Another life that wasn't wasted

 “Wally” Funk wanted to be an astronaut. But in the 1950's, when boys hoping to get a toy space helmet for Christmas were building imaginary spaceships out of cardboard boxes, girls weren't expected to have any such ambitions. It didn't matter that she was already a pilot, having taken her first lessons at the age of nine. Or that President Eisenhower himself had written her a letter congratulating her on her expert marksmanship; she was a girl, and girls couldn't march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, OR fly o'er the enemy. And only military officers were being considered for the space program, so it just wasn't to be.

But Wally Funk had a secret weapon: longevity. Having been trained as a backup for the Mercury mission, and then turned away when there turned out to be seven men with the Right Stuff, she lived through the entire US space program, observing the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Shuttle Missions from afar, while racking up an impressive series of “firsts”: first in her class at Stephens College (graduating at age 19), first female Flight Instructor at a US military base, first female Field Examiner for the FAA, first female Air Safety Investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. And first place finisher, in a field of 80, of the Pacific Air Race. By the time the Shuttle program finally opened up to women, she was no doubt qualified in every way except one: she was now too old! She was turned down three times. And it's a good thing, by the way, that Christa McAuliffe, rather than Wally, got the nod to be the first civilian in space: she never made it, as the Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff, killing all aboard.

As for Wally, she lived on. And she kept flying, serving as the Chief Pilot for five different aviation schools. But she never gave up her dream. When the first Shuttle flight to be commanded by a woman took off, she was an honored guest at the launch. Finally, as the 21st century dawned, it looked as if civilian space travel might finally become a possibility. Wally took the money she'd inherited from her art collector parents, and royalties from her books, to make a down payment of the first Virgin Galactic space tourism flight. By this time she was in her seventies, and space tourism was still a decade off. But when the first flight finally took off with paying passengers, it was competitor Blue Orbit rather than Virgin Galactic. Their maiden flight set two records: 18-year old Oliver Daemen became the youngest person in space, and Wally, at 82, the oldest by half a decade (and it was a good thing for the record books that she was on that first flight, as the second, just a few months later, carried 90-year-old William Shatner). She had somehow managed to outlast the entire span of the male-only U.S. space program, AND to outlive the age restriction. In that way she was reminiscent of the first woman in space, who was sent along on an early robotic flight purely as a token, but kept on training long enough to see the Soviet space program open up to women, and became a fully qualified cosmonaut.

I was inspired to write this post when I noticed that, like Linus Pauling, Mary Wallace Funk got tired of not being allowed to study what she wanted to in high school, so dropped out and entered college at age 16. With all the progress they have made in so many other areas, in this way America have regressed: it's no longer possible for a frustrated genius to get into college without first ticking off the box of a secondary school education. At the very most, he or she can take limited college classes concurrently while completing secondary school, or complete it early by correspondence; just dropping out is no longer an option for bright young students like Linus and Wally.

I imagine there are a few exceptions in subsequent generations, but I suspect none from the 21st century.

A review of David Instone-Brewer's Bible Contexts Series - Chapter 20: Cain's "wife"

Dr. David Instone-Brewer is an eminent Bible Scholar in England, one of the experts responsible for the last tranche of changes to the NIV. He knows a lot more than I do about a lot of things, and since he makes it easy to access most of what he writes, I follow him to my advantage--especially in the area of Old Testament Studies, which is his specialty. What I've learned from him, however, are generally facts and insights I hadn't been exposed to before. I don't sit at his feet for much of what he weaves into his teaching, which are just standard tenets of atheism (although I admit, some of them are new to me as well). For although he identifies as an evangelical, he nonetheless looks to atheist scholars and their disciples to inform his interpretation of the Scriptures--and is thus oft led astray.

Dr. D is greatly hampered in his ability to gain insights from the book of Genesis, believing as he does that it was composed as a sort of religious fiction during the Babylonian captivity to inspire Jews not to lose hope in their present situation, or something along those lines. He doesn't believe that it is even intended to be a serious historical record, and certainly not that it was compiled from written eyewitness accounts. There is therefore no apparent limit to the imaginations his mind can supply from a reading of this section of the Scriptures, guided by the speculations of the atheists which lie behind much of his theology. And since he drinks deeply at the font of those who have no access to absolute truth, he all but admits that what he sincerely believes to be true today may be ridiculed a decade or a century from now, as atheist philosophers discard old and unworkable alternative explanations for how the world works, and imagine new ones yet to be disproven. This approach leads him far astray from orthodox understanding. 

Take, for example, his chapter on Cain's Wife. He already reinterprets the first two chapters of Genesis in an atheistic framework, starting with a random humanoid whose ancestral line went back to stardust. He then departs from the atheist narrative just a bit to give God credit for taking this human-looking animal, the pinnacle of billions of years of random evolution, miraculously granting him a human spirit, and then--in a most unusual departure from his involvement of the previous billions of years, and in a biological process we can hardly imagine, much less explain scientifically--splitting off a half-clone which became the first human woman. He then set the newly enlightened couple in special walled enclosure he called Eden and commanded them not to eat a certain fruit. They did so regardless, and as a result they were cast out of Eden to resume their evolutionary progress without any life-sustaining access to the fruit of the tree that conveyed some sort of immortality. And here enters Cain's Wife, who he proposes was a non-human, implying along the way that the host of present mankind must be descended from her.

I hesitate to critique Dr. D in any area of actual OT Studies, as he is an acknowledged expert in both the Hebrew language and rabbinical literature. But here he has left far behind anything directly related to the Hebrew Scriptures to dabble in Evolutionary Biology, in which he is no expert--leaving me on much firmer ground to dispute him. [Edit: he does claim biological expertise based on his undergraduate studies, but then, so could I, having sat for General Science in Bible College.]

