 169), J. L. Morris reported some instances of hermaphroditic subjects with testicular feminization who underwent surgery and later delivered a normal child, provided only that the ovaries were still present and the vagina not blind ["Intersexuality," J. Amer. Med. Assoc., 163, 7, 1957, p. 540]. Here, then, we have what amounts to a full cycle conversion, male into female and father into mother. Eve who was formed out of Adam became the mother of all living (Gen. 3:29).
172. On this subject, Fritz Kahn has observed: "The male and female sex glands, as well as the male and female hormone, are antagonistic in their actions. If a female sex gland is implanted in a man, it is rapidly destroyed, and the same thing happens to a testicle implanted in the body of a sexually immature woman. Nevertheless, throughout its entire life, every organism retains some genital tissue belonging to the opposite sex...When the sex gland becomes weak in the course of the aging process, it sometimes happens that the tissue of the other sex begins to predominate. This explains the well-known fact that after the menopause women become masculinized to some degree by developing facial hirsutism and acquiring coarser masculine features, a deeper voice, and a gruff manner" [Man in Structure and in Function, N.Y., Knopf, 1960, Vol. II, p. 737,738] . Kahn has a photograph of a woman who had experienced what he terms "a crass case of masculinization." He says of this woman that until a few years previously she had been completely feminine. One day, however, a tumor had developed due to a proliferation of cells which belonged to the opposite sex and which then flooded her body with male hormone.
173. Short, R. V., "Germ Cell Sex" in The Genetics of the Spermatozoon, ed. R. A. Beatty and S. Gleuchlsohn-Waelsch, Edinburgh, International Symposium at Edinburgh University, 1972, p. 325.
174. In this connection, Ursula Mittwoch observes: It is evident that both the evolutionary and the embryological evidence demonstrate that the origin of separate sexes is in hermaphroditism...We may thus picture the evolution of sex chromosomes as having occurred in three stages. During the first stage individuals were hermaphroditic. This was followed by the second stage in which separation of the sexes was achieved by environmental factors such as temperature...Lastly, a pair of unequal chromosomes was set aside under whose influence males and females would develop in equal numbers ["Sex Growth and Chromosomes," New Scientist, 15 July, 1971, p. 127]. This could be viewed as a reflection of what happened at an accelerated rate in the case of Adam and Eve. At first the two sexes were combined in one individual: their separation was effected: and each separated half was then reconstituted as a whole organism in its own right - all this taking place perhaps in a matter of minutes?
175. E. A. Lapham and H. Morowita, speaking of the Dicyemida, point out that these simple creatures develop a structure that may be thought of as a kind of hermaphroditic gonad. This is in a sense the only organ that the Mesozoa possess, and it produces both eggs and sperm. The eggs produced are fertilized by sperm frequently from the same organ ["The Mesozoa," Sci. Amer., Dec., 1972, p. 95]. It is evident that however sexual dimorphism has come about in man, among lower animals the division was sometimes highly uneven. According to V. Geodakyan, in the mountains of Armenia on the shores of Lake Sevan, colonies of lizards exist which are entirely female, laying only unfertilized eggs and hatching them, thus breeding strictly by parthenogenesis ["Why Two Sexes?", Meditsinskyia Gazeta (Medical Gazetteer), Moscow, 23 Mar., 1966 - trans. Joint Publication Research Service, US Dept. Commerce, Washington, and issued as JPRS No. 35321]. There is a small fish known under the name Labroides dimidiatus which is specifically sexed as either male or female but the females have the power of becoming males if the male happens to desert the harem. The most dominant of the ten or so females in the harem begins to change its sex within a few hours of the departure of the male [Ross Robertson, "Sex Changes Under the Waves," New Scientist, 31 May, 1973, p. 538].
176. John Burton observes that parthenogenesis takes place in insects, fishes, reptiles and even birds. He notes that it has been clearly established that the eggs are not being fertilized by any males...though the eggs can be! ["Virgin Birth in Vertebrates," New Scientist, 9 Aug., 1973, p. 334].
