LIFE BEGINS WITH A DANCE

Ova:  ballerina

The first ceremony at the beginning of a new life is a dance in which the ovum, clothed in gauze tissues, spins in slow tour jete until she is met by a corps of danseurs, a beady little horde with whipping tails.   

(The Corps de Ballet from "Drake Lake.")

If this seems like fantasy, it is.  A more developed version is in a book:  Birthing Ourselves Into Being, by Baraka Bethany Elihu.

An animated medical version is at:    http://highered.mheducation.com/sites/0072507470/student_view0/chapter28/animation__maturation_of_the_follicle_and_oocyte.html

The sperm do their seeking dance in spite of knowing that there will be only one premier danseur who makes his final pas de deux with the prima donna.  Shazam!  Fertilization !!  Creation!!  A new blob!  A new story.

One celled ocean animals.

In what way is this a ceremony?  It is an event with a beginning, middle and end; it is focused on desire; it has meaning; it is a process that confirms something very old that will persist and sustain life for a long time in the future -- we hope.  It is patterned in a way that can be elaborated in acts today, maybe consciously and maybe unconsciously echoing this first dance.

Beginning with this little metaphor -- which is actual except for calling it an art form when it’s biology -- makes the point that each cell in the human body has its own “mind” and seeks its own ends in its own way.  Putting aside for now the knowledge that the first "creatures" developed from substances and potentials becoming patterns on the planet, and were "alive" in the moment they began to choose their own way.

We remember with molecules . . .  somehow.

An artist's version of a hippocampus, imaginary,

neither like the organ nor like the sea creature, both of which exist.

It appears to science that memory and intention originate and are preserved in cells, maybe individually and sometimes in organs, which are organized cells that can specialize, for instance, the hippocampi -- two little seahorses, one just above each ear.  (On the inside of the brain of course.)  When these little organs begin to fail, you will lose your memory.

When a memory is recalled, it doesn’t come whole, but rather is re-assembled from parts stored in cells all over the brain.  Responding to the connectome, the smells and colors and tastes come together into meaning.  We don’t know exactly how it works, but we do know that every time something is recalled, it is not perfectly re-assembled, but may include bits that don’t belong or drop out other bits that actually could be proven actual at the time.  Without knowing this recent understanding, when we enact familiar ceremonies we reassure ourselves of what is there and what we believe to be true.  Memories of repeated acts and sense memories help us be ourselves.

This is the most basic level of human function from which all the rest emerges over time.  It begins at conception.  From then on the cells are responding to the environment -- the inside of the mother through the interface of the placenta, and its flow of nutrients and hormones.  But then as the cells begin to organize into organs, awareness of movement, temperature, and sound expand the level of memory and interpretation.

The question of whether an embryo can feel pain is crucial but puzzling:  “The neural regions and pathways that are responsible for pain experience remain under debate but it is generally accepted that pain from physical trauma requires an intact pathway from the periphery, through the spinal cord, into the thalamus and on to regions of the cerebral cortex including the primary sensory cortex the insular cortex and the anterior cingulated cortex. Fetal pain is not possible before these necessary neural pathways and structures have developed.”  This is organ-detected pain, defined by the brain.  If there is no organ, no brain, it's not the same.

We already know that individual cells can move towards or away or be changed by outside forces.   One-celled creatures eat and shit. They go to light and avoid bad "smells."  Early fetuses suck their thumbs as soon as they have thumbs, have erections as soon as they have penises.

We seem to need to know when the baby is “human.”  “Quickening” is when the mother first feels the baby moving, usually about halfway through the pregnancy.  This is taken by some cultures as the entry of the soul into the baby.  They call it "ensoulment."  If the mother drinks too much coffee, the fetus will have the jitters.

Religion, politics, economics, individual circumstances, take over at this point or shortly before.  Technical forces enter into what happens.  The fact of a sonogram, the ability to do surgery on an embryo while it is still in the uterus, the capacity to assay the molecules in fluids in minute amounts so as to change them, the ability to analyze a genome for flaws so as to compensate for them -- all these things are in a vague way cultural ceremonies that reflect desire for survival, an invitation to a new being.  “Baby showers” are such a ceremony.

The baby ceremonies like baptism are only the beginning of a long trajectory of change with recognized points that seem important to the culture.  We are late understanding that a genome is a suite of potentials, like a great cathedral organ, not a script.  A person emerges from the moment of fertilization and begins a series of "births" and celebrations.  Even death does not end the liturgies of memory, the impact of the choices made.

