Who's Your Mommy

While it is not my objective to raise alarm, I fervently believe that some of you just didn't get the memo back in 2000. Many voters seemed to be laboring under the misguided impression that the governorship of Texas must produce leaders with savvy and keen executive skills. We are incubating another one for a presidential run with all the usual players and groomers even now, and while you are free to vote for whomever tickles your electoral fancy in 2012 or 2016, be advised that the spoils of any gubernatorial race in Texas do not necessarily go to the sharpest cheese on the cracker.

Somewhere along the way (and it's probably detailed in the Texas Constitution, but I don't have enough interest to look it up) the powers of the governor were severely restricted, resulting in a rather weak office compared to other states. At Governors' Summer Camp, all the other governors make fun of Texas.

The real power behind the throne lies with the Lieutenant Governor. This person is, more often than not, wicked smart, hugely influential, a very effective political animal and is voted in year after year, even though people have a hard time remembering who he is unless he's been in office long enough to get a museum in his name. He (or she, although there hasn't been a "she" so far) is not the running mate of the governor and can keep his job no matter what clown is living in the mansion. If you ever read the late Molly Ivins, you already know what I'm saying.

Thus, current and former governors of Texas have seldom been required to possess more than a little affable, folksy charm to get the job. Although, every now and again, a prototypical candidate is so repellent that even Texans are offended and they elect a smart and effective leader by default. Governor Ann Richards, for example, narrowly slipped into the governorship after her opponent shared his happy youthful memories of his trips to "Boys' Town" across the Mexican border, and actually described himself as being "serviced."

Sadly, the rogue brainiac lasts only as long (about half a term) as it takes Texas to get annoyed all over again with a governor who knows big words and the office reverts to the aforementioned standard. Texas' current governor is carrying on that grand tradition.

Among his more admirable qualities is that he is follically blessed. So dense and attractive is the Governor's coif that he is known throughout the land as Governor Good Hair (thanks to Molly), or just plain Good Hair, if you don't stand on formality. Good Hair is equally gifted with the same sort of rhetorical command that you may have observed in another well-known governor from Texas.

So, when I heard Good Hair state that he believes in genetics, but does NOT believe in evolutionary theory, I filed the contradiction away in a mental folder marked "Don't dwell on this or you will begin to despair that some of our leaders are not even as smart as a 5th grader. And no disrespect intended toward the nation's 5th graders."

I always love it when politicians make these sorts of affirmative pronouncements – as if their agreement that the earth rotates on its axis or their disbelief in climate change gives natural phenomenon its legitimacy. Such smug certainty is almost admirable, if they only had the sense God gave a walnut in the first place.

Anyway, it wasn't until I was having a conversation with my friend Louis, and he brought up Good Hair's revelation, that I felt my nostrils start to flare in an agitated sort of way, as they do when I'm trying to form a Big Thought.

Louis is a Ph.D. candidate in Paleontology. His brain is so illumined that you can see it glow in his cranium. About all I ever have to contribute to a chat with him is a nod and any of the following exclamations: "I did NOT know that!"; "You don’t say!"; "I've never heard that before!" and "Wow!"

Fortunately, Louis is a patient person and I suspect he's used to dumbing everything down a notch for others. But he brought up a very interesting question that even I understood. If Good Hair believes in genetics, how can he, simultaneously, believe in the biblical account of the Immaculate Conception and not come up with a female god every time?

You want to sit with that a moment? Yes? Moving on...

Now your first response might be a profound sense of relief reading that Good Hair accepts genetics (but not evolution). After all, scientists across the globe live in perpetual fear that the Governor of Texas will denounce a scientific principle and decades of research will get flushed down the test tube.

However, your second thought may be "Huh?" How does a belief in genetics get separated from evolution, and why can't you get a male god out of an immaculate conception?

You know how this works already. I know you know, because I know you are not now, nor have you ever been, a governor of Texas. You most likely respect some sort of logic and order in your thinking. But just as a little life science refresher...

In normal reality, human-kind requires a male and a female (or, at least, their gametes) to produce offspring. Each parent has 23 paired chromosomes, which are a package of genes composed of DNA (the chemical that carries the genetic instructions for making the organism) in the nucleus of their cells; 22 pairs are essentially identical, but the 23rd pair is different. In females, the 23rd pair (those that encode the ovum and sperm, also known as the "germ" cells) has two like chromosomes called "XX", but in males, the pair has dissimilar chromosomes, "XY".

Almost all of the cells in the body replicate and divide over and over through a process called mitosis. The germ cells, however, take steps in a cellular dance called meiosis, whereby a reduction in the amount of genetic material occurs. One parent cell produces four daughter cells during two successive nuclear divisions with only one round of DNA replication in four stages of nuclear division...follow that? They replicate only once, but divide twice.

Imagine having a complete zipper, duplicating both halves of the parent zipper to produce two daughter zippers, and unzipping each of those to make 4 half zippers. It's a crude illustration and not entirely accurate, but you get the idea.

Daughter cells have half the number of chromosomes found in the original parent cell and with crossing over, the chromosomes trade segments of themselves with each other by cutting the zipper into pieces and recombining. (I need big charts with bright colors and large arrows to grok this; check out the diagram at www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ if you need the same.)

