Black Order (24 page)

“You love Anna,” Painter mumbled aloud.

“Of course I do,” Gunther snapped back. “She’s my sister.”

Holed up in Anna’s study, Lisa stood by the wall where a light box hung. Normally such boxes illuminated a patient’s X-ray films, but presently Lisa had snugged two acetate sheets in place, striped with black lines. They were archived chromosome maps from research into the Bell’s mutational effects, before shots and after shots of fetal DNA, collected by amniocentesis. The
after
shots had circles where the Bell had transformed certain chromosomes. Notations in German were written beside them.

Anna had translated them and had gone off to fetch more books.

At the light box, Lisa ran a finger down the mutational changes, searching for any pattern. She had reviewed several of the case studies. There seemed no rhyme or reason to the mutations.

With no answers, Lisa returned to the dining table, now piled high with books and bound reams of scientific data, a trail of human experimentation going back decades.

The hearth fire crackled behind her. She had to restrain an urge to chuck the research into the flames. Still, even if Anna hadn’t been present, Lisa probably wouldn’t have. She had come to Nepal to study physiologic effects at high altitudes. Though a medical doctor, she was a researcher at heart.

Like Anna.

No…not exactly like Anna.

Lisa nudged aside a research monograph resting on the table.
Teratogenesis in the Embryonic Blastoderm
. The document related to aborted monstrosities that resulted from exposure to the Bell’s irradiation. What the black stripes on acetate had delineated with clinical detachment, the photographs in the book revealed with horrifying detail: limbless embryos, Cyclopean fetuses, hydrocephalic stillborn children.

No, she was definitely not Anna.

Anger built again in Lisa’s chest.

Anna clattered down the iron ladder that led to the second tier of her research library, another load of books tucked under one arm. The Germans certainly were not holding back. And why would they? It was in all their best interest to discover a cure to the quantum disease. Anna believed it to be a futile effort, confident that all possibilities had been explored over the past decades, but it hadn’t taken much persuasion to get her to cooperate.

Lisa had noted how the woman’s hands shook with a barely detectable palsy. Anna kept rubbing her palms, trying to hide it. The remainder of the castle suffered more openly. The tension in the air all morning had been palpable. Lisa had witnessed a few yelling matches and one fistfight. She had also heard of two suicides in the castle over the past several hours. With the Bell gone and little hope of a cure, the place was coming apart at the seams. What if the madness set in before she and Painter could figure out a solution?

She pushed that thought aside. She would not give up. Whatever the reason for the current cooperation, Lisa intended to use it to her best advantage.

Lisa nodded to Anna as she approached. “Okay, I think I have a layman’s grasp on the larger picture here. But you raised something earlier that’s been nagging at me.”

Dropping the books to the table, Anna settled into a seat. “What is that?”

“You mentioned that you believed the Bell controlled
evolution
.” Lisa waved her hand across the breadth of books and manuscripts on the table. “But what I see here is just some mutagenic radiation that you’ve tied to a eugenics program. Building a better human being through genetic manipulation. Were you just being grandiose when you used the word
evolution
?”

Anna shook her head, taking no offense. “How do
you
define evolution, Dr. Cummings?”

“The usual Darwinian way, I suppose.”

“And that is?”

Lisa frowned. “A gradual process of biological change…where a single-celled organism spread and diversified into the present-day range of living organisms.”

“And God has no hand in this at all?”

Lisa was taken aback by her question. “Like in creationism?”

Anna shrugged, eyes fixed on her. “Or intelligent design.”

“You can’t be serious? Next you’ll be telling me how evolution is just a theory.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m not a layman who associates
theory
with a ‘hunch’ or ‘guess.’ Nothing in science reaches the level of theory without a vast pool of facts and tested hypotheses behind it.”

“So then you accept Darwin’s theory of evolution?”

“Certainly. Without a doubt. It’s supported across all disciplines of science.”

“Then why were you talking about—”

“One does not necessarily rule the other out.”

Lisa cocked up one eyebrow. “Intelligent design
and
evolution?”

Anna nodded. “But let’s back up so I’m not misunderstood. Let’s first dismiss the ravings of the Flat Earth Creationists who doubt the world is even a globe, or even the strict biblical literalists who believe the planet is at best ten thousand years old. Let’s jump ahead to the main arguments of those who advocate intelligent design.”

Lisa shook her head. An ex-Nazi stumping for pseudoscience. What was going on?

Anna cleared her throat. “Admittedly, I will contend that most arguments for intelligent design are fallacious. Misinterpreting the Second Law of Thermodynamics, building statistical models that don’t withstand review, misrepresenting radiometric dating of rocks. The list goes on and on. None of it valid, but it does throw up lots of misleading smoke.”

Lisa nodded. It was one of the main reasons she had concern for the current drive to have pseudoscience presented alongside evolution in high school biology classes. It was a multidisciplinary quagmire that your average Ph.D. would have difficulty sorting through, let alone a high school student.