Under the heading Hermaphrodite, the Encyclopedia Britannica [Vol. II, 1953, p. 503] makes reference to what is called "functional hermaphroditism in animals, a condition in which both male and female gametes are produced by one and the same individual...occasionally fish and birds have both sex organs, one on each side. Gynandromorphism leads to two half-animals (male and female) united in one....(chiefly in insects)."
More recently the National Institute for Agronomical Research in France reported the breeding of bisexual trout which produce both eggs and sperm. "The breeding process is fairly simple and requires feeding young normal trout with small doses of substances which act on the biological sex differentiation. About 30% of those treated become bisexual within two to three years. Each bisexual trout can produce about 1000 normal trout and experiments are just starting to find out exactly how the process can benefit fish farms by giving rise to trout of superior quality" [New Scientist, 12 Jan., 1978, p. 93].
177. The common earthworm night crawler Lumbricus terrestres is both a complete male and a complete female. It cannot, however, fertilize its own eggs: there is reciprocal cross fertilization in this species. This may be contrasted, therefore, with the behaviour of the Mesozoon Dicyemida which can fertilize itself [H. Armstrong, Creation Res. Soc. Quart., Sept., 1972, p. 132]. This is known as autogamy.
178. Ulam, Stanislaw M., "How to Formulate Mathematically Problems of Rate of Evolution," Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, Wistar Symposium, Phila., Wistar Institute Press, No. 5, 1967, p. 23.
179. A work was published in 1974 dealing with the clinical, morphologic and cytogenetic aspects of hermaphroditism. The author is Professor W. van Niekerk, Dept. of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in the Tygerberg Hospital, Parow, Cape Province, South Africa. This is perhaps the most complete study of the subject to be published in recent years. Among the case histories in this volume is that of an individual who developed to maturity with a truly hermaphroditic constitution including an active testis and an active ovary. Normal sperm were found in the testis on the left side, and an ovary with numerous follicles and some ova were observed on the right side [True Hermaphroditism, Willem A. van Niekerk, N.Y., Harper and Row, 1974, 200 pp. , especially p. 112].
180. Money and Erhardt point out that girls with Turner's Syndrome are "more extremely feminine" than normal XX females. They conclude from this that masculinity and femininity are not really discrete entities but lie along a unidimensional continuum which would see pure masculinity at one extreme and pure femininity at the other extreme and a continuous graduated series of mixtures in between. Turner's Syndrome, as they interpret the evidence, places the individual further to the feminine pole than the normal female, thus leading to a "purer" sexual type [Review in Science, 180, 1973, p. 587; and Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972, p. 107ff.]
181. Cynecomastia or gynecomazia, a condition where the male mammary glands are well developed and may secrete milk, is a recognized phenomenon, being reported by early writers including Aristotle and referred to by the French as la couvade. More recently, the famous physiologist, John Hunter, records the instance of a sailor who, having lost his wife, took his son to his own breast to quiet him and after three or four days was able to nourish him. He also mentions the case of a man of 50 who shared equally with his wife the suckling of their children. In Franklin's Voyage to the Polar Seas, he quotes the case of an old Chippewa who, on losing his wife in childbirth, had put the infant to his breast and earnestly prayed that milk might flow; he was fortunate enough to eventually produce sufficient milk to rear the child [See further on this G. M. Gould and W. L. Pyle, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, N.Y., Julian Press, 6th printing, 1966, p. 395-397].
Under the heading "Milk Hormone Produced at the Slightest Touch," the following observation is made.- "Prolactin is one of the galaxy of peptide hormones secreted by the anterior pituitary gland and its main function has to do with the production of milk in lactating females. Biologists in Washington University School of Medicine have been looking at the way prolactin secretion is initiated in non-lactating individuals - both males and females [my emphasis]. Occasionally milk is produced in individuals following mechanical stimulation of the breasts...Simple stroking of the breast and nipple in the female subjects for five minutes induced a dramatic increase (at least ten times) in the prolactin output of the pituitary. Curiously, when wives manipulated their husband's nipples prolactin output rose." Reference is made in a Note, in Nature, 238, 1972, p. 284; quoted in New Scientist, 10 Aug., 1972, p. 277].