The end result of meiosis after all the daughter cells are counted up are X,X,X,X (ovum) or X,Y,X,Y (sperm). The sex of the offspring is entirely determined by which swimmer romances the ovum first. An XX pairing results in female offspring; an XY pairing yields males.

Mitosis (the replication and division of cells) and meiosis (the replication and division of reproductive cells) are observable events. You can watch this process under a microscope. A common procedure like in vitro fertilization proves over and over that meiosis is how we get more of us.

At any rate, it's a good thing that Good Hair is a supporter of genetics, because there isn't another explanation for the phenomenon of sexual reproduction that doesn't include a cabbage patch or a stork. Other than immaculate conception, of course (or "supernatural generation" if you prefer a literary term) and we'll get to that in a few.

Because each fertilization is a brand new combo, species change over time due to random fluctuations of the appearance of different genes in a population. These fluctuations may become fixed, whether or not they have any real adaptive purpose. For example, the Governor's extraordinary bounty of hair (an anomaly among male legislators of a certain age with domes often as smooth as the granite capitol under which they labor), may become more frequent among future Texas politicians if he continues to reproduce successfully. To phrase it more precisely – genetic drift from no hair among a population of legislators to follicular surplus.

You are different from your parents; your children are different from you, and so on, backward and forward throughout the timeline of any species. Genetic drift is one of the pillars of evolutionary theory, and while many factors impact the direction of the drift, it starts with the obvious fact (although, not obvious to Good Hair) that two individuals (absent cloning) produce kids that are not replicas of them, and might even express characteristics not seen in either parent. This reshuffling of the genetic deck allows for a few surprises in the next generation.

I suspect that what Good Hair was trying to express was that he believes the biblical account of Genesis (coming from the Latin meaning origin, evolution, creation, formation, coming into being) and not in any theory that life on our planet began in a rich soup of chemicals. He believes that first there were a couple of fully formed humans made from earth and THEN genes took over.

Well...alrightey. He's trying to throw in a little science with his faith and make them jibe. But Good Hair runs down that secular road at great peril, because he has painted himself into a theological corner. And that is, immaculate conception.

Good Hair, unwittingly (as if it could be otherwise), snagged himself on an ancient annoyance. That is, as much as some religions have tried every kind of trick to drum women out of God's inner circle, they have to concede, at the very least, that conception requires a female vessel. It is a vessel over which many politicians and religious leaders in America attempt to exert control. But until governors of Texas can produce new humans by commingling their DNA with, say, a chink of mortar from the Alamo, they're still stuck with us.

Now, scholars have long pondered the occurrence of supernatural generation - children given by the gods - in mythology and the history of the ancient world. Accounts of mating between divine beings (usually males, but not always) and humans (usually females, but not always) are common in Greek, Roman, Babylonian and Hindu myths, among others. The male seed can arrive in many forms – a dove, the wind and even, in an old Scottish tale, the ashes of the dead. Hercules, Apollo, and Jupiter were all implicated in their time. And Mars was named so frequently as a supernatural lover that one suspects that some maidens just took to saying, "Mars did this to me!" to avoid awkward questions.*

We are most familiar with the idea of an immaculate conception from the Bible. There is a lot of theological wrangling on this point with Catholics having a differing interpretation than Protestants, and Protestants having differing interpretations between denominations. But suffice it to say, we're talking about a baby conceived by a woman sidestepping the usual prerequisite of intercourse.

In Chapter 1 of his book of the Gospels, Luke describes the visit from the Angel of the Annunciation, Gabriel (no relation, but thank you for asking) to the innocent Mary. Gabriel explains to her that she will conceive a Son of God. No mention is made of chromosomes by Luke, but we are led to believe that some sort of Divine essence entered Mary's womb, absent any usual biological ingredients.

And that's fine. We've been content with Luke for almost two thousand years, and there are many poetic interpretive spins on the Immaculate Conception. It was once explained to me that the chaste Mary was bringing forth a pure ideal into the world in the form of Enlightened Consciousness, so the conception was immaculate in Spirit, if not in actual biology. I'm not opposing this. I wasn't there, and Providence doesn't owe me an explanation, anyway.

But once you bring genetics into it, you've got some major theological overhauls to perform.

Good Hair's view is that the Supreme Being is, naturally, male. But He is not a human male and does not have chromosomes to contribute to the project. Absent the "Y", all we have left is Mary's "X" as the female contribution. Thus, and I'm not dissing faith, but as Louis pointed out to me, if you also believe in genetics, all you can hope to produce from an immaculate conception are females.

The good news is that Mary's X chromosome means that she's passed down the spark of her own Divinity around the globe. The bad news (to Good Hair and his ilk, anyway) is that her perfect baby born in a manger is the Daughter of God.

Genetic testing of a child resulting from an immaculate conception will not prove up paternity. But it will prove two things: 1) who's your mommy and 2) you're a girl.

Thank you, Governor Good Hair, for bringing that to our attention.

* Reference: "Ancient Faiths and Modern" by Thomas Inman (reprint 1993).

Noted on a bumper sticker sure to thrill the engineer in your life: Drinking and Calculus Don't Mix: - Please Don't Drink and Derive.

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Ingrid lives on San Juan Island.

While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

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