As I write, the radio tells me about a tribal ceremony of “reburial” returning remains collected as bodies of American Indians to their tribes.  They have been in drawers in museums, waiting for study.  New strategies of analysis are always being devised, but the People are determined to put these bones back in the earth now.  There will be more song than dance, drums like heartbeats, making skeletons real for the moment.  A fantasy like the Dance of Conception, but less scientific and more the conviction that place and genome are important to the tribal community.

Old myths establish that one leaves life in a boat with a man named Charon to steer the person across the River Styx.  Perhaps before one comes to be alive, before that Dance of the Ovum, one arrives from a Blue Sea with a woman rowing hard.  Some choose not to come ashore.  Storybook artists depict unborn babies as having little wings, but it's plain from the sonograms that they really have fins.

PONDERING CONTEMPORARY SEX

Indulge me.  I might not agree with the statements below tomorrow or next year.  But it seems important to think about them.

CHROMOSOMAL MEIOSIS

Two strands of chromosomes, one from “male,” meaning the gender-determining chromosome has an X gene and a Y gene.  It’s also possible but rare to have an XXY or an XYY.  The outcome will not be good, but not as bad as YY or YYY.  The conceptus cannot survive without at least one X.

CHIMERICAL MEIOSIS

Occasionally two sperm may get into one ovum.  The outcome, if there is a viable zygote, would be unpredictable.  An interventional chimera is produced when the nuclear chromosomes of one woman are introduced into the de-nucleated cell machinery of another woman.  (I don’t know what happens with two nuclei but it is probably not good.)  The purpose is to remove the nuclear chromosomes of the mitochondria, which are cells within the cells and occasionally faulty.  Mitos have no secondary chromosomal input from a male.  (It’s also possible for the conceptus to be conceived in a petri dish, then implanted and gestated in a womb that is not the “biological” mother.)

We know that infant cells can migrate into a woman’s body or that an incomplete conceptus or twin can be absorbed into the developing conceptus.  Normally they persist as just a cell mass, but sometimes begin to develop at adolescence, even in a male body.

THE ECONOMY OF THE BIG EGG AND THE LITTLE MIGRATING SPERM

The female must produce the egg and take to term the conceptus.  The male only has to inject the triggering sperm.  Whatever helps the female to maintain the pregnancy and then protect the infant will persist over time, simply because any without advantages have worse chances.  The male sperm is best served by being planted many times in many “gardens.”  But if a man chooses his receptor carefully, is protective and contributes to the healthy gestation and the subsequent infant’s successful growth, then his babies will survive.

INFANCY

Every baby is born into a unique culture, environment, expectations, and so on.  Certain abilities to learn from the situation are probably genetically sourced and will help babies to adapt to some families and cultures but not others.  If the match is happy, the baby will thrive.

MIXED MESSAGES

Not every baby has the expected binary sexual organs.  A small percentage may have both, some might have neither, some might have a mix, a confusion.  Surgical and hormonal intervention is possible and some may choose to be a “woman with a penis” or a man with a vulva/vagina.  Fertility might or might not be related, depending on the status of the generating organs.  A penis is a delivery system, a uterus is a container.  The crucial creative organs are testes and ovaries and their internal support systems, whether organs or hormones.

PSYCHOLOGY OF MALE/FEMALE

If the family and/or culture’s expectations do not match the learning style or temperament or other “hard wiring” of the baby that might not have anything to do with sex, the baby’s sexual organs may not match the situation of the baby’s cultural expectations and the person may end up wanting to change, maybe by impersonation or nowadays with surgery.

ABERRATIONS

Varying from the norm in any culture means “difference” but since humans wear clothes, it is possible to hide or contradict some differences, therefore awareness of them might be low.  In some cultures a variation like twins is considered dangerous and the twins are killed.  In others, twins are highly valued.  In some cultures (this is SO tricky) twins are so valued that their sacrifice is considered efficacious in propitiating the gods.

This applies to some imagined lines of development (the children of bad people carrying “bad seed” or the children of good people inheriting high expectations) which loads up the simple ovum/sperm seams of persons with lots of cultural embroidery. 

CHILDHOOD

Because human babies are born unfinished, they must be sheltered in early childhood.  If the process of forming oneself has the added burden of adapting to sexual demands by adults, the child may struggle lifelong to overcome a felt incompleteness, which some describe as the shattering of the self.  After early childhood the burden of carrying a baby to term or competing with other males for access to a female is so heavy that humans develop in at least two more stages.  First they must unfold who they are and fit into their situation.  Some cultures require children to begin to work at this point, even something so arduous as underground mining.  The second stage, adolescence, is to become sexual in some way, which means managing appearance and drives. 

