The Missing Biblical Rib

Francis Crick was an evangelical atheist. He believed that scientific understanding removed the need for religious explanations of material phenomena. Francis Crick’s Obituary (PLoS Biology, 2004)

Being a scientist, one is awed by the intellectual depth and unparalleled pedagogical mastery of the Biblical narratives. They have perfectly succeeded in the past and are not less perfectly succeeding today to convey an intuitive and most profound imagery, otherwise unavailable, of very complicated things which are rightly associated by modern science with the most challenging problems of All Beginnings.

So, why and how science – born from, and finally becoming a noble adult daughter of, the Catholic faith – was later kidnapped, abused and sold, with the majority of her modern overlords and servants manifesting the malicious habit of dismissing the faith?

We are presenting a new, particularly archetypical, dramatic and impressive exemplum of this in the life of the famous modern biologist and fiery atheist Francis Crick (1916-2004), both the real victim and an outrageous propagandist of the ignorance of God and faith:

“The god hypothesis is rather discredited,» – declared Crick in 2003, at age 86, to the English newspaper The Telegraph, – « and since many of the actual claims made by specific religions over 2,000 years have proved false, the burden of proof should be on the claims they make today, rather than on atheists to disprove the existence of God.” -( Francis Crick)

 The Real Victim

Francis Crick tells his story himself in the absorbing autobiography of 1988 named What mad pursuit: a personal view of scientific discovery, the first half of the title being borrowed from an ode by John Keats. A man of almost pathological intellectual pride and exactingness, Crick is very forthcoming about how, why, and to what effect he became a militant unbeliever and scientist – in one stroke, although raised in an English middle-class protestant family to whose intimate customs and religious traditions he was sincerely attached as a child:

My parents were religious in a rather quiet way. . . . At exactly which point I lost my early religious belief I am not clear, but I suspect I was then about twelve years old. . . . I imagine that my growing interest in science and the rather lowly intellectual level of the preacher and his congregation motivated me . . . Whatever the reason, from then on I was a sceptic, an agnostic with a strong inclination toward atheism.

Then Francis entered the university, and here on an occasion with a friend, he fell a victim of his still vivid protestant imagination:

I was familiar with the account in Genesis in which God makes Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. . . . It was only some years later, probably when I was an undergraduate, that I let slip to a friend of mine, a medical student, that I understood that women had one more rib than man.

One could easily imagine the rest, with the friend «falling off his chair with laughter», after being presented with Crick’s Biblical exegesis . . . Still, according to Crick’s story, one might expect that a friend’s laughter should not be of a great importance to Crick – since, as he recounts it beforehand, his «biblically inspired» understanding of women’s anatomy at the time of this incident was just an accidentally survived atavism of his already dead and buried childish faith.

And yet, the shame at being caught by an apparently respected older friend to still profess such a sham, and the momentary discovery to be manipulated as a child by such imbecilities was never forgotten – with the sting of such a flagrant betrayal of his spiritual and intellectual trust was never forgiven.

So, whom to blame – family, community, God, or his own ignorance of things spiritual? Youngsters rarely have a natural capacity to look for intellectual, historical, or psychological excuses or deeper explanations. Today, such explanations are discussed, for example, by Professor Janet Stein Carter on her Web site Number of Ribs, at the demand of her students, probably as young as Francis Crick once was and wondering about the same theology versus biology discrepancy, but in a much more confident, plausible, and non-violent way. And it is apparently not without reason that the Number of Ribs site has been accessed more than 100 000 times.

Assuming Francis Crick’s Challenge

This is how Crick has become an outspoken enemy of religion. Indeed, in his last interview to The Telegraph, March 20, 2003, he said that “my distaste for religion was one of my prime motives in the work that led to the sensational 1953 discovery”:

I went into science because of these religious reasons, there’s no doubt about that. I asked myself what were the two things that appear inexplicable and are used to support religious beliefs: the difference between living and nonliving things, and the phenomenon of consciousness.

A colleague of Crick confirms: not satisfied with his first success, the discovery of the genetical key to the history of living things, he put these qualities to work in an attempt to find the neural correlate of consciousness, a problem he defined as the search for the link between the mind and the brain.

– And yet, without success.

Quite to the contrary, Crick’s discovery of the DNA was a great success– not only public, with its Nobel prise, but personal too. Crick also received with it a hidden message which he entirely and brazenly ignored: he was assured to possess all intellectual and professional means to understand the valuable Biblical statement about the missing rib. This is what we expect to do now – without any reference to the straight-forward Creationism and in spite of typical modern reassurances à la Crick that the rib fable is definitely an argument Christians should not use.

