Not Quite Human

(Advance warning: This post has nothing to do with the theme of the blog). 

I recently had my DNA tested by one of the several companies that specialise in this service. You provide them with a small sample, in this case by swabbing the inside of your cheeks, send it off for analysis and await the results. My father came from Yorkshire and his family had been there for several generations, my mother's father came from North East Scotland and his mother was from the Hebridean island of Benbecula while my maternal grandmother was Irish so I roughly knew what to expect, but here are the results.

Europe

100%

Great Britain and Ireland

98.7%

Ireland

27.5%

Northumbria

21.8%

North Yorkshire

10.4%

Northern Ireland and Southwest Scotland

8.8%

South Yorkshire

7.4%

Lincolnshire

5.9%

Aberdeenshire

4.6%

Central England

3%

Cornwall

2.3%

Northwest Scotland

2.2%

Northwest England

2%

South Central England

1.7%

East Anglia

1%

Europe (North and West)

1.3%

Northwest Germanic

1.3%

All fairly typical for a British person or an actually British British person. The big surprise to me was the amount of Northumbrian but I suppose that is not far from Yorkshire. The other interesting (to me) element is the relatively high quantity of DNA from Lincolnshire and Aberdeenshire. My Scottish grandfather's surname was Ledingham and this name was apparently first found in Lincolnshire but is also associated with Aberdeen. I have DNA from most places in Great Britain and Ireland but none at all from Wales. This would have pleased said grandfather who harboured a prejudice against the Welsh for reasons I never found out. When his only son, my uncle, married a very nice Welsh girl he was so annoyed that he trained my brother and I, aged around 6 and 4 at the time, to recite the old nursery rhyme "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief" at the wedding reception in Cardiff. Apparently we weren't a great success with the family of the bride.

The reason I chose this particular company, which is called Living DNA, is because they also give you an estimate of how much of your DNA came from the Neanderthals. It used to be thought that Homo sapiens did not breed with other forms of humans but we now know that Homo sapiens did, in fact, interbreed with Neanderthals during the Late Pleistocene, soon after moving out of Africa some 80,000-50,000 years ago. So, although we are the only surviving human species we do carry traces of earlier human species within us.  At least, those of us who are of European and Asian ancestry do. Neanderthal DNA is not found in sub-Saharan Africa though in that part of the world there are traces of other even earlier types of Homo.  That counters claims made at the time the genetic code was first unravelled which maintained that all human groups were exactly the same. DNA analysis has completely disproved this always obviously wrong and ideologically based theory.

I have 1.89% Neanderthal DNA which is roughly average for someone of my background. I also have 0.18% Denisovan DNA. Homo denisova is another form of archaic human whose DNA survives as part of the modern human genome though they themselves died out thousands of years ago. It survives mostly in populations from Asia and Oceania and presumably does because it is useful in some sense. Ability to adapt to high altitude is thought to be one of the benefits bestowed by Denisovan DNA and that makes sense as the populations are believed to have been centred in areas around Siberia and Tibet. The first discovery of a fossil of this type of human was actually in a cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia and, though there have been a couple of other places where it has been found since (in China and Laos), scientists are working with extremely small samples, bits of a finger or a molar, to extract their DNA. I have to say that the work in this field has been truly remarkable and led to fascinating results. It makes you wonder how much more there is to be discovered, locked up inside our bodies.

As a result of this analysis I am delighted to announce that I am only 98% human, or modern human if you want to nit pick. Of course, you probably are as well.

On a more serious note, and returning to the blog's actual theme, as interesting as this kind of study is it should not blind us to the fact that we are in a particular body but we should not be exclusively identified with that body. But then nor should we go to the other extreme and do as many do now and think it doesn't matter, we're all the same. We are not all the same and we are meant to be what we are. At the same time, our true self is the soul and when we die that is what we will return to. And yet I do believe we shall take something of what we are now with us as an additional flavour or colouring. Nothing is wasted and just because we are not the body that does not mean that the body is not in some sense part of us too. Approach this question on an intuitive level rather than a strictly intellectual one and you will find that you can reconcile apparent contradictions.

Why is Christianity Better than Islam?

