kilometer zero running eye blog

The most recent episode of RadioLab investigates the source of human goodness and it includes an astounding insight into heroism.

Most of the show investigates the quandary of altruism and whether it is actually a biologically selfish act that evolved to help protect shared genetic material in blood relatives. (I explored the same question in this essay about altruism and economics.)

However, RadioLab takes an intriguing twist on the story by looking at cases that fall outside selfish-gene theory and seem to prove their is an intangible source of goodness within us all. This part of the show looked at people who were awarded the Carnegie Medal for heroism. This honour is given to civilians who risk their life to an extraordinary degree while trying to save the lives of others. Three incredibly brave medal recipients were interviewed: a woman climbed an electric fence and chased off a savage bull that was goring a helpless farmer; a man who rescued three teenagers from a blazing car that had crashed into a utility pole; and a man who leapt in front of a subway to save an epileptic who had rolled onto the tracks.

These stories were magnificent, but here’s what was truly uplifting: Since the medal was created in 1904, the Carnegie Hero Fund has had to repeatedly raise the eligibility standards for the medal! “Simply because of the vast number of heroic deeds that happen in day-to-day-life,” Walter F. Rutkowski, executive director of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, told the RadioLab hosts. “Regardless of what you hear elsewhere, we are fortunate to be living in a society where people do look out for others, even strangers.”

Endorsements infuriate me. The vast majority provide no practical help because i) the celebrity is only doing it for the money; and ii) the endorsements are for products I can easily evaluate for myself. Do I need George Clooney to tell me which coffee capsules I prefer?

However, when I actually need professional guidance before purchasing, I find useful endorsements hard to come by. Take the New Testament. For the past year, I have been working with a King James Bible published by Cambridge University Press. It has no footnotes on textual choices or exegetical commentaries, rendering it is essentially useless.

As exegetes know, the New Testament was created out thousands of diverging manuscripts written in Ancient Greek, most of which are centuries removed from the events in question. These original manuscripts are littered with mistakes. Some are minor and unintentional: many copyists used the abbreviation ‘KW’ for ‘KURIW’, which is Greek for ‘Lord’. At one point, a copyist interpreted this as ‘KAIRW’ or ‘time’, so that in some Bible versions Paul urges people to ‘serve the time’ instead of ‘serve the Lord.’ Others errors are major and intentional. Take the story of Jesus saving adulterous woman by telling the angry Pharisees “the one who is without sin” should cast the first stone. This story isn’t in any of the earliest and best copies of the Bible, and scholars agree it was added decades afterward to the Gospel of John, perhaps by a scribe who had heard the story and thought it should be in the book. Similarly, it was a scribe who added the last twelve verses of the Gospel of Mark; scholars believe the original ending was considered too abrupt and uninspired.

Once you know all this, it is vital to have a Bible that provides the proper historical and exegetical background for the text. But how do you choose? The vast majority of Bibles are aimed at prosthelytizing and don’t raise tricky questions. Obviously, this is where you need an endorsement. I sent a note to Bart Ehrman, the legendary exegetical scholar who is the author of dozens of books on the Bible, including the popular masterpieces Misquoting Jesus and Jesus, Interrupted. He didn’t hesitate to endorse : the HarperCollins Study Bible using the New Revised Standard Version.

All my fellow confused Bible shoppers can thank me at their convenience.

When I set out to buy this year’s holiday card supplies, I asked my fiancée how many cards she would be needing.

“Nine,” she said.

Nine? But last year she sent 25 cards?

“Only nine people sent me cards,” she said.

Ever since my fiancée and I began celebrating the holidays together, I have noticed curious differences between my Canadian and her Euro-African seasonal attitudes. Here was one more: a naive expectation that you will receive as many holiday cards as you send.

The fact that card senders usually find themselves at a deficit seemed like an accepted fact to me, but just to be sure I conducted an informal survey of some of the most conscientious members of my card circle. Sure enough, a strong pattern emerged: dedicated holiday card senders usually get back between a quarter and a third of the cards they send. Crystalle, an artist who has just moved to the Boston area, is an avowed ‘holiday card etiquette freak’ and has been sending out between 100 and 120 hand-made cards every year for the past 15 years. She receives an average of 20 – 25 cards and has noticed that “even older people who used to be sure bets are sitting out the snail mail tradition.” Another reliable sender has been my cousin Amanda who works at a publishing house in Toronto. She sends out an average of 40 cards and receives an average of 10, and like Crystalle simply accepts the imbalance. “I generally don’t trim people. Once you’re on the list, you can never get off. Ever.”

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1950.

When I was small, I felt I had a twin who was lost somewhere. My mother told me, no, I was born alone, just me. The feeling would not go away and later I explained it as undigested grief as a result of a younger brother who died in infancy, whose absence was more profound than his presence (I was a toddler when he died, not quite two years). Or perhaps it was ancestral memory, or just routine compartmentalization of the multiple personalities we all develop and carry through life.

Since then, I’ve read about Vanishing Twin Syndrome, where one twin not healthy enough to survive either miscarries, is reabsorbed by the mother’s body, or absorbed by the healthier fetus. This is not unusual. By one estimate, 1/8 of all pregnancies begin as multiple pregnancies, but 20-30 percent of those result in just one child. Other estimates are much higher. Before ultrasounds, mothers and doctors were often unaware of the existence of a second fetus.

Sometimes, the vanishing fetus becomes a teratoma in the surviving twin, a tumor with teeth and eyes. In some cases, surviving twins are found to have extra arms and legs inside them, while yet others are blended:

Two early stage embryos fuse into a single embryo containing two unique sets of DNA. The surviving twin becomes what’s known as a chimera, essentially two people in one body. Chimeras can have different sets of DNA in different body parts. For instance a male chimera can have one type of DNA in his skin cells but what appears to be an entirely different person’s DNA in his sperm cells.

In 2005, a doctor at the Mayo clinic said 50-70 percent of all healthy adults are chimera.

Most chimera are unaware of this, but occasionally it manifests outwardly, as two different eyes, for example, or in an intersex person with both male and female genitalia.

I’ve been told many times I have two different eyes, one bright and open, one more hooded and jaded, as if there are two of us looking out.

And you? Do you feel like a  singleton or a chimera?

Read more on the subject here. (Thanks to Althea Hayton for the last link.)