Cross-over Fiction

Fanfic that must never be penned:

You may know her as the bright-eyed Victorian beauty popularized by the American Girl series, but by 1912 Samantha Parkington was a seductive 18-year-old heiress traveling home from her European Grand Tour. Educated, liberated, and uninhibited, she had turned heads across the continent, but not until the voyage home did she meet her match in the capable arms of the son of the 15th Duke of Denver, 22-year-old Lord Peter Wimsey. (Peter, a recent Oxford graduate, has been sent to America by his uncle to forget the flighty but beautiful Barbara.) The ship on which their passions ignite? A vessel as immense as their desires, the majestic, unsinkable Titanic.

Dear Lord, stop us now...

A Happy Thanksgiving to All, and a Thought

A happy Thanksgiving to all our readers.


As the red wine cranberry sauce chills in the fridge and MrsDarwin roasts vegetables (no, we're not dispensing with the bird, but we're heading over to a large gathering to which our contributions will be cranberry sauce, roast veg, stuffing and beer) it occurs to me that while the culinary aspects of Thanksgiving continue to go strong in modern America, the reason for taking a day in November to give thanks for our blessings seems arbitrary -- other than opening the "holiday season".

This is one of the ways in which our modern society has become much removed from the rhythms of agriculture -- and I would argue from the natural rhythms of life generally. In a modern supermarket, all produce is available year round, fresh and ready to eat. Nor is there any real doubt that food will always be there. If you don't have food, the feeling goes, it is because someone is denying you your rights.

In a society in which people are closely dependent on the local harvest, there was real and immediate reason to be thankful once the harvest was safely gathered and stored. Plenty was worth celebrating and being truly grateful for, because there was the ever present possibility that a bad harvest would result in widespread hunger.

As we survey the groaning banquet table this afternoon, we modern Americans would do well to recall that food comes from somewhere -- and indeed that it either comes or it doesn't. One may talk of rights to food and shelter and medical care and such all day long. But at the most basic, human level: our existence and comfort depends on those who till the soil -- and to all others who, dealing in more modern trades, produce the things we have or desire.

Raising The Dead

If, as I did, you spent much of your youth reading about creatures of the past, and especially if you had a chance to frequent museums, as I did the Page Museum at Los Angeles' La Brea Tar Pits, the idea of seeing some of the large land mammals which went extinct within the last 50,000 years brought back to life can't help seeming a bit attractive.

Who could resist the chance to see an American Mastodon (above) or a Smilodon, or "saber-toothed cat" (below) alive again?


Scientists are increasingly thinking that it would in fact be possible to produce live specimens of recently extinct mammals, such as the Woolly Mammoth, which died out in Europe and America (like the above creatures) only around 8,000 B.C.


The cause of these extinctions was probably dual: changing climate after the end of the last glacial period, and excessive hunting by humans. That virtually all large mammal species (among them the American Horse and American Camel) other than the American Bison vanished from North America shortly after the flourishing of human populations here is probably not entirely a coincidence. (A similar pattern occurred in other parts of the world, notably Australia where a number of large marsupial species died out right after the arrival of humans.)

Given how recent these extinctions were, there's fairly "fresh" genetic material still around from them, and fairly close living relatives around to serve as surrogate parents, so of course as genetic technology advances scientists have become increasingly interested in trying to bring back one or more of these recently extinct species by means of using original genetic and cloning type procedures. The New York Times reports:

Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million....

A scientific team headed by Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller at Pennsylvania State University reports in Thursday’s issue of Nature that it has recovered a large fraction of the mammoth genome from clumps of mammoth hair. Mammoths, ice-age relatives of the elephant, were hunted by the modern humans who first learned to inhabit Siberia some 22,000 years ago. The mammoths fell extinct in both their Siberian and North American homelands toward the end of the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago.

Dr. Schuster and Dr. Miller said there was no technical obstacle to decoding the full mammoth genome, which they believe could be achieved for a further $2 million. They have already been able to calculate that the mammoth’s genes differ at some 400,000 sites on its genome from that of the African elephant.