In a Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, there occurred the following observation: "It is not a very uncommon circumstance to find both among human kind and animals, males whose breasts contain milk. Among the lower orders of people in Russia milk in the breasts of men is much more frequent than among the more southern nations..." It may be of interest to note with respect to the last observation that the Scyths who migrated into Russia, according to Hippocrates showed a high incidence of hermaphroditism as though it were almost a racial character, and some skeptics of reports of male breast feeding have suggested that only a hermaphrodite could possibly perform this function. Perhaps Hippocrates' observation sheds some light on this matter. This information was published by the Medical Librarian, Evansville, Indiana, in a local paper dated 2 Aug., 1972.
The San Francisco Chronicle [6 Nov., 1976] reported a billy goat which was observed by two scientists at Garhwal University in the State of Delhi, India, to be producing milk from normal mammary glands, yet all its other sex organs were clearly male.
As Dr. A. E. Wilder Smith points out, both sexes synthesize both male and female hormones. Males synthesize female hormones and females synthesize male hormones. In fact after certain operations it is often necessary to treat the female to prevent the undue expression of the male hormones as a result of the depletion of the female hormone and in old age with the decline of the female glands which produce these hormones, the female body may occasionally assume a number of quite marked male characteristics. Wilder Smith observes wisely that if human ancestry from an evolutionary standpoint is ultimately to be traced through reptiles which do not nurse their young and therefore have no nipples, it is difficult to account for the possession of nipples by the male unless we assume that they served a purpose at some time in the past [Man's Origin, Man's Destiny, Wheaton, Shaw, 1960, p. 105]. For this is how the evolutionists must account for nipples in the female of the species. He therefore concludes that we have to assume that they were at one time functional, or at least potentially so. If Adam were originally bisexual, his nipples would undoubtedly have been routinely functional and only ceased to be so because Eve was taken out of him.
It has more recently been discovered that males also produce relaxin, a substance which softens the pubic bone in the female, allowing the fetus a little more freedom of passage. In the male it is produced by Leydig cells which also produce the male sex hormone, testosterone. This was reported by M. P. Dubois, of the National Institute of Agricultural Research, and Jean-Louis Dacheux of the Laboratory of Comparative Physiology in Tours, France [Cell and Tissue Research, 187, 1978, p. 201].
It should be said that when, for pathological reasons, the genetic male does not respond to the androgen produced by the testes (a condition known as androgen insensitivity) the body develops with essentially female external genitalia and with female sensitivities, and will almost certainly be assigned a feminine sex role. This condition is also termed testicular feminization, for obvious reasons. The male testes therefore produce sufficient estrogen to impress female characters on what should have been a male body.
Thus, a male can give rise to a male or to a female, but a female cannot give rise to a male - or only so rarely that many authorities deny the possibility, and reports of such are probably misrepresentations of the actual facts. Eve can easily be conceived as having been derived out of Adam, but not Adam out of Eve. In 1866, Franz Delitzsch, in his System of Biblical Psychology, made a remarkable observation regarding the forming of Eve. He said: "Eve is certainly not Adam's child, but Adam himself in a different sex" [See p. 133 of the Baker reprint, 1966].
Even in the matter of the external genitalia, it has so far proved impossible to convert a female to a male by surgical intervention or by the administration of hormones, but the reverse operation is now quite successful when it is considered proper. An actual case of the conversion of a true male into a female, an event necessitated only as a result of an unfortunate accident, is given by Money and Ehrhardt [Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972, p. 95-116 and 118f., esp. p. 113].
182. Mowatt, Farley, West Viking, Toronto, Little, Brown, 1965, p. 147.
183. Ciba Symposium, June, 1940, p. 495.
184. Turner, Sharon, The Sacred History of the World, London, Longman, 1837, Vol. II, p. 191, footnote.
185. R. V. Short has a very good summary statement at this point: "In this review I would like to consider the essential differences between sexual and somatic tissues in mammals, and the way in which these two cell lines may be subject to separate genetical control mechanisms.
