GENE FROM NOWHERE: GOLDSCHMIDT’S MONSTER RESURRECTS

In the early 1960s the biologist Richard Goldschmidt spent years of his life trying to observe mutations in fruitflies that would, he believed, lead to speciation, i.e., to confirmation of the basic Darwinian model that microevolutionary changes over time could produce macroevolutionary results. After years of this fruitless quest, he gave up in despair and proposed what he called a "hopeful monster hypothesis," whereby a sudden macroevolutionary change could suddenly occur (sounding suspiciously like creationism), and be preserved over time and lead to a new species.

Well, consider this one:

Fruit fly gene from \'out of nowhere\' is discovered

Well...there it is, a gene that appeared suddenly in the lowly drosophilia from out of nowhere, and completely unconnected to any known gene in any other species.

I found this little article to be very intriguing, not so much from the modern point of view, but from the ancient one, so, brace yourself, for now I am going to let my imagination run wild, and "return wholesale dividends of speculation for a minimum investment of fact," to paraphrase Mark Twain (who, incidentally, made that remark about the theory of evolution).

What intrigues me here is the suggestion, genetically, that the male or masculine element somehow is connected with the idea of spontaneous differentiation in a kind of "come out of nowhere hopeful monster" scenario. What has this to do with the ancients, you may well wonder? Well, to put it as succinctly as possible, in The Grid of the Gods my co-author (Scott D. de Hart) and I devote a whole chapter to the weird (and very technical) musico-mathematical codes in the Vedic literature of India, and in the Sumerian-Pythagorean-Platonic legacy of Mesopotamia and Greece, and the change in those codes effected by the Hebrews.

One thing that stood out when comparing the Mesopotamian to the Vedic codes, was that the ancients consistently identified the masculine principle as the "musically differentiating" principle, i.e., as the principle that generated differentiated tones within a musical octave, whereas the feminine principle generated only sameness, i.e., an infinite series of the same note over and over again in octaves.

And along comes the Goldschmidt's lowly drosophilia once again, with its weirdly spontaneous spermatozoic gene generation "from out of nowhere," suggesting, in some small fashion perhaps, that the ancients knew - from somewhere and somehow - the same sort of thing long ago, and that, of course, implies perhaps yet another legacy that they inherited from High Antiquity. At the very least, the sudden appearance of this gene "from nowhere" should make the late Dr. Goldschmidt rest a little easier.

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Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and "strange stuff". His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into "alternative history and science".

11 Comments

  1. paul degagne on May 20, 2011 at 10:02 am

    One thing I found fascinating related to investigation is a TV program I viewed sometime ago. The narator proclaimed they were in the deepest part (pit-abyss?) of the ocean looking or scavaging under rocks and such looking for baterea (spelt wrong) or some kind of weird emzines that could give them a clue.

    I ask myself – A clue to WHAT? What kind of clue? And if we find IT then what the hell is it! Isn’t the practice of research amazing? Yes, more daring then Fiction although I like fiction too! (Sometimes, what we only believe is fiction turns out to be fact. Our drives or Unconscious guiding us to some facts which we then wake up in amazement to realize it was true all along.

    Yes, Dorothy, there are some pleasant suprises ahead if we can only get over the shock of our cultural conditioning



  2. Michael on May 18, 2011 at 5:18 pm

    So could this whole chain of ideas be at least partly responsible for the gender bias within certain groups? Where you have a strong dominate patriarchal figure and a submissive matriarchal figure? If so, was there ever a point where females held a semi-sacred role within these establishments. To the best of my knowledge, which is fairly limited, women historically have never had a dominate role within society until fairly recent times. This is not to say that women have not had important roles or titles throughout history, but that if they did have such a role it was usually minimized or given only a superficial treatment by historians. Good Doctor, what are your thoughts?



    • Ramura on May 18, 2011 at 7:01 pm

      You need to go back further in your history. Basically, all societies were matrilineal until the Ice Age. Something like 40,000 years of “sacred feminine!” The patriarchy has only been here for about 5,000 years or so — dominator model. Read “The Chalice and the Blade” by Riane Eisler for a good exploration of all this.



      • Mike M on May 18, 2011 at 8:28 pm

        So does this book discuss the relationship between gender and a genetic imperative within society?



      • Mike M on May 18, 2011 at 8:29 pm

        Also why not just call the book, ” The symbols of the vagina and the penis” ?



  3. Dave Walton on May 18, 2011 at 2:37 pm

    Can’t wait for that book – kind of blows your mind! I have always felt that the universe and all existence is based around musical priciples. 🙂



  4. Jay on May 18, 2011 at 5:37 am

    Look making matter and bacteria has been well demonstrated–then supressed–in the alternative science community (see Wilhlem Reich for one). So genes from nowhere/nothingness/ether don’t seem like a big stretch.

    And the concentration on genes seems secondary and a distraction from actual discovery.



    • MQ on May 18, 2011 at 3:54 pm

      “And the concentration on genes seems secondary and a distraction from actual discovery.”
      Interesting idea. What if, in fact, the gene is merely the “footprint” of someone who decided to walk a new path, so to speak. Yeah, that’s *really* opening a can of worms.



      • Jay on May 19, 2011 at 5:34 pm

        Yes, give’s real meaning to Plato’s Cave.



    • David Mansfield on May 18, 2011 at 7:43 pm

      Hey, I see them drosophilia fruit flies or whatever fly out of my stale beer cans all the time. Beer. The spontaneous mother of fruit flies! ,no – that was tongue in cheek, but I’ve always wondered how did they get in there? same with maggots and bottle flies on crap I guess….



      • Jay on May 19, 2011 at 5:43 pm

        In all seriousness: You’re not the first to take notice of this. Reich is a good place to start, mainly because so many others have repeated his work, but he’s not the only one.



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