I will be interacting in this post with Chapter 20 of his book Bible Contexts which, at least for now, can be found at his website http://www.biblecontexts.com/. He introduces the chapter as follows:

If Cain married someone living outside Eden, this would explain some strange details in Genesis. It would also explain how our gene pool contains so much variation.

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His book is all about explaining strange details in Genesis with even stranger speculations. He sees a problem with God selecting just two humanoids--really, only one--to begin the human family tree. Although his God is capable of many amazing feats, Dr. D seems constrained by his acceptance of atheist teaching to place the Laws of Nature at a higher tier on the hierarchy than that occupied by Nature's God. The God who could split the first man in half at the sub-cellular level to produce the first woman was nonetheless stumped at providing this pair's descendants with enough genetic variety to produce the four blood types, so He needed to pull in some genes from the neighboring humanoids to pull it off. Thus, Cain's Wife. 

Now Mrs. Cain was not a Neanderthal, mind you--Cain had already inherited those genes from his long-dead humanoid ancestors. What she provided instead was access to the "rich gene pool" that had resulted from millions of years of primate evolution. Dr. D uses a modern analogy to explain why this was not only sufficient, but necessary, if humanity were to survive The Fall:

 Cain could, of course, have married his sister – though the Bible doesn’t say this happened. It is difficult to imagine her wanting to marry a brother (especially the nasty brother who murdered the nice one). Presumably this incest wouldn’t be dangerous like it is today because God could have made sure there weren’t any dangerous recessive genes in Adam’s chromosomes. However, our human race would be very weak if the entire gene pool had been limited to just Adam’s chromosomes. Restricted gene pools often cause problems in overrefined agricultural animals or crop lines because this makes them vulnerable to pests and changes in the environment. This is solved by interbreeding with wild species to reinvigorate the gene pool by introducing more variety.

Here he makes a mistake commonly perpetuated by pseudoscientists, assuming that a genetic bottleneck always results in a dangerously depleted gene pool. The reason modern agricultural crops and animals have depleted gene pools, and wild varieties don't, is precisely the result of human intervention to breed out unwanted variation. Absent that unnatural selection, a fairly robust set of genes will continue to be passed on, even in a small population. But racism is a powerful and primordial urge, such that organisms resist hybridisation and generally seek to mate with creatures most like themselves, resulting in further speciation, as any organisms that depart from the standard in the same direction tend to seek out each other for breeding, leaving an even more depleted genome to their descendants. Were it not for the balancing act of another primordial urge--that of men, having gone forth to conquer, seeking and finding sexual release amongst the females of the conquered races--humans would be much more genetically depleted than we are. 

If I were to hypothesize myself, I would say that God created Adam with two completely different sets of chromosomes, with each of the millions of gene pairs consisting of different alleles. Thus Eve was far more distant from Adam, genetically, than any two humans are today; at the time she was split off from him, she only shared 50 per cent of his genetic material. And if God were powerful enough to pull off forming yet another haploid set for the rest of Eve, then he only shared half of her genome--providing far more diversity than Cain could have brought into the young race by impregnating a distant descendant of the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Adam could well have carried one haploid gene for Type A blood, and one for Type B. We don't even have to split that in half again to get all three of the blood types just among their children, provided that Eve possessed the same. And if, post-Fall, any two of their children ended up with an allele that lacked the information for producing either the A or B antigen, Type O could emerge as early as their grandchildren's generation. It's a stupendous pity that Dr. D, with all his learning, didn't see how God could accomplish this without having Cain interbreed with a non-human. 

       Mutations occur very rarely, unless there are carcinogens present. This is good, because most mutations are dangerous – as seen by the effects of carcinogens. Reproductive cells are protected from mutations by DNA repair mechanisms, which make sure that accidental mutations are rarely passed on to our children. A few do get through – on average sixty-four mutations – though this is tiny compared to the three billion base pairs that are copied perfectly.⁴ However, some of these are so harmful that they result in miscarriage – about 10 percent of pregnancies end this way. So even a small increase in mutation rate would result in a lot more miscarriages.

Dr. D goes on at length to describe just how humanly impossible it would have been for God to actually get the human race going with just two people. Okay, and where does the book of Genesis imply that God can't do anything humanly impossible? This cognitive dissonance would be laughable, did he not with such sincerity lend credence to the atheist hypotheses. Of course, the way heredity works now, in our currently depleted human population, where any two humans on the planet share at least 99.9 per cent of the same genome, does not necessarily speak to how things would have worked back when they shared barely half of that. We don't really have any idea what a genuinely rich gene pool looks like, as the nature of genetic recombination means that some genes go missing with each successive generation, and after several thousands of years, every genome has become depleted to one extent or another--unnatural selection greatly accelerating the process. And since this goes against the collective wisdom of Evolution--which imagines, contrary to all evidence, the gene pool at large becoming progressively richer over time--Dr. D. just isn't going to hear this from his atheist mentors or their disciples.

So whom DID Cain marry? Well, as all scholars have noted, Genesis doesn't say. And why should it? If humanity began with only one man and one woman, and no ape-men to "enrich the gene pool," then of course he married his sister. Anyone with even half a human brain could figure that out with just a little help; there's no need to state the obvious. All we need is the succinct statement of the compiler of Genesis 3 that Eve was "the mother of all living." That leaves no room for any previous races to insert their alleles into the human genome, period. 

Dr. D should have stuck with interpreting and explaining the Bible, and left fairy-tale speculations to those who reject the Genesis account out of theological necessity.