So. I talked to my friend Route 66. She works for the government in an underground lab on a military base outside of Washington DC, in the field of molecular biology. A lot of the people in her research group were on the human genome project. She was telling me the story of a woman who had an illness which resulted in the doctor's deciding that she needed a partial lobotomy. They gave her one, but it had unintended consequences. She felt like there was another being close to her, a presence that was right next to her skin. Sometimes it was below her, sometimes next to her, but she couldn't get rid of it and obviously it was freaking her out. The doctors and scientists took careful note of when she felt the presence and where it was, and they were finally able to determine that the presence was really just her own self, and the partial lobotomy had adjusted her awareness of self so that it wasn't working quite right and she imagined herself to be some several inches to the right or left of where she actually ended. In doing this, and knowing what part of the brain she'd lost, the doctors and scientists were able to narrow down the part of the brain that controls the sense of self- where you imagine your "self"- (your soul, if you will) in relation to your body. Which is really weird because if you can isolate the self (and distort it), what else could you possibly isolate and distort?

Route 66 was also telling me how amazing it is how close the DNA of humans and chimpanzees are. I mean, you've all heard "98%", but think about that... think about the billions and billions of base pairs that go into the human genome... you could go for a million base pairs and they'd all be the same. So what makes humans different from apes? The church wants to know- what gives humans a soul, while chimps do not have one? What separates man from the animals? Well that's a good question... a big difference between humans and apes is the fact that chimps have 24 chromosomes and humans have 26. Not too long ago everyone thought we had 24, but they figured out it was 26. So 26 chromosomes, eh? That means that in the past, the last two chromosome pairs must have split in the case of humans, or maybe more likely fused in the case of chimps. The Catholic church says that this fact could reconcile the Church with evolution, because perhaps it was at this time that God imbued man with a soul, making him in his own image, and leaving the chimps without one. This might suggest that the capacity for a soul was coded into those base pairs at the center of the last two chromosomes, which were destroyed when they merged with the other ones in chimps to make 24. Well, that simply means that the soul, or at least the coding for it, can be found on a particular chromosome pair, hidden in a particular sequence of genes.

Pause.


HOW FUCKED UP WOULD THAT BE?!?!!?!?


So if it were indeed true that the coding for your soul was part of your genetic make-up, you could obstensibly figure out where it was coded. Then you could obstensibly test your theory by modifying that part of the genome.

Or removing it.

I wonder who would be the first to volunteer for that experiment?


Moral of the story:
1. Science is amazing
2. Though the human mind is infinitely curious, there are some things that we never, ever, really want to know.
3. Route 66 is like the most interesting person ever


*note*. Route 66 and I decided that, upon the isolation of the soul from the human genome, we might be tempted to throw ourselves out the nearest window/off the nearest cliff. If we can be restrained, we might move into the mountains into caves and never speak to anyone ever again. You are welcome to join us as long as you stay at an appropriate distance such that none of us ever catches sight of any of the others ever again.

wow, that's really interesting.
» dave on 2006-10-17 11:31:13

apparently we share 50% of the same dna as bananas, too.
i'm scared now! one of my english teachers always suspected our souls were in our genes. but do they still get affected by our environment? i hope so.
» sarah (203.62.10.3) on 2006-10-18 12:39:06

Hmmmmm
Does that mean if we removed 50% of our DNA, we could become a banana?
» papakerbs (71.229.172.142) on 2006-10-18 02:42:43

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