"Natural sex reversal occurs commonly in a number of lower vertebrates (Chan, 1970), and complete, functional sex reversal can be achieved in fish and amphibia by adding steroidal sex hormones to the water in which they are swimming (Ohno, 1967). There are occasional reports of spontaneous functional sex reversal in birds (Crew, 1923), and if the single ovary of a hen is removed surgically, the contralateral gonadal remnant will develop into a testis and may produce spermatozoa (Miller, 1938). Partial gonadal reversal occurs when male chick embryos are treated with estrogen (Erickson and Pincus, 1966), or when embryos of opposite sex develop within the same egg and acquire extensive vascular interconnections (Lutz and Lutzstertag 1959). In the Virginia opossum, a marsupial, partial gonadal sex reversal can be produced by treating the pouch young with steroids (Burns, 1961). But in mammals, complete functional sex reversal never occurs naturally, and even partial gonadal sex reversal cannot be induced experimentally with steroids (Burns, 1961). It is therefore tempting to conclude that the plasticity of gonadal development in fish, amphibians and birds had to be forsaken in mammals, where the whole embryonic development has to take place within the confines of a uterus which is bathed by maternal hormones. Such a situation demands a much more immutable genetic control if the fetus is to develop its sexuality independently of its mother" ["Germ Cell Sex" in The Genetics of the Spermatozoon, Proceedings of International Symposium at Edinburgh, August, 1971, ed. R. A. Beatty and S. Gluecksohn Waelsch, Edinburgh, 1972, p. 325f.]. His references are:
Chan, S. T. H., "Natural Sex Reversals in Vertebrates," Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc., London, B. 259, 1970, p. 59-71.
Ohno, S., Sex Chromosomes and Sex-linked Genes, Berlin, Springer-Verlag, 1967.
Crew, F. A. E., Studies in Intersexuality. II: "Sex-reversal in the Fowl," Proc. Roy. Soc., London, B. 95, 1923, p. 256-278.
Miller, R. A., "Spermatogenesis in a Sex-reversed Female and in Normal Males of the Domestic Fowl, Gollus domesticus," Anat. Rec., 70, 1938, p. 155-189.
Erickson, A. E. and G. Pincus, "Modification of embryonic development of reproductive and lymphoid organs in the chick," J. Embryol exp. Morph., 16, 1966, p. 211-229.
Lutz H. and Y. Lutz-Ostertag, "Free-martinisme spontan chez les Oiseau," Develop. Biol., 1, 1959, p. 364-376.
Burns, R. K., "Role of hormones in the differentiation of sex" in Sex and Internal Secretions, 3rd ed., Vol. 1, Baltimore, Wilkins, Williams, 1961, p. 76-158.
186. The world famous Vienna psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, was convinced that if personalities could be arranged in some kind of order from superior to inferior, at the very top of the list one would have to place those who somehow seem to combine within themselves in almost equal measure male and female personality traits and characteristics. Jung believed that such people under favourable conditions are likely to achieve "the highest human perspective and creative expression. But this gynandromorphic admixture appears to introduce a peculiar delicacy and a hair-trigger emotional intensity into the human machinery" [quoted by W. H. Sheldon, The Varieties of Human Physique, N.Y., Harper Bros., 1946, p. 257]. More recently Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi reported the results of some interesting psychological experiments involving particularly creative people, and came to the following conclusions: "The creative person is not stereotypic in temperament. The male exhibits some of the feminine sensibilities: the female some of the masculine sensibilities. In our own work with artists, the males were more feminine on a sensitivity scale than other males, and the females more masculine on a tough-minded scale than other females" [L. J. W. Getzels and M. Csikszentmihalyi, "Scientific Creativity," Sci. J. 3, 9, 1967, p. 80, 84]. I think this reflects the same situation. There are differences in temperament and in other significant psychological ways between the sexes which are mutually contributory to the total well-being of both. Where they can be combined in one individual, or where two individuals (man and wife hopefully) can pool their best resources, there we ought to find human potential at its highest levels of creative expression. Presumably, in Adam as first created all these potentials were maximized in a single individual. What is at issue here is not physiological function but temperament.