ADOLESCENTS

If adolescents are unsupported and unguided by the culture, the attrition will be high.  Mothers who are too young produce faulty babies even if they survive themselves.  Boys who are too young to compete are often victims of violence.  Sometimes they are unprotected even within the family and sometimes their drive to perform takes them into danger.  Neither is likely to have the stability to raise babies.  In cultures where youngsters reproduce, there is usually a supporting extended family.  If not, many just don’t survive.  This is not a matter of morality, but simple lack of what is needed.

COMING OF AGE

The last (4th) stage of maturation is post-adolescent, around the twenties.  In this time the most recently evolved brain capacities “come online”  -- both in terms of knowledge and emotional stability.  At this point a human being is able to manage a vast tapestry of cultural possibilities as well as personal decisions and practices.  They might choose to deny parts of themselves, transform other parts, intensify and develop others, or simply jump cultures.  

At this point the binaries of male/female are only a beginning for the multitude of possibilities along several spectrums of measurement: desire, desirability, awareness of other practices, conformity to context, faithfulness, desire for children, displacement to other kinds of creativity and so on.  

HOMOSEXUALITY

Confusion about the reference of this word is rampant.  In Biblical terms it probably had more to do with onanism, since survival of the tribe depended on willingness to reproduce.  Contrast that with the situation of China which is equally draconian about over-reproduction since population density threatens them.  In modern USA we have far more children than there are people responsible enough to protect and rear them, so it makes sense to encourage adoption by gays and het contraception. 

The real threat to “morality” is not same-sex marriage but incomplete relationships that produce children but abandon them, whether or not the relationship had legal standing.  We are only beginning to explore what the legalities of biological parents might be, whether it is in terms of “shoots and leaves” or in terms of legal sperm donors who have created hundreds of biological descendants.  Nor do we know what to do about biological mothers who do not bond psychologically, or those on whom the effect of the pregnancy hormone surge derails them. These aberrations may prevent survival of offspring, but they also damage the larger society, which is what justifies intervention.

It appears that gay men are created in the womb in a number of mammal species (though no one has identified a gay "gene") and persist genetically because they contribute to the survival of the group rather than the individual.  How they might make their contribution as "uncles" probably depends more on the culture, but often is through artistic creativity or other humanities.  They might also be athletes, mechanics, farmers or cowboys.  There is no "build" or "voice" or "gestures" that identify gays.  

Lesbians seem to be more influenced by the culture, probably more in the nourishing, protective maternal style but maybe not.  Since actual fertilization is not necessarily voluntary, women have evolved to survive where they are, even if it is an imprisonment and against their personal nature.

COMMODIFICATION

In a capitalistic and status/class based society, the culture will impose, evoke, and reinforce even such things as sexual characteristics.  Hugh Hefner’s success was as much a product of selling high-end booze, expensive cars, music, fireplaces and smoking jackets as it was sexual liberty and access to bunnies.  The real porn was the advertising.  "Gay" is a market.  Homosexuality is a major Netflix category. “Special” places, clothing, tools, etc. are all pitched to gender differences, sexual markers, and invented categories.  The appeal of them might not correlate with children: skinny women with breast implants who use many chemical cosmetics and get pregnant late in life are not so likely to have the best outcomes.  But the commodification offered to the woman who can pay for ovum donors, in vitro fertilization, mitochondrial transplant, and surrogate gestation has got to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Even that is dwarfed by the kind of commodification called “criminalization.”  Managing incarcerated prisoners is worth billions.  All the adjunct functions like methadone clinics or anger management groups have a sexual valence to them, or why would the media be so obsessed with prison rape?  How else could things like the criminalizing of carrying condoms be justified when they are so clearly beneficial?  The criminalization of drugs is deeply entwined with the criminalization of sex.

These thoughts are in part triggered by reading "The Evolution of Human Sexuality" by Donald Symons. (1979)  It's packed with challenges to people who have dominated the field, maybe unjustifiably.  Anyway, time for a re-think.

THE EASTER OVUM

It used to be that one only knew one’s origin was one’s mother.  You might have two or more mothers:  one to give birth and several to give care.  Some of those mothers might be male. The identity of the inseminating father was ambiguous.   Now we know and can prove the identities of the fathers -- the only problem is making them cough up that child support check.  That’s one cynical take on modern society but it certainly is not the only one confusing us.  

With modern medical technology, a person may be conceived in a petri dish, implanted -- not necessarily in the womb of the ovum producer and maybe even in the womb of the grandmother or another surrogate mother (no one has been brought to term inside a chimpanzee that we know of, but it might be possible since cow ova can be carried in rabbit wombs), carried to term and birthed either in the natural progression of things or with a chemical trigger, and delivered either with a lot of muscle effort or with a knife.

