“I am,” he said. Three hours later, I was sitting in a pub with nine Colfers and a copy of my family tree spread out between the pint glasses. Some of the first names overlapped, as Irish names wilclass="underline" Catherines and Johns and Margarets. There was even a Margaret who had emigrated to Chicago—and my father had stayed with an Aunt Margaret in Chicago when he first came to the States.
I clearly recall sensing that the facts didn’t all fit, but the feeling faded as the excitement built and the beer flowed. Come closing time, I was hugging my long-lost uncle Mick and promising to keep in touch. New relatives are a novelty and a charm. It’s a buzz, and you want to give in to it.
Six weeks later, back at home, my grandmother’s birth certificate arrived from the Dublin General Register Office. Her birth date was about ten years earlier than I’d thought. My Irish “family” were no more than friendly strangers in a pub. I’d been swept up in the excitement of the unraveling, paying attention to the facts and dates that fit, overlooking those that didn’t.
It is certainly possible that in among the reborn Veerpals and the long-lost Uncle Micks are true links and souls that have lived before. For those with the patience to wade through Ian Stevenson’s colossal compilations of case studies, there is much that leaves you scratching your head: statements too specific to suggest coincidence, and no obvious motive for a hoax.
Of late, I find myself wondering about the mechanics of it, the unfathomable blending of metaphysics and embryology. How would the suddenly homeless soul get itself situated someplace new? How does spirit, for want of a more precise word, infuse itself into a clump of cells quietly multiplying on a uterus wall? How do you get in there?
Scientists and philosophers of bygone years had a name for the impossible moment. They called it ensoulment, and they debated it for centuries. If the National Science Foundation had existed in the 1600s, there would have been an entire lavishly funded Institute of Ensoulment, devoted to studying the mysteries of human generation, the how and when of life’s initial spark. Most of the research covered in this book focuses on things that happen to a person as, and after, his body reaches the finish line, but it makes sense to spend a little time at the other end of the footrace, too.
2. THE LITTLE MAN INSIDE THE SPERM,
or POSSIBLY THE BIG TOE
Hunting the Soul with Microscopes and Scalpels
THERE’S A VERY good chance that you underestimate the historic import of the sea urchin.[5] In 1875, a German biologist named Oskar Hertwig watched a sea urchin sperm nose its way into a sea urchin egg and fuse with it to form a single nucleus, right there under his microscope. It took civilized man six thousand years to figure out how life begins, and the honors go to humble Oskar and his amorous echinoderms.
Scientists had long suspected that human generation had something to do with eggs—most everyone who owned a chicken suspected this—and they knew it had to do with intercourse and semen, but beyond that they were unclear on the specifics. This was largely because they couldn’t see the specifics. The sea urchin’s eggs offered two advantages: (a) they’re see-through, and (b) they’re fertilized outside of the female’s body, in the ocean or, in occasional cases, under some German dude’s microscope.
This means that for six thousand years, there was lots and lots of entertaining speculation about the creation of new human beings. Some of the earliest and most thorough speculating was done by Aristotle. The learned Greek—who, I was interested to read, went through life with a lisp—decided that the man’s semen supplied the soul of the new individual. The spirit, in those days, was envisioned as a kind of vapor or breath, which was understandable given breathing’s obvious connection to being alive. Hence Aristotle’s name for the spirit: pneuma, which is Greek for “wind.” He believed it was this pneuma, carried in the semen, that orchestrated the creation of a budding human being. Upon arrival inside the uterus, the pneuma would set to work, building new life out of the materials it had on hand: menstrual blood, to be unpleasantly specific. Aristotle described the process as a sort of coagulation, using the apt if inelegant analogy of a cheesemaker’s rennet solidifying milk. It took seven days for the new entity to “set,” at which time the pneuma would infuse it with the first of three eventual souls. This vegetative soul, as it was called, was a sort of starter soul, a learner’s permit for human existence. You were a thing that eats and grows: more than a potato but less than a human.
On the fortieth day, Aristotle theorized, the proto-human morphed into what he called the sensitive soul. By “sensitive,” he meant “relating to the senses,” for forty days is about when the embryo’s sense organs begin to appear. After some further, unspecified amount of time had passed, the pneuma would allow the newly minted sensitive soul to upgrade to a rational soul. Here was the black belt of humanness, the sort of spirit that rises above animal lusts and girly emotions and pays no heed to people who make fun of the way it says semen.
And that’s pretty much what people believed for the two thousand years after Aristotle put the word out. The man who elevated the ovum to a leadership role in the proceedings was seventeenth-century English physician William Harvey. Harvey is best known for figuring out that blood circulates in a closed system of arteries and veins, a feat he managed by dissecting cadavers, including that of his sister. For his pioneering work in reproduction, you will be relieved to learn that Harvey left the womenfolk alone. Here he turned to a herd of deer that wandered, ever more warily, the grounds of his employer, King Charles I. As a student of Aristotle’s teachings, Harvey expected to find the requisite coagulated blob when he dissected the deer’s uteruses. He was astonished to instead find the beginnings of tiny deer: embryos and fetuses encased in sacs, which he mistakenly identified as eggs. The egg, Harvey felt, contained the makings of “all that is alive.” Semen was relegated to the role of a “contagion,” prompting human generation much as a virus does a cold.
And how would the life force, the soul, get into the egg? Here science abandoned Harvey, and he fell back on religion: “It is given… by the heavens or the sun or the Almighty Creator.”
Like most biologists of his day, Harvey was limited by his equipment. He couldn’t see what was going on at the cellular level. He couldn’t see sperm. He had a magnifying glass, but what he needed was a microscope. And so it is not surprising that the next milestone fell to Antoni van Leeuwenhoek: the man who loved microscopes. Leeuwenhoek did not invent the microscope, nor was he a scientist by training. The Dutchman worked as an accountant for a haberdasher and, later, as Chamberlain of the Council-Chamber of the Worshipful Sheriffs of Delft, which is a ten-gallon way of saying that he tidied the chamber. The post left him plenty of time for hobbies, of which he had just one: grinding lenses and building microscopes. The microscopes Leeuwenhoek built were superior to those of the main maker of the day, and soon they were in demand by members of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, more or less the National Science Foundation of its day. Over time, the Royal Society began publishing Leeuwenhoek’s letters about his findings as well, and he was on his way to a historical, if unpaid, career as the founding father of microbiology.
In 1675, Leeuwenhoek discovered a universe of up-to-then-unknown creatures—bacteria and protozoa, mostly—in drops of stagnant water in a “water-butt” in his yard. He named them animalcules. It is difficult to properly appreciate the wonder and strangeness of this discovery. Think of scientists today discovering Martian life. Leeuwenhoek was appropriately awed. “For me this was among all the marvels that I discovered in nature the most marvelous of all, and I must say, that for my part, no more pleasant sight has met my eye than this of so many thousands of living creatures in one small drop of water.”
5
There’s a good chance you underestimate almost everything about the sea urchin. For instance, the