1. Punctuated Equilibrium
— Versus the Virgin Birth Theory —
The death-and-resurrection of Jesus Christ is the pivot of Scriptures but besides its enormous theological impact, the principles and dynamics behind the Golgotha Event have been admitted enigmas to the Church throughout the ages. But no more so. Since man was made in God's image, the production of Jesus and the Body of Christ are self-similar to every human reproductive cycle.
Here's how it works:
The Bible depicts humanity or specific people-groups as a single human female1. Now that we know that every human body consists of cells — and is really an intensely compact colony of single-celled creatures that are each endowed with an identical nucleic code — we may conclude that the members of a people are those who share a specific mental constitution; the belief in a reality-model2. And then in such a way that from all those separate individuals a super-identity with a distinct personhood rises. In fact, we may conclude that our own personhood is really nothing other than the combined consciousnesses of each little cell that makes us up3.
The Biblical Jesus was a man whose genes only came from His mother. Since she, like any other woman, was not equipped with the Y-chromosome needed to produce a male child, Jesus could only have been feminine. Unless, of course, He was supposed to be something completely different, even so unique that science has not recognized and certainly not classified the event.
The body of every human being consists of cells that have a double set of chromosomes. But every human being also has a small quantity of cells that only have a single set of chromosomes. These are the gametes, the reproductive cells; spermatozoa (seed cells) for men, ova (egg cells) for women. Jesus was not simply the founder of a new religion. The Body of Christ (which is feminine, a.k.a. Ecclesia) is a person that consists of many persons, and Jesus is incarnate in that Body. It doesn't take a great leap to land on the genetic essence of Jesus: He was a gamete!
🔼 Punctuated Equilibrium
Speciation — that is the bringing forth of a new species by an old one — is not very well understood by mankind today. When Charles Darwin observed what he called evolution, he figured that species kind of gradually formed from their parent species. The fossil record, when less interrupted than in Darwin's days, should show it. And after a century and a half of digging, brushing and hoping, the fossil record stayed the way it was: new species had the tendency to just show up and hardly grow gradually out of older populations. Some brilliant biologists came to the rescue.
In 1972, Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldredge expanded a speciation theory of Ernst Mayr and named it Punctuated Equilibrium. It goes like this (summarizing Gould's 1980 article):
A large and stable population stays the way it is because any mutation is too small a change in the grand scheme of things; it gets rubbed out. For a beneficial mutation to survive, it must occur somewhere on the edge of the population, where it can create a pocket of isolated, influenced individuals. New species should always emerge on the edge of a population and then, when the mutation caused a new species, move into the parent population and be different.
The objections to this theory are the same as the general objections to the primary evolutionary dogma: We're evolving the wrong way! The second law of thermodynamics dictates that everything must fall apart over time, and not together4. The mechanism of mutation and natural selection (which obviously exists) is too puny a force to bring forth the diversity of life, and the only reason that people cling to it is that there is no valid alternative. Until now:
🔼The Virgin Birth Theory
We here at Abarim Publications like to propose a new theory; the Virgin Birth Theory:
The behavior of a species is self-similar to the behavior of an individual. When a species has matured enough, it will reproduce in a way that is self-similar to the reproduction of a single female individual.
In the realm of single-cellular creatures, this means that a population simply breaches in two, and each half evolves separately. But in the mammalian world, speciation should occur by means of a virgin birth! A mammalian population should simply get pregnant.
Initially, something like a placenta should form; a group of individuals within the population that is still part of the population but in which yet another group emerges: the fetal population, which is much smaller but definitely distinct. During the gestation period, the two new forms live side by side within the parental group, and the fetal group obviously feeds off the placental group. When the new species suddenly begins to assert itself (after its speciative birth) it will distinguish itself from the parental species, and the placental group will swiftly dissolve.
The Virgin Birth Theory could explain why the fossil record shows the sudden appearance of species. And specifically, it might explain why Homo Sapiens emerged somewhat around the same time as Neanderthal, stayed dormant for eons, and then, all of a sudden, emerged and extinguished Neanderthal.
Notes:
1) Ezekiel 16, 2 Corinthians 11:2, Revelation 12, Revelation 16, Revelation 21:2
Genders in Scriptures work differently than in our modern world. In the Bible masculinity is the tendency towards individuality and femininity is the tendency towards collectivity.
The essence of Jesus as instigator of the Body of Christ is mental rather than physical. One does not require a specified physical constitution to take part in the Body. Hence, the genetic constitution of Jesus is irrelevant and perhaps mentioned only because of the mental implications of His person.
2) Belief in this sense is not devotion or submission to a code of conduct or dogmatic library, but much more the fabric of the mind upon which all thoughts are displayed. It denotes an essence much more than a conviction.
3) The diversity of Scripture interpretation should be as diverse as the various interpretations of the DNA in our bodies. Just like cells may interpret the same DNA to mean: become a nerve cell, or become a muscle cell, or a transparent eye-cell, or a rigid bone-cell, so will the same Scriptures form human minds into a vastly differing array of beings and sub-orders much like the organs of a corporeal body. Some of us don't even belong to a distinct organ, but are afloat in the mental bloodstream of the Body of Christ. Maybe some of us are blood-cells and carry nutrients and spirit to the various organs. Maybe some of us are white blood-cells and spend their lives chasing foreign objects such as heresies and untrue certainties, or even semi-Biblical sects that hang in the Body like cancerous growths.
4) Since we don't precisely know how evolution works, it's honestly too early in the game to be making these kind of statements. Oscar Wilde once enigmatically pronounced the child to be the father of the man, and it may very well turn out to be that the universe "reckons" the singularity from whence everything sprang not as infinitely simple but as infinitely complex. In that same vein, the universe might very well consider the first life-form from which everything else appears to have come as most complex and the evolving biosphere as increasingly simple. Take the statement "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," for instance. It's obviously a lot smaller than the rest of the Bible, but arguably a lot more potent. It's perfectly defendable that that little sentence "contains" the whole rest of the Bible, and then some more. Theologically (or even poetically) spoken, the opening line of the Bible is more complex than the whole rest of it (see John 21:25). But that is far from all:
The universe (that's space plus time plus the rules that run it) is "allowed" to create order in one region, as long as the order in another region decreases more. But to the universe "another region" may very well be "another time." We are duly impressed with the complexity of one DNA molecule, but the universe may review one creature's entire career of eating and secreting, and moving about in a perfectly unpredictable way. It may very well be that creating DNA caused chaos to decrease far less than the amount of chaos generated by the acts of living things. Add to that things like speech and contemplative thought, and you may understand why the universe "chose" to create life instead of going straight to heat-death. It seems perfectly plausible that the initial investment of order in a DNA molecule is paid for in full-and-then-some by the life that arose from it. We might think that living creatures are hugely complex, but to the rules that run the universe, we're hugely adding to chaos. DNA may seem inexplicably complex to us but on the balance sheet of the universe it's a very small investment for a whopping return. In other words: the chances are excellent that a universe teeming with intelligent life has a much greater entropy than a universe that's wholly extended, and which consists of nothing but a homogeneous and extremely thin quantum mist. Maybe that's why we're here.
If all this is true, then the universe won't allow its infinite expansion into heat-death, because that would kill life and that would decrease the entropy of the universe at large. And that means that the mysterious "dark matter" that should permeate the universe according to the calculations is in fact the entropy-increasing presence of life.
Looks like we got neighbors, and a whole lot of them.