But now there’s an additional mother possibility: your mitochondria mother.  To review, we all recognize that the double helix of the chromosomes unzips and separates, one side in the mother (ovum) and one side in the father (sperm).  The father’s side is only that little half-zipper but it has a propeller attached so it will travel.  It’s a biological Zodiac boat.  The mother’s side gets the house: the cell, because it stays and waits.  All the sperms with their code message go buzzing up the Great Canal and one breaks into the house.  He is welcome and zipped-up with the waiting half of the 23 chromosomes.

There is furniture in that House of Ovum, little blobs of what might once have been one-celled animals who got pulled through the wall of the motherhouse.  The most crucial inclusions are the mitochondria, which were probably pulled in long ago when an Ovum went it alone as a bacteria.  The mitos are power paks with their own set of 37 genes on one chromosome: Neversplit batteries.  They do not unzip and rezip.  The Ovum, when its nucleus is re-zipped, quickly transforms into a blastosphere and then an embryo, a fetus, an infant, and a toddler . . . according to its own 23,000 gene pairs.  But it is dependent on the energy of those mitos.  If -- as in giant airliners -- the batteries, the mitos, have probs, the animal will suffer.  One in 6,000 people has something wrong with their mito genes.  They don’t burst into flames, but they have trouble and may abort.  

One can only inherit mito genes from one’s mother.  I’m rather proud of mine.  My mother was an energetic woman, though her mother was a little compromised by her environment.  My mother’s mother’s mother was a vigorous person.  My niece does not have the same mito genes that I have, because our relationship is through her father, my brother.  But she has plenty of vigor and she is tough-minded as well.  She’s working on graduate degrees in animal fertility, teaching as an adjunct, running a business shearing sheep and camelids, and doing AI.  She’s proud of her calves, though none of them have her genes.  She WAS the inseminator.  She fistfucks cows, right out in the public and with fertile consequences.  

She would easily understand this next part of the story.  Nuclear transfer is in principle one of the easiest methods of genetic engineering. In this case, they are talking about taking a donor egg and then transferring the nuclear genetic material from the parents' fertilized egg into that donor egg -- that is, moving the re-zipped chromosomes into a new house with better furniture.  In more medical language, it's taking the cytoplasm from one woman (including all the mitochondria in that cell) and grafting into it a whole diploid genome from a cell with two other parents. Mitos have their own separate chromosome, only one with 37 genes that change only by mutation, never by re-zipping.

There are many other complexifications with chromosome codes in the nucleus, which are more varied than anyone expected.  An excellent overview is at  http://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html  This new technique doesn’t change any of those things and will not “fix” problems with the nuclear chromosomes, whether those that determine the actual structuring of the embryo or those that control the unfolding plan as the baby gestates.  Only recently have researchers realized that each “pair” of genes on the zipped-up chromosomes do a little negotiating between them to decide which one will be dominant or whether they will compromise in some way.  Also, we now see that there are “epi-genes”, a kind of sleeve around each chromosome that may influence how things turn out.  It’s possible that “living” in a different house from the one where the female half of the zipped-up chromosome was made will seriously affect the nature and development of the embryo.  It’s a sort of micro-case of an unique individual adjusting to a new environment.

This neglects the influence of the interchange with the gestating mother, who is sending chemical messengers like hormones as well as oxygen and nourishing metabolites.  Humans are not perfectly designed and stamped out but are organic art forms with many variations, including that of the beholding party who tries to interpret what they see before them.

This is Easter when the Northern Hemisphere is teeming with recombinant fertility as well as budding mitosis.  Whether you think it’s about a rabbit, a God fertilizing a virgin in order to create a Son -- only to have the beholders kill Him, or whether you feel it’s all about Easter egg rolls and marshmallow peeps, the actual planetary event -- which is the tipping of the earth’s axis -- goes on without any control from us.  In the past we’ve only been able to behold it with our feet on the ground and that’s a good thing, just as poetic as watching from outer space.  Our imaginations run wild.  A cave becomes a birth canal for a rebirth.  Winter becomes the grieving of a mother who has lost her daughter to the dark sex of the God of Death, and then Spring is the rejoicing of that mother when her daughter returns.  They don’t tell us that Proserpine is pregnant, but my guess is that she is and will give birth in the fall, harvest-time.

I just watched Ridley Scott’s sci-fi thriller, Prometheus, about the origin of the Alien creature.  It is "riddled" with puns and metaphors about death, birth, insemination, gestation, and the nature of the human being.  An android can have sex but not babies.  It has no chromosomes.  This belongs to the preceding “Endarkenment” of Good Friday.  The movie begins with a dark swirling video of broken double helixes and ends with Lizbeth going off on a new adventure with the android’s head (a computer) in her gym bag.  Ken Kesey:  “The need for mystery is greater than the need for answers.”  We won't run out of mystery.