The best explanation of the facts as presently understood seems to me, in the light of Scripture, to be that the earliest forms of life which multiply by propagation rather than by simple division were almost certainly bisexual, each individual combining the organs of both sexes within his own body: in the higher forms each containing both a functional testis and ovary. Perhaps when God planned the organic world, of which man was to be a working member, He introduced this mode of multiplication in anticipation of the time when man should be likewise created bisexual for reasons already intimated.
187. Many of the examples of acquired characters that seem to have become inheritable which are now being discussed by such men as Waddington, seem to me of dubious value because they could be viewed equally well as preadaptations. This is true of the thickening of the soles of the feet in the human fetus. It was noted by Darwin and elaborated upon subsequently by R. Semon [Arch. mikr. Anat., 82,1913, p. 164ff.], and it has since been discussed by C. H. Waddington in an article entitled "The Evolution of Adaptations" [Endeavour, 12 July, 1953, p. 136]. Among evolutionists, it is customary to point to this phenomenon as having resulted from the bipedal locomotion of man which has had the effect of toughening the soles of his feet, an advantageous acquired character which is then inherited after millennia of use. The human fetus now therefore is born already prepared for walking, in this respect, according to this view.
Waddington refers to a similar situation in connection with the ostrich. This bird has two conveniently located callosities on its breast which bear the brunt of friction and pressure when the bird squats on the ground. According to Waddington, these callosities have become inherited and they are therefore found to be already formed during foetal development ["Experiments in Acquired Characteristics," Sci Amer., Dec., 1953, p. 92f.]. However, this particular case is not as straightforward as Waddington makes it appear, for as Sir Gavin de Beer has pointed out, the ostrich is born with other similar callosities which it cannot make use of at all [Embryos and Ancestors, Oxford, 1951, p. 87]. It could therefore be argued that we have here a case of the accidental development of callosities due possibly to some gene mutation, two only of which callosities happen to be of some use to the animal.
A somewhat analogous situation has been observed in man in the form of so-called squatting facets of the Indians of Punjab. These Indians easily assume a restful squatting position which the European finds difficult, because of a modification of the bone structure of the tibia. No such modification is ever found among chair-users, according to Wood Jones [quoted by Kenneth Walker, Meaning and Purpose, London, Penguin, 1951, p. 154], but the Punjabis are born with them. Is this, then, an acquired character that has become inheritable or is it merely that they have made use of a chance modification once they discovered its advantages?
Such proposed examples of inherited acquired characters have, it seems to me, doubtful validity. On the other hand, there is much experimental evidence on the genuine inheritance of acquired characters in many forms of life from the simplest to the more complex which seem most easily to be accounted for by assuming that they are inherited cytoplasmicly rather than via the nuclear genes. Some further observations on this point will be found in a later reference, #217.
One of the most eloquent supporters in recent times of what may be called Neo-Lamarckism was the English naturalist, Professor F. Wood Jones. In his Trends of Life, he has a whole chapter titled, "The Inheritance of Adaptations," which is well worth examining [London, Arnold, 1953]. And in the same year, Dr. Carlos Monge reported an impressive example of what seems clearly to be a case of an acquired character being inherited in man. Monge found that Andean highlanders had developed considerably larger chests, presumably a compensation for the rarefied atmosphere in which they live. The interesting thing is that many of their descendants who came down and have now lived along the sea-coast for many generations, still have the same large deep chests and broad shoulders of the highlanders. If this were simply a superficial response of the highlanders to the need for an increased lung capacity, one would expect it to disappear quickly in their lowland descendants. That it has not done so, seems to indicate that the character became inheritable ["Biological Basis of Human Behaviour" in Anthropology Today, ed. A. L. Kroeber, Chicago Univ. Press, 1953, p. 127ff.]. Why this lung enlargement should become heritable but not the blacksmith's muscular build, is hard to say. The mechanism is obviously not a simple one.