There is no present way to synthesize a genome-size chunk of mammoth DNA, let alone to develop it into a whole animal. But Dr. Schuster said a shortcut would be to modify the genome of an elephant’s cell at the 400,000 or more sites necessary to make it resemble a mammoth’s genome. The cell could be converted into an embryo and brought to term by an elephant, a project he estimated would cost some $10 million. “This is something that could work, though it will be tedious and expensive,” he said.

I must admit, I find this a rather exciting idea. However, it seems that no sooner do people come up with the ability to do something like this than they get other ideas:

The same would be technically possible with Neanderthals, whose full genome is expected to be recovered shortly, but there would be several ethical issues in modifying modern human DNA to that of another human species.

Love the charming understatement of "there would be several ethical issues in modifying modern human DNA to that of another human species", eh?

Oh, but fear not. We've got some deep thinkers here who are working hard to make sure that they don't engage in any research that treads ethically thin ice:

But the process of genetically engineering a human genome into the Neanderthal version would probably raise many objections, as would several other aspects of such a project. “Catholic teaching opposes all human cloning, and all production of human beings in the laboratory, so I do not see how any of this could be ethically acceptable in humans,” said Richard Doerflinger, an official with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Dr. Church said there might be an alternative approach that would “alarm a minimal number of people.” The workaround would be to modify not a human genome but that of the chimpanzee, which is some 98 percent similar to that of people. The chimp’s genome would be progressively modified until close enough to that of Neanderthals, and the embryo brought to term in a chimpanzee.

“The big issue would be whether enough people felt that a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid would be acceptable, and that would be broadly discussed before anyone started to work on it,” Dr. Church said.

I'm sorry, perhaps I shouldn't be flip and derisive, but in the words of my generation: Is this guy for real?

Does he really imagine that the big moral objection that people have to the idea of cloning Neanderthals is just a matter of whether a human egg or chimp egg is used?

The Neanderthals were around until about 25,000 years ago. They made complex tools, wore simple jewelry, made clothes, buried their dead, used fire, and there's fairly strong evidence that they also created art and had equal speech abilities to modern humans. One of the main controversies about Neanderthals is whether they are a separate species in genus homo or a separate sub species within homo sapiens (homo sapiens sapiens vs. homo sapiens neandertalis).

Even leaving aside thorny religious questions (of which I think there are definitely many -- given that I don't think creating genetic knock-offs of modern humans is remotely acceptable, and also given that the evidence is decent that the Neanderthals were themselves religiously aware in some sense, and thus not to be taken as a non-entity in the question) this seems like an appalling idea from a strictly humanitarian perspective. Create one or more "resurrected" members of an extinct group of humans as a scientific and technical stunt? A group of humans which clearly had mental and physical (and I would assume thus emotional) characteristics not so different from our own -- and yet almost certainly different as well.

Would the researchers "own" these Neanderthals? Would they be citizens with their own rights? What kind of life are you setting someone up for by artificially bringing him into the world 25,000 years after those like him died out, and making him a curiosity among a sea of those similar yet not the same?

Don't get me wrong, I can certainly find the idea of meeting other types of humans interesting, but artificially creating them strikes me as not only irresponsible, but inhumane.

Well, I'm apparently not the only one who had some ethical questions about the article, because the New York Times chose to run an editorial about the article. Their ethical concern?

The first mammoth would be a lonely zoo freak, vulnerable to diseases unknown to its ancestors. To live a full and rewarding life, it would need other mammoths to hang out with, a mate to produce a family and a suitable place to live. The sort of environment it is used to — the frigid wastes of Siberia and North America — are disappearing all too fast...

If scientists do bring back a few mammoths, we suspect our warming world won’t look any more hospitable than the one that did them in.

Yes, they ponder whether it would be moral to bring a woolly mammoth into a world with global warming.

Do you ever get the impression there are people with very different philosophical and moral compasses than your own in our country?

Thou Trollop!

While I'm sticking my neck out making observations about the modern phase of the "war between the sexes": I've been darkly amused to note of late in some interdepartmental struggles at work that despite all other changes in social expectation, disparagement of a woman's virtue remains a standard means of attempting to neutralize social rivals.

More specifically, many female co-workers seem to consider it a particularly effective attack to suggest that another female co-worker only gets ahead because she flirts (or, it is darkly implied, does more than flirt) with male managers. Once this weapon is used a few times against a given woman, those circling in for the kill settle down to, "Did you see that v-neck she was wearing today? I mean, that's a veeeeeeeee neck."