First Step of the Biblical Exegesis – Translation

The majority of those who venerate the Bible, and for that matter most of its detractors, have not read it, strictly speaking, and never will. Instead, they have read someone else’s idea of what the biblical writers say – they have read a translation. (Frederik W. Knobloch)

Here is the translation of the three Biblical verses we are interested in, which gives an idea why the English word rib is not the best translation from Hebrew:

The Lord God said: “It is not right that the man should be alone. I shall make him a helper.” . . . So the Lord cast a deep sleep upon the man and he slept; and He took one of his ribs and He filled in flesh in its place. And the Lord God built the rib [in Hebrew: , which also could be translated a side, or aspect] which he took from Adam into a woman, and brought her to the man. And the man said: «This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh ! She is to be called Woman [ in Hebrew], because she was taken from Man [ in Hebrew].»(Genesis 2:18,21-23)

It is evident that the English word side, with its rich semantics embracing both the pure material notions, like edge and jumb, and more abstract ones, like aspect and point of view, should be much more appropriate as the equivalent term for the original – if only, of course, among its many meanings, would be also rib, as it is for. This not being the case, unfortunately for English teenagers reading this Biblical story without an exegetical accompaniment, all translations into English stick traditionally with the anatomical rib. French teenagers might be luckier: the French côte for rib has at least two suggestive additional meanings, freeing it from the exclusive and narrow anatomical interpretation: bord de mer (seaside) and versant de colline ou de montagne (the slope of a hill or of a mountain); besides, the closely related and semantically rich côté gives all necessary in our case allusions.

Flawed Knowledge of the Bible

To be sure, Francis Crick is not the rare victim of a flawed, intellectually and spiritually outdated, lightweight and/or irresponsible «religious» education: some people preaching «God» to their neighbors and to their own and neighbours have chosen to teach the most difficult and profound subject in the world. The problem is far from being new or even modern: thirty years before Crick was born, another eminent Englishman, John Henry Newman, was grieving at the ignorance of the Bible by, of all people, English Catholics:

It is to them a terra incognita. The Old Testament especially excites no sentiment of love, reverence, devotion or trust. They hear bold things said against it – or fragments of it quoted detached from its context, and they have no associations with it in their affections.» (From a letter to William Monsell, April 9, 1883.)

Human Chromosomes: The First Answer

Chromosomes in humans go by pairs, 23 pairs of 46 chromosomes in every cell, and can be divided into two types: autosomes – body chromosomes and allosome – sex chromosomes. There exists only one pair of types-non-identical, dimorphic human chromosomes – the pair of allosomes X-Y-chromosomes of men and X-X-chromosomes for women – with 22 other pairs of autosomal chromosomes being normally identical by their types for women and men. The X-chromosome is a very decent, ordinary sort of chromosome and having more than its fair share of genes that are involved in what might be viewed as most important personality factors, including intelligence, reproduction, sexual behaviour, etc. The Y-chromosome, much shorter and thus much poorer by genes than X, is sex determining – by its presence for men and absence for women. This means, in particular – and this is somehow in harmony with the Bible’s account – that women are made from a proper subset of the types of genetic material of which men are made. More generally, the modern research in molecular biology and genetics does not shun to enquire into, as it does not spare the efforts to confirm, at least some Biblical accounts.

One of the principal possibilities of such studies is the fact that Y- chromosomes are almost identical for any man and his son. Thus, for example, researchers study the Y-chromosomes small variations (polymorphisms), when transmitted from father to son, to «illuminate our understanding of human history and prehistory».

Others are studying the genetic heritage of the cast of Jewish priests:«Y-chromosomal Aaron» is the name given to the hypothesized most recent common ancestor of many of the patrilineal Jewish priestly caste known as Cohanim. In the Torah, this ancestor is identified as Aaron, the brother of Moses. Molecular phylogenetic research published in 2013 and 2016 places the Y-chromosomal Aaron within the age estimated 2638-3280 years Before Present – the time interval consistent with the Bible account . . .

The Probable Decisive Answer

Ours, however, is here quite a different intention presented recently in our published scientific paper. We believe that the Biblical story of Adam is an account of the real historical appearance of the modern Man, whose solitude has finally inspired our Lord to create his partner Eve, with the same genetical basis excluding the X chromosome – which was a part of the original long Y-chromosome of Adam – his «initial and complete genetical rib». And with the modern Y-chromosomes of men representing its remaining «scrap».