188. Weismann, August, op. cit., (ref. #33), Vol. 1, p. 419ff.
189. Huxley, Sir Julian, "Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics" in Essays in Popular Science, Penguin, 1938, p. 36, 37.
190. Pearl, Raymond, "Biology and Human Trends," Smithsonian Institute Report, Washington, 1935, p. 331.
191. Briggs, Robert and Thomas King, "Nucleoplasmic Interactions in Eggs and Embryos" in The Cell: Biochemistry, Physiology, and Morphology, ed. J. Brachet and A. E. Mirsky, N.Y., Academic Press, Vol. 1, 1959, p. 539.
There is some evidence that some of the body cells retain the full potential of the germ cells. Writing in Science under the heading "Some Characteristics of a Continuously Propagating Cell Derived from Monkey Heart Tissue," J. E. Salk and Elsie N. Wood report that it has been possible by the right techniques to isolate heart tissue cells and induce them to go on multiplying indefinitely [126, 1967, p. 1338]. The phenomenon suggests that some of the potential for immortality which is characteristic of germ cells may have been retained even by the body cells which have differentiated some distance from the originating germ plasm.
Recently MD of Canada reported that Dr. John Gurdon and his coworkers at Oxford had grown fully mature and fertile frogs from single body cells extracted from the intestinal lining of other frogs. With his present technique more than 30% of the intestinal cells could be made to grow at least to the tadpole stage [10, 3, 1969, p. 53]. Neither lines of proliferating cells were human. It must surely be assumed that the fall of man has made his body cells unlike all other animal cells.
192. In a manner of speaking, Weismann was both right and wrong in assuming that differentiating cells lose the totipotency of the initiating ovum to the extent that such cells are no longer individually capable of giving rise to a whole animal but only to specific organs and tissues. In plants, of course, the cells in a slip taken from almost any part of the plant are capable of reproducing the whole organism, roots and all. But experiments have now shown that complex animal forms may also be reproduced by highly refined techniques from cells which have long since differentiated into specific tissues and have lost their identity as germ plasm.
The technique involves extracting the nuclei from tissue cells and transferring them to enucleated cells of germ plasm origin. Such reconstructed cells are evidently capable of initiating the process of cell cleavage and division and proceeding normally through embryological and foetal development to maturity. It no longer seems likely, therefore, that cell differentiation is due to the loss of gene material in the nucleus during earlier stages of cell division but rather to changes in the cytoplasm; although Briggs and King were able to demonstrate that nuclei of cells taken from tissue which has formed later in foetal development less frequently retain their totipotency than do nuclei of cells derived from tissue formed earlier in the developing embryo. It therefore seems likely that even the nucleus may change slightly with time, although it is fairly certain now that the major change occurring within the cell relates to the chemistry or organization or structure of the cytoplasm as successive cell divisions occur. The differentiated cytoplasm interacts with the nucleus and this in turn leads to the emergence of new directions for cell development along specific lines towards the growth of tissues and organs which form the body or housing for the original germ plasm.
Professor Bernard D. Davis, Harvard Medical School, stated: "We now know that all the differentiated somatic cells of an animal (those of muscle, skin, and the like) contain in their nuclei the same complete set of genes. Every somatic cell contains all the genetic information required for copying the whole organism. In different cells, different sub-sets of genes are acting while the remainder are inactive. Accordingly, if it should become possible to reverse the regulatory mechanism responsible for this differentiation, any cell could be used to start the embryo. Though differentiation is completely reversible in the cells of plants (as in the transfer of cuttings), it is ordinarily quite irreversible in the cells of the higher animals. The stability, however, depends on the interaction of the nucleus with the surrounding cytoplasm..." ["Prospects for Genetic Intervention in Man," Science, 170, 1970, p. 1280,1281].
