The reader should recall the song Dost dost naa rahaa from Raj Kapoor's Sangam, and then hum the following tune:
Sperm father naa rahaa
Ovum mother naa rahaa
Varsa hamein teraa
Etbaar naa rahaa
Etbaar naa rahaa …
The one cell in a male that is totally unlike him is the sperm, and ditto for ovum in a female. (That is how following vasectomy, the back-absorption of sperms excites immune response). This is because, during meiosis, the stage of crossing-over permits to the gametocyte a thorough riffle-shuffle of the paternal and maternal genetic cards, both sides merrily crossing the gender-divide. Nature in its infinite sense of fairness is not keen on foisting on the child either the virtues or the vices of the parents. Hence the stand-offishness of each gamete from its owner, and hence the few lines that you need to hum at the beginning of this Adieu.
If crossing-over effectively abolishes the dogma of heredity, the concept of reverse causality further accentuates the demolition. The TITE principle operates through the fact that a child's genotype is determined prior to the very birth of the parents. A marriage (made in Heaven or Hell as the case may turn out to be) is contrived by the child's genotype whereby the parents meet and mate. Samuel Butler wrote 300 years ago: A hen is an egg's way of making another egg, A marriage is a child's way of making itself by forcing the parents into a sexual union.
It is considered that the old Chinese Zen Masters saw everything in Nature as interrelated with everything else, and so did not regard some as good and others as bad, or some as superior or higher and others as inferior or lower. This is quite in agreement with modern science also, by which we can say that everything is what it is and where it is because of everything else - and itself.
Earnest Wood
Zen Dictionary
An immediate corollary of the aforequote is INNTOE which reads as In Nature No Terror of Error. A so-called congenital deformity, a so-called cancer or cancer-death, a moron on one side and mighty Einstein on the other are all integral parts of Herdity, being interconnected components of a normal distribution. The abnormality whatever lies in the eyes of the medical beholder.
Like it or not, every single event / cell / organ/ individual is a phenomenal manifestation at noumenal behest. It is the Cosmos that controls whatever you see as a phenomenon or as chaos. The flag seems to flutter, but not by itself. The gene whatever seems to operate but the orders come not from the phenomenal gene but from the invisible, inviolable noumenal Cosmos. The so called genes do not give orders but they receive them and then transmit them. The jugglery of modern genetics and genetic engineering has rightly bred "romantic pessimism". If you see the very scholarly tome Gene IV and then the latest Gene VI, you can perceive the apologetic refrain in their unchanging epilogue.
Gene, genetics and Heredity will have to be replaced for they represent an isolatedness that Is out of sync with the seamless, timeless, spaceless and basically causefree universe. One of us way back in 1977 has had a long session with the biophilosopher Lewis Thomas, then the director of the famed Sloan-Katering Institute (SKI). His confession was that there was no headway made on cancer but "since we are politically so committed to the cure of cancer, that we have no courage to tell the truth to the public." Thereafter there was lunch with Joseph Hixson[22] who wrote the biography of the greatest scientific scandal of the century perpetrated at the very SKI. When asked what he did before, he said he was PRO at the SKI for 19 cushy months but resigned for he got tired of telling lies to the public.
The much-hyped gene, genetics and heredity are plagued by the same dilemma: So much has been promised so how can the public be let down. If we give up, who will cure common cold and who will snub cancer! The show must go on.
It is time philosophy steps in. To those who pooh-pooh philosophy, let them know that dictionary[7] defines philosophy as Scientia scientiarum - the science of all sciences. A finer, cosmic analysis of human well being or suffering without the idea of exploiting any piece of knowledge in favour of arrogant mankind and medicalkind, may ill truths that could be delights of the mind and soul.
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