MY RESPONSE TO THE THREE QUESTIONS RELIGIONS ASK

ANSWERING THE THREE QUESTIONS THAT RELIGION ASKS

Who am I?

I am a human being and, with 7 billion others, I belong to the species Homo sapiens. That makes me a primate, a mammal, a vertebrate, and a deuterostome among the living animals.  I am a coordinated mass of 3 trillion cells that trace their origin to the union of one of my father’s sperm and one of my mother’s eggs.  I have a unique genotype shared by no other person, past or present.  That genotype is found among the 46 chromosomes of my karyotype --  46,XY  -- as a collection of about 20,000 genes capable of forming proteins to build my cells, tissues, and organs.  Those genes are regulated by largely unknown associations with RNA produced by the rest of the DNA found in my karyotype.  About 100 billion cells are reserved for my brain which generates my sensory interpretations of the environment, my responses to them, and my identity as a person.   My Y chromosome makes me a male.  My narrative so far makes me a scientist, more specifically, a biologist.

       I am mortal and so far have lived 84 years in a social life that makes me Caucasian in my European ancestry, Scandinavian in my paternal ancestry, Eastern European in my maternal ancestry, American in my citizenship, a Brooklyn born New Yorker in my growing up years, and the son of a working class father who was a merchant mariner before he settled in the US as an elevator operator.  My mother was from New Jersey and psychotic, which made me self-reliant to accommodate her mood shifts.  I had a brother who had a congenital heart condition and a half brother and half sister from my mother’s first marriage whom we rarely saw while growing up.

       I am a father of five children, a grandfather of 12, and great grandfather of 3.  I have been married twice.  My first wife, Helen, died at 43 of lung cancer.  My present wife of 57 married years,  Nedra, I cherish and adore.  I am a geneticist and historian of science, receiving my PhD in 1958 at Indiana University and I now consider myself a full time writer in my retirement years.

Why am I here?

I had no conscious role in uniting the sperm of my father that encountered my mother’s egg sometime in mid-October of 1930 that led to my birth nine months later on July 15, 1931.  Nor do I have any awareness of my gestation or birth.  My earliest recollection of childhood was when I was about 2 or 3 years old and I placed a wash basin over my back and crawled like a turtle.  I am here because my mother said “no” when my father asked her, in the Depression, if she wanted to abort their unplanned pregnancy with my embryonic status measured by a skipped period.  I respected my father for his concern and I respected my mother for her choice when I learned of their decision some 20 years after I was born.

              I am here because my karyotype was normal, my implantation took, I was born healthy, and I was living in a country where famine was rare.  I was living in an era that understood the germ theory of infectious diseases and benefitted from the vaccines available.  I am here because I was born in 1931 which made me too young to be drafted in World War II; and in the next decade, at an age to be exempt from military service because I was in college.  By the time I finished my PhD, I was exempt as a father.

              I am here because I am lucky I escaped injury or death from collisions narrowly missed, from accidents avoided at the last second, and from a flight I might have boarded earlier but decided not to take, and which crashed after takeoff from Chicago. My mentor, H. J. Muller called it “life the lucky” and I believe most people have had narrow escapes from death or profound injury.

              It is not just luck, however.  I never smoked tobacco, avoided substance abuse, lived a cautious life, and benefitted from my life as an intellectual.  My field also made me cautious on risk-taking as an adult.

How then should I live?

              I have been an atheist all my conscious life.   Neither of my parents appreciated their religious upbringing.  My father rejected Lutheranism as a child and became an atheist.  My mother was disowned by her relatives for marrying a non-Jew. She abandoned most of its kosher habits had a vague sense of a God but never conferred Jewish traditions or religion on us.

              From my father I learned to appreciate a love of reading and of thinking independently.  From my mother I learned to appreciate museums because she regularly took my brother and me to the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  On rainy days we drew and painted.  My father bought the Encyclopedia Britannica on an installment plan.  I read voraciously from it over the years, randomly discovering topics I did not know existed.  My mother played about an hour a day for us on her violin so we were early introduced to classical music (mostly of the Boston Pops type).  Later our father bought a phonograph and we learned to enjoy listening to opera.  In school I excelled and teachers encouraged me.  I liked art and science but chose genetics when I was in 10^th grade in high school.  I won a full tuition scholarship to NYU.  I majored in biology and minored in history.  I went to graduate school at Indiana University to study with Nobelist H. J. Muller.  I learned what it is like to be totally immersed in a scholarly field and the pleasure of designing and carrying out experiments,  I learned how Muller thought and shared his concerns for the unintended harmful  consequences of the misuses of science in society.

              I became a Unitarian in 1961 and liked its emphasis on social justice, appreciation of reason and science, rejection of the supernatural explanations when rational ones exist, and its belief that we can make a better world than we experienced.

              I learned to communicate science to non-science majors.  I taught my students how science permeates their lives and how to live with that new knowledge and used it wisely for our reproduction, health, and the quality of the world we live in.  I called my Biology 101-102 course “Biology, a Humanities Approach” because, like the humanities, the life sciences reveal what it means to be human.

              I liked being responsible for my behavior and using my empathy to help others when opportunity permitted.  Life is a gift.  I am thankful to have experienced it, to have learned from it, to have atoned for my mistakes and failures, and in some small measure, to have contributed to it.

Elof Axel Carlson

December 5, 2015