Cell differentiation is therefore mainly the result of modifications of the cytoplasm rather than the nucleus. A. C. Enders and S. J. Schlafke, in a Ciba Foundation Symposium, observe that the cytoplasm of cells, even by the time the blastocyst has formed, is clearly different from the cytoplasm of the ovum. "During the late cleavage stages and the blastocyst stage, the structure of the cytoplasm alters a great deal in most species. Characteristically, there is a diminution and re-organization of the cytoplasmic inclusions..." ["The Fine Structure of the Blastocyst: Some Comparative Studies" in Preimplantation Stages of Pregnancy, ed. G. E. W. Wolstenholme and M. O'Connor, London, Churchill, 1965, p. 45, 47]. Alfred Kuhn puts the matter this way: "It is certain that the nuclei of some tissues need not forfeit some of their talents to reach a certain stage: rather they can replace the egg nucleus, and their derivatives can satisfy all the demands of the developmental steps which the various cells must pass through" [Lectures in Developmental Physiology, tr. Roger Milkman, N.Y., Springer-Verlag, 1971, p. 488]. It seems, therefore, that the cell nuclei retain their totipotency to a far greater extent than the cytoplasm. In the natural order of things, cells do fairly quickly become differentiated and lose their totipotency - except perhaps in plants. While most of the cells to which the totipotent ovum gives rise soon become differentiated cytoplasmicly for the development of body cells, not all of them do. A few remain for the perpetuation of the germ cell line. It is these few that form the thread of continuity from generation to generation.
The following readily accessible articles dealing with this subject are useful: J. B. Gurdon, "Transplanted Nuclei and Cell Differentiation," Sci Amer., Dec., 1968, pp. 24-35; C. H. Waddington, "How Do Cells Differentiate?", Sci. Amer., Sept., 1953, pp. 108-114; Michail Fischberg and A. W. Blackler, "How Cells Specialize," Sci Amer., Sept., 1961, pp. 124-140; Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King, "Changes in the Nuclei of Differentiating Endoderm Cells as Revealed by Nuclear Transplantation," J. Morphology, 100, 2, 1957, pp. 269-311; Lewis Wolpert, "Developing Cells Know Their Place," New Scientist, 14 May, 1970, p. 322f.
193. Raven, Christian P., An Outline of Developmental Physiology, tr. L. de Ruiter, N.Y., McGraw Hill, 1954, p. 62.
194. Weismann, August, "Upon the Eternal Duration of Life," op. cit., (ref. #33), Vol. 1, p. 139.
195. Parthenogenesis is so well established for so many species that it scarcely needs the reinforcement of this note. However, for those who may not be aware of how widely it has been demonstrated below man, the following brief comment may be useful. Few proven cases of mammalian parthenogenesis in nature have ever been clearly established, though as we have already seen (ref. #175) it has been observed for lizards and is common enough among insects and some fish. To the list of insects in which parthenogenesis occurs naturally, B. I. Balinsky adds aphids, phyllopods, and rotifers at certain times of the year, and of course bees in which the fertilized egg produces a female and the unfertilized egg develops into a male [An Introduction to Embryology, Toronto, Saunders, 1970, 3rd ed., p. 126].
The situation is very different in the laboratory where experiment has shown that a very wide range of animal forms can be induced to propagate parthenogenetically. According to Albert Tyler, "Extensive investigations have shown that in practically all the main groups of animals, normal development can be obtained by artificial activation of eggs" ["Artificial Parthenogenesis," Biol Reviews, Cambridge Univ., 16, 1941, p. 292f.]. Reports include such species as silkworms, caterpillars, sea urchins, star fish, frogs, fish (including carp), lizards, birds and rabbits. In 1896 R. Hertwig found that sea urchin eggs could be activated by chloroform or strychnine! ["Ueber die Entwicklung des ubefruchteten Sceigelcies," Festschr. fur gegenbauer, Leipzig, 1896]. H. Spurway reports experimental parthenogenesis in the guppy, Lebistes reticulatus ["Spontaneous Parthenogenesis in a Fish," Nature, 171, 1953, p. 437]. In the case of rabbit ova cultivated in vitro, Dr. Chambly in France almost fifty years ago was probably the first to demonstrate that mammals can give birth to viable offspring parthenogenetically [see Gregory Pincus, "Fertilization in Mammals," Sci. Amer., Mar., 1951, p. 47]. There is some evidence of man-induced parthenogenesis in sheep, though I am not sure how dependable this is [Arthur Koestler, Beyond Reductionism, London, Hutchinson, 1969, p. 199].
