The Eternal Perspective

“I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

I think it’s fair to say God rarely gets a fair shake from any but his own.

If any being in all the cosmos has ever been so second-guessed, given zero benefit of the doubt, or had the worst of all possible motives attributed to him, it is the Creator and Sustainer of our universe. Some of the more vicious attacks on God’s character are merely laughable when closely analyzed. We easily dismiss them as ignorant blathering.

Other critiques feel like they might have more substance. The Christian attempting a defense for his faith finds himself with a difficult task.

Thrashing Around in the Dark

That’s not because there is no explanation of God’s ways, of course. Often, it’s because we know so little about both God and the nature of reality that we are thrashing around in the dark.

Some of the big questions are more sensitive and personal than others, particularly those involving the death of children. (I say that with some limited understanding and sympathy. I know what it feels like to lose a child in the womb. Then again, it wasn’t my womb.) A few years ago, I tried to formulate an answer to an Anonymous Asks question about why God might allow birth defects. My response was necessarily speculative, but I started with a thought experiment: How would you feel if God overruled every bad decision you ever made? The answer was not as obvious as we might initially imagine. As awful as a fallen world can be at times, sometimes things are the way they are because they could not be any other way. Correcting them might actually make the world a worse place. In contemplating such issues, I often find the mercy of God peeks through in the strangest and most unexpected contexts. Here’s yet another example that I came across just last night.

Muller’s Ratchet

Scientists have documented and discussed the fertility problem associated with cloning for over sixty years. The problem even has a name: Muller’s Ratchet. You may get a rough idea of the issue if you’re old enough to have ever dubbed one cassette tape from another and noticed the inevitable loss of audio quality, or photocopied a photocopy of a photocopy and noticed the text deform and degrade generation after generation. By the tenth iteration, it’s usually barely legible, notwithstanding the quality of modern photocopiers. The same problems occur genetically when you clone mammals. At some point, the copies are so far removed from the original that they can’t sustain independent existence. Scientists understand this well.

What’s new is that someone actually ran an experiment to determine how many times you could clone a clone before encountering total genetic collapse. Developmental biologist Teruhiko Wakayama and his team found the answer. They cloned a mouse in 2005, then cloned the clone, then the clone of the clone and so on. Two decades, 1,200 mice and 30,000 cloning attempts. The breaking point was 58 generations. Every mouse born in that last generation died within days.

What was happening was this: disadvantageous mutations accumulated across generations, because in cloning there is no opportunity for genomes to mix with those of another population. Geneticist Hermann Muller pointed this out in the early 1960s: without sexual recombination, negative mutations only accumulate. There is no mechanism to remove them. The “ratchet” only turns in one direction, always downward. Entropy.

So then, the upper limit for copying copies of living beings without introducing new genes into the package is no longer a matter of theory. God designed mammals to breed sexually. Humans are mammals.

A Genetic Death Spiral

Here is the more interesting part. Modern humans are also trapped in a genetic death spiral, but ours is self-inflicted. We have a problem similar to the later generations of cloned mice. Negative mutations are accumulating in the human genome, and we have inadvertantly shut off the mechanism God designed to eliminate them.

In God’s design, a baby is the product of a shuffled combination of DNA received from both parents. The “shuffling” is quality control, keeping the genome stable. Negative mutations concentrate over generations until an offspring is so damaged it is unable to reproduce itself, flushing those mutations out of the general population for good. There is therefore some long-term value for our species in the occasional birth defect. How about that? While not pleasant for the children in whom they occur, birth defects so severe that they prevent damaged genes from passing on to the next generation are the mechanism by which the human population purges itself of negative mutations. God built humanity as a whole to be remarkably resilient even in a fallen world. The cost is borne on our behalf by a few unfortunate individuals.

Well, all that is how things transpired for most of human history, and the human genome stayed healthy. Until modern medicine, modern sanitation and modern food systems. Then we started to run into trouble.

Kinder Than God

People are always trying to be kinder than God, or maybe we’re just more concerned with the immediate than with the long term. Because we do not have God’s eternal perspective, pain that’s happening in front of us right now is way more important to us than hypothetical pain that may come down the road from interfering with natural processes. The long-term results of accumulated short-term thinking do not look good for our prospects. A woman who commented on this subject confirmed. Her own child is genetically damaged. She thoroughly understands the long-term issues at stake. Nevertheless, she plans to use every available medical means to make his life as long and as ordinary as possible. If he marries and passes on damaged genes, so be it. I tend to agree with her maternal instincts, but it highlights the problem before us.

Vox Day’s The Frozen Gene documents where the human race is standing as a whole genetically right now. Modern medicine in the Western world keeps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people alive with genetics so compromised they would normally die off. Many of these are now able to reproduce when under normal circumstances their genes would self-cancel. That means their compromised genetics stay in the population and continue to circulate. Western societies have effectively disabled the selective component that makes sexual recombination effective at purging negative mutations from the population. Every generation, each person born brings about 70 new mutations. Of these, something like 2.2 are notably hurtful, but with modern sanitation, food and medical care, none of these go away. The trend toward genetic instability throughout the population is inexorably downward. We are literally killing ourselves with kindness, or perhaps by prioritizing the short-term over the long-term. The human genome is effectively frozen. The fraction of genetically damaged humans purged in each generation by selection has shrunk to near zero. Like the cloned mice, the passage of time can only make the species worse, not better.

The Eternal Perspective

I find the whole subject fascinating, and a reason to praise God. If Muller’s Ratchet represents an accurate understanding of human genetics, then we have a God who not only built into us a regulatory system that would preserve us as a species for as long as his plan of salvation requires, but a design that also prevents corrupted human beings from persisting indefinitely in our sin. Our very intelligence and ability to adapt has become our undoing. History always had a natural stopping point, and that terminus exists because of human nature. When self-preservation becomes a god to us, our own ingenuity starts to work against us. When we get too big for our boots, we self-cancel. The Lord never intended mere existence to become our be-all and end-all. If we really thought like God, we would know that. Endless life without Christ in and around us would be hell. In and of ourselves, the human race represents nothing worth perpetuating.

Interestingly, those who oppose God are already talking about purging the population of its undesirable elements, and have been doing so for a century, going back to G.B. Shaw and his genocidal British eugenicist friends enamored of socialism. They understood what many don’t: that sufficient negative elements in the human population represent a major threat to our species thriving. However, they lack the morality necessary to temper their intelligence and analysis of the facts.

If there were no God, Shaw might have had the right idea. Unfortunately for Shaw, the eternal perspective looks wildly different than the purely natural outlook. He has undoubtedly discovered that by now.