While I understand that using sex appeal for gain is socially understood as being far worse than giving it away for free (especially by those who lack it), I get an odd sort of culture shock hearing the same kind of derision vented against immodesty that I used to hear from very buttoned-up Catholic homeschoolers in high school being voiced by women who I know cohabit with their boyfriends or remain open and active on "the scene".

Despite all the fears and boasts that society has lost all sense of propriety, Mrs. Grundy remains active even in modern society.

Dry Skin Bleg

One of the girls has a problem with severe dryness on her hands. We've used Vaseline and Eucerin cream, but neither seems to work for long. Does anyone have any recommendations for an industrial-strength moisturizer suitable for six-year-old skin?

Sexual Selection and Modern Dating

The other day my beautiful wife emailed me a link to this City Journal article entitled "Love in the Time of Darwinism" by Kay S. Hymowitz about the selective pressures which the modern dating environment places on the mating pool. It seems the same author had written another article earlier this year entitled "Child-Man in the Promised Land" about the phenomenon of single men in their twenties and even thirties who, rather than shouldering the "grown up" interests of their forefathers a generation or two before, linger in an extended adolescence of playing video games, watching cartoons and gross-out comedies, and seeking only uncommitted sex rather than marriage on the dating scene. In response to this first article, the author had received numerous emails from young men informing her that the reason that they behaved that way was essentially that the actions of the women on the dating scene left them little other choice. Hymowitz sums up their reaction this way:

Their argument, in effect, was that the SYM [single young male] is putting off traditional markers of adulthood—one wife, two kids, three bathrooms—not because he’s immature but because he’s angry. He’s angry because he thinks that young women are dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling, and gold-digging. He’s angry because he thinks that the culture disses all things male. He’s angry because he thinks that marriage these days is a raw deal for men.

And so this article is basically an investigation into how accurate this complaint is.

As with many such articles, what follows is a mix of anecdote, analysis and mild titillation. Hymowitz essentially takes the position that in a society with no fixed paradigm for what what women can or should have as expectations in dating, women on the modern dating scene often simply choose to expect that men fulfill whatever expectations they happen to have at the moment:

But then, when an SYM walks into a bar and sees an attractive woman, it turns out to be nothing like that. The woman may be hoping for a hookup, but she may also be looking for a husband, a co-parent, a sperm donor, a relationship, a threesome, or a temporary place to live. She may want one thing in November and another by Christmas. “I’ve gone through phases in my life where I bounce between serial monogamy, Very Serious Relationships and extremely casual sex,” writes Megan Carpentier on Jezebel, a popular website for young women. “I’ve slept next to guys on the first date, had sex on the first date, allowed no more than a cheek kiss, dispensed with the date-concept altogether after kissing the guy on the way to his car, fucked a couple of close friends and, more rarely, slept with a guy I didn’t care if I ever saw again.” Okay, wonders the ordinary guy with only middling psychic powers, which is it tonight?

In fact, young men face a bewildering multiplicity of female expectations and desire. Some women are comfortable asking, “What’s your name again?” when they look across the pillow in the morning. But plenty of others are looking for Mr. Darcy. In her interviews with 100 unmarried, college-educated young men and women, Jillian Straus, author of Unhooked Generation, discovered that a lot of women had “personal scripts”—explicit ideas about how a guy should act, such as walking his date home or helping her on with her coat. Straus describes a 26-year-old journalist named Lisa fixed up for a date with a 29-year-old social worker. When he arrives at her door, she’s delighted to see that he’s as good-looking as advertised. But when they walk to his car, he makes his first mistake: he fails to open the car door for her. Mistake Number Two comes a moment later: “So, what would you like to do?” he asks. “Her idea of a date is that the man plans the evening and takes the woman out,” Straus explains. But how was the hapless social worker supposed to know that? In fact, Doesn’t-Open-the-Car-Door Guy might well have been chewed out by a female colleague for reaching for the office door the previous week.