 I was asked this question recently by a young man, some of whose friends had decided that if they were going to follow a religion then Islam seemed a more attractive proposition than Christianity as it had a greater sense of where it stood on issues and didn't prevaricate or sentimentalise which Christianity in its official forms now does. On the face of it, it's hard to disagree with this view. Islam is fixed in its beliefs and doesn't seek to accommodate itself to the secular world which modern Christianity usually does as its leaders, seeing they are losing spiritual power, seek to justify their existence by pandering to social changes. Also, Islam has not become feminised which Christianity along with the whole Western world unfortunately has, and this appeals to younger men who see in feminism a civilisation destroying influence. Why do I say unfortunately? Because a feminised religion or culture prioritises feelings and being nice over truth, social concern over supernatural reality, equality over hierarchy and soft furnishings over the sword. That is to say, the energy that nurtures and comforts over the energy that builds and preserves. You need both but one must lead and it must be the latter.

However, whilst it is true that many Christian churches have succumbed to the world and lost touch with the spiritual, replacing it with the anodyne charms of secular humanism, Islam never had much connection with the spiritual to begin with. It has a fixed view of God based on a primitive conception of the deity and is unable to open itself up to higher dimensions of being*. Its virtue that it doesn't change is also a major weakness. It is stuck in the past, unable to evolve as consciousness does. This inflexibility might be regarded as a positive but the rights and wrongs of inflexibility depend on what refuses to change. Islam might have been a healthy corrective for polytheistic pagans in a 7th century of warring tribes (though Christianity would probably have done a better job even then), but it has nothing to say to a 21st century consciousness unless a person wants to throw away the positive evolutionary gains of the last thousand, and especially last 400, years.

But the best answer to this question is to rephrase it and ask why is Christ better than Muhammad? Even a casual look at the lives of these two teachers shows there is an enormous gulf between them in terms of spiritual understanding. They both spoke of the one God but for Jesus he was a loving father while for Muhammad he was more like the Old Testament Jehovah, an over-promoted tribal deity who demanded servile allegiance. Partly because of this, Christianity is based on love while Islam is based on law. Further, Christianity is grounded in freedom whereas Islam demands obedience. This is illustrated in the postures for prayer of the two religions. A Christian kneels in humility but his back is straight. The full prostration of a Muslim in prayer also shows humility but it is more that of a slave before its master than a free individual.

I have not even spoken of the fact that Jesus was the Son of God who healed the spiritual damage caused by the Fall while Muhammad, even in the eyes of his own followers, was no more than a prophet and one who basically just mixed and matched from Jewish and Christian sources. He brought nothing new while Jesus showed us the way to become sons of God ourselves - see John 14:12 "Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these." At best, Muhammad was a messenger but Jesus in his person even more than in his teachings was a window into heaven. In fact, not just a window but a doorway.

Mentioning heaven brings us to another critical difference. Is the Muslim paradise the same as the Christian heaven? I don't see how anyone can seriously believe that since the one is the perfection of earthly existence while the other is the total transformation of being. When you understand that the next world has many planes of existence you see that the paradise of Islam is what is known as the wish fulfilment plane where all your desires are fulfilled but only to the extent that allows for the exteriorisation of your earthly wishes without the impediment of matter. So your mind can creates palaces and gardens insofar as you conceive of such things but this is still no more than this world brought to what you think of as an ideal state. You are still limited by the narrowness of your own vision whereas in the true heaven you are freed from the boundaries of your circumscribed self, and this is what Christ offers. The Islamic paradise gives the lower self what it wants but Heaven is entry into the glorified existence of higher being. There is no doubt that many Christians will go to a place that is a Christian version of paradise on the astral plane, as the psychic world is sometimes known, but that is due to their deficiencies not those of their religion. The fact is Jesus and Muhammed promised their followers entirely different destinations.

I freely admit there may be some bias here. I was born in a Christian country and culture not a Muslim one. But that doesn't mean any of the points here are incorrect. Moreover, the universalist humanitarian prejudices of contemporary Western culture incline many people to go the other way and hold Christianity to higher standards than other religions, seeing the former in the light of its negative aspects (which are all the fault of human beings not its own) and the latter more positively. Obviously, Islam has virtues but unless it has a radical reformation in line with the developments in consciousness over the last several hundred years I would say it is spiritually regressive. Christianity too needs to grow spiritually but it can grow from its roots and I don't believe Islam can.

* I'm ignoring Sufism in this essay which is outside the mainstream of Islam and often regarded with suspicion by fellow Muslims who are not Sufis. Besides, Sufism is the product of Hindu metaphysics and Christian mysticism just as much as Islamic theology though I don't deny it has also fed back in to its parents.