I was surprised to read in Carl Zimmer's "She Has Her Mother's Laugh", a tour of old and new ideas about heredity, that a US woman seeking financial assistance was accused of kidnapping her children and defrauding the government after a mandatory blood draw. The accusation happened in 2003, not way back in time. The charge was based on understanding of biology and heredity as understood by her state government at that time. Her lawyer learned of a similar case close in time to hers and looked into it. Charges were dropped with further information about cells, bodies and heredity.
Some of the confusion about whether a given mother could or could not be the mother of a child relates to the fact that a pregnant woman may get a few of the growing fetus's cells into her body. A sentence like that often gives the impression that the fetus and the mother are separate entities. Further, the "cells" are alive and have their own purposes and pathways of life. So, the title of this blog post: am I a united, unified animal or am I a collection of single-minded cells and organs that more or less hang together most of the time? When I also think of my growing understanding that there are thousands of life forms in my gut, on my skin and elsewhere, the picture gets complicated.
The other day, I withdrew a new book from the university library called "Life Out of Balance" by Robert Hagen. I haven't read the whole thing but it deals with the biological concept of "homeostasis", the tendency of the living body to seek a steady state. In the paragraph above, I didn't mention evolution or changes to improve survival and flourishing. "Adaptation", both temporary as when I grow accustomed to a given sight, sound or routine as well as genetic modifications that occur in the genes seem to be counter to the idea of a continuous, steady me. Neither adaptation nor seeking homeostasis include the picture of a body, a mind and social changes related to aging and to fashion changes. None of this includes the result of science, research and experimentation that opens new doors of thought and action and closes some.