The result, according to Hymowitz's analysis, is thus that men eventually decide that women are essentially out for whatever they happen to want at the moment (which in cases like some of those above certainly appears to be the case) and so decide they might as well seek to find tactics for getting whatever they want out of life (in this case: video games, sex and fart jokes.) The result is what Hymowitz describes as a Darwinian struggle in which both men and women seek tactics to get what they want out of the other without giving commitments or putting up with behaviors they don't want.

While I recognize that any "struggle for survival" has in our culture come to be referred to as "Darwinian", I can't help finding this a rather peculiar use of the term, since to the extent that all of this churn in the dating world is intended to be entirely sterile it really has nothing to do with "reproductive success". Hymowitz says

No, the problem with the Darwinian tenor of the Menaissance is neither antipathy to women’s equality nor a misguided reading of female nature. It is an uncompromising biological determinism that makes no room for human cultivation. We are animals, the new Darwinians seem to say; get used to it. They define manhood as alpha-style toughness and unsentimental promiscuity. And in that spirit, they cultivate manipulation, calculation, and naked (in both the literal and metaphorical sense) self-interest. “Nature doesn’t care about hurting people’s feelings,” explains dating coach Mike Pilinski. “It cares ONLY about reproductive success.”

And yet one of the things that strikes me about this described system is that while it is a struggle shaped by the ways in which certain tactics achieve or fail to achieve their goals, it is a wholly un-natural situation. The whole reason why the scene that the article describes is even able to exist is that modern technology allows people to totally separate (or at least, imagine that they are totally separating) sex from its traditional context of producing offspring.

And in that regard, when I read this sort of thing (which apparently the parents on our local Catholic homeschooling email list are forwarding around with proclamations of how this seals their determination never to allow their children to date) I can't help wondering how real and widespread a phenomenon is actually being described here. I don't doubt that the people interviewed in the article, and in the books and studies quoted in the article, exist. But what percentage of the population has actually experienced anything like this sex-saturated primal struggle to get everything one wants without compromising any of one's own desires? Perhaps it's huge and I've somehow managed to live in a small corner of the Catholic sub-culture where I missed it. However, my impression is that while the dating scene described in the article doubtless exists among people of a certain income and background, in certain areas of the large cities throughout the US, for most people the post-sexual-revolution dating scene is one in which most people end up having sex before marriage, but nonetheless fairly quickly find themselves in long term relationships where they have children, share bank accounts and argue about who left the dishes undone.

There must be, it seems to me, a strong pull towards a moderately "traditional" lifestyle inherent within the human person simply because we are creatures made to associate sex with the closeness necessary to form a family able to nurture the children which naturally result from it. So to the extent that the culture described in this article is widespread (rather than just a good story for scaring parents and exciting those who wish they knew what bars the interviewees were hanging out at), I don't see how it could be sustainable. It's a culture which one can only bring new people into the world by leaving, and as such it seems like something that would naturally burn itself out fairly quickly. Even in the present of birth control technology which is obviously socially disruptive, if people are indeed going to keep reproducing and having anything vaguely resembling a stable family culture, this kind of sub-culture must be either very small or very transitory.

As Christians, our duty is to make it clear through word and example what the sane alternative is.

After a Long Day At Work...

...you might just need a site which allows you to configure mad libs, and provides lots of helpful ones all ready for the tired mind to pour its detritus into.

Personal Ad I enjoy long, chaste walks on the beach, getting printed in the rain and serendipitous encounters with triceps. I really like piña coladas mixed with gin, and romantic, candle-lit mastadons. I am well-read from Dr. Seuss to Mamie Eisenhower. I travel frequently, especially to The Forum, when I am not busy with work. (I am a panderer.) I am looking for chattel and beauty in the form of a Tibetan goddess. She should have the physique of Angelina Jolie and the klein bottle of Jenn. I would prefer if she knew how to cook, clean, and wash my skanks. I know I’m not very attractive in my picture, but it was taken 42 days ago, and I have since become more pejorative.

And since you asked (you did, didn't you?) here's one from our own fevered minds:

Open Letter to Obama NOUN (PLURAL) VERB VERB VERB ENDING IN "ED" YEAR OR HISTORIC EVENT ADJECTIVE SOMETHING BAD NOUN (PLURAL) ADJECTIVE EXCLAMATION ADJECTIVE BAD THING GOOD THING ABSTRACT NOUN TOPIC FAMOUS QUOTE SLOGAN