196. "A human egg is a spherical cell...which is one of the largest cells in the body, and when placed against a dark background it is just visible to the naked eye...The large size of the egg cell is due mainly to deposits of yolk in the cytoplasm...In contrast to the egg, the sperm is the smallest cell in the body...The volume of an egg cell is about 85,000 times that of a sperm" [Ursula Mittwoch, Genetics of Sex Differentiation, N.Y., Academic Press, 1973, p. 84, 85].
197. It is established that an ovum can be activated without fertilization by the spermatozoon, and in certain cases will go on to full development of a mature female animal, complete with a functioning reproductive system which thus provides the initiating ovum with a mechanism for continuing itself indefinitely. To this extent, the ovum is self-sufficient. The sperm does not appear to be so, under natural conditions.
It was at one time supposed that the limitations imposed upon the spermatozoon was entirely due to lack of energy because of the small amount of cytoplasm surrounding the nucleus. It simply starved before reaching sufficient maturity to extract food from its environment. By reducing its food requirements, at very low temperatures for example, its life can be greatly extended, and certainly in warm-blooded animals the temperature of sperm is quite critical to its survival, and unless the testes descend to the scrotum free from the deep body temperature, they are not viable. Excessive use of hot baths in Japan reduced male fertility.
However, there appears to be some other factor limiting sperm life. George Conner observed. "If an ovum is cut into two pieces, one of which has no nucleus, and the latter is then entered by a sperm, it too will divide and become an embryo, though admittedly not as often as in the case of the unfertilized ovum" [The Hormones in Human Reproduction, N.Y., Atheneum, 1963, p. 19]. This kind of highly sophisticated manipulation of cells in the laboratory is very different from anything that occurs in Nature whereas the variety of treatments that can lead to parthenogenesis of the ovum is so diverse that at least some of them must probably occur under natural conditions.
Dorthea Rudnick, in her article on Embryology in the 1960 edition of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology [Vol. IV, p. 573], after pointing out that the sperm itself is by no means essential for the activation of the egg, suggests that the mature egg must be thought of as a system containing all the potential factors for development and the sperm essentially as a trigger that sets off the mechanism. It is, of course, also the source of the paternal set of chromosomes. But it seems clear that it is not at all the same kind of self-contained unicellular organism capable of independent existence that the ovum is. Under natural conditions, by itself it will die, whereas the ovum, left alone, is in no necessity of doing so provided only that it is given a suitable environment and an appropriate though remarkably non-specific stimulation to activate it. If the ovum can thus survive by itself, it can hardly be argued that the sperm contains any absolutely essential component for its activation, since apparently the ovum can be activated without it.
198. The ovum can be activated and developed into a fully mature organism by an amazingly diverse range of stimuli. According to Albert Tyler, "It is clear that there is very little specificity in regard to activating agents. Thus eggs of the sea urchin can be activated by such diverse agents as puncture, heat, cold, ultra-violet radiation, radium emanation, acids, bases, isotonic salt solutions, hypertonic and hypotonic solutions, fat solvents and some alkaloids. This contrasts with the high degree of specificity in fertilization (in nature)" ["Artificial Parthenogenesis," Biol Reviews, Cambridge Univ., 16, 1941, p. 318].
To these non-specific stimuli have since been added others, including electric shock. The carp eggs mentioned above (ref. #195) were actually activated by human saliva. Professor Christian P. Raven of the University of Utrecht has added to this growing list of activators such physical treatment as illumination, induction shock and osmotic pressure as well as chemical agents such as urea and saponin [op. cit., (ref. #193), p. 20].
I do not know whether I am reading too much into the evidence, but I think it worth noting that Balinsky observed that most of the agents used are of such a nature that they probably damage the ovum to a greater or lesser degree, and if applied too vigorously they cause the death of the cell. He then adds, "It is reasonable to suppose, then, that activation of the egg involves some kind of sub-lethal damage to the egg cytoplasm" [An Int