Anna, though, was not done with her side of the argument. “That all said, there is one concern proposed by the intelligent design camp that bears consideration.”

“And what is that?”

“The randomness of mutations. Pure chance could not produce so many beneficial mutations over time. How many birth defects do you know that have produced beneficial changes?”

Lisa had heard that argument before.
Life evolved too fast to be pure chance
. She was not falling for it.

“Evolution is not pure chance,” Lisa countered. “Natural selection, or environmental pressure, weeds out detrimental changes and only allows better-suited organisms to pass on their genes.”

“Survival of the fittest?”

“Or fit
enough
. Changes don’t have to be perfect. Just good enough to have an advantage. And over the vast scope of hundreds of millions of years, these small advantages or changes accumulate into the variety we see today.”

“Over hundreds of millions of years? Granted, that is indeed a vast gulf of time, but does it still allow enough room for the full scope of evolutionary change? And what about those occasional spurts of evolution, where vast changes occurred rapidly?”

“I presume you’re referring to the Cambrian explosion?” Lisa asked. It was one of the mainstays of intelligent design. The Cambrian Period encompassed a relatively short period of time. Fifteen million years. But during that time a vast explosion of new life appeared: sponges, snails, jellyfish, and trilobites. Seemingly out of the blue. Too fast a pace for antievolutionists.

“
Nein.
The fossil record has plenty of evidence that this ‘sudden appearance’ of invertebrates was not so
sudden
. There were abundant Precambrian sponges and wormlike metazoans. Even the diversity of shapes during this time could be justified by the appearance in the genetic code of Hox genes.”

“Hox genes?”

“A set of four to six control genes appeared in the genetic code just prior to the Cambrian Period. They proved to be control switches for embryonic development, defining up and down, right and left, top and bottom, basic bodily form. Fruit flies, frogs, humans, all have the exact same Hox genes. You can snip a Hox gene from a fly, replace it into a frog’s DNA, and it functions just fine. And as these genes are the fundamental master switches for embryonic development, it only takes minuscule changes in any of them to create massively new body shapes.”

Though unsure where this was all leading, the depth of the woman’s knowledge on the subject surprised Lisa. It rivaled her own. If Anna were a colleague at a conference, Lisa thought she might actually enjoy the debate. In fact, she kept having to remind herself to whom she was talking.

“So the rise of Hox genes just prior to the Cambrian Period might explain that dramatic explosion of forms. But,” Anna countered, “Hox genes do
not
explain other moments of rapid—almost
purposeful
—evolution.”

“Like what?” The discussion was becoming more interesting by the moment.

“Like the peppered moths. Are you familiar with the story?”

Lisa nodded. Now Anna was bringing up one of the mainstays on the other side of the camp. Peppered moths lived on birches and were speckled white, to blend in with the bark and avoid being eaten by birds. But when a coal plant opened in the Manchester region and blackened the trees with soot, the white moths found themselves exposed and easy targets for the birds. But in just a few generations, the population changed its predominant color to a solid black, to camouflage against the soot-covered trees.

“If mutations were random,” Anna argued, “it seems amazingly lucky
black
showed up when it did. If it was purely a random event, then where were the red moths, the green moths, the purple ones? Or even the two-headed ones?”

Lisa had to force herself not to roll her eyes. “I could say the other colored moths were eaten, too. And the two-headed ones died off. But you’re misunderstanding the example. The change in color of these moths was
not
from mutation. The species already had a black gene. A few black moths were born each generation, but they were mostly eaten, maintaining the general population as white. But once the trees blackened, then the few black moths had an advantage and filled the population as the white moths were consumed. That was the point of the example. Environments
can
influence a population. But it wasn’t a mutational event. The black gene was already present.”

Anna was smiling at her.

Lisa realized the woman had been testing her knowledge. She sat straighter, both angry and conversely more intrigued.

“Very good,” Anna said. “Then let me bring up a more recent event. One that occurred in a controlled laboratory setting. A researcher produced a strain of E. coli bacteria that could not digest lactose. Then he spread a thriving population onto a growth plate where the only food source was lactose. What would science say should happen?”

Lisa shrugged. “Unable to digest the lactose, the bacteria would starve and die.”

“And that’s exactly what happened to ninety-eight percent of the bacteria. But
two
percent continued to thrive just fine. They had spontaneously mutated a gene to digest lactose. In one generation. I find that astonishing,
ja
? That goes against all probability of randomness. Of all the genes in an E. coli’s DNA and the rarity of mutation, why did two percent of the population all mutate the one gene necessary to survive? It
defies
randomness.”

Lisa had to contend that it was strange. “Maybe there was laboratory contamination.”

“The experiment has been repeated. With similar results.”

Lisa remained unconvinced.

“I see the doubt in your eyes. So let’s look elsewhere for another example of the impossibility of randomness in gene mutation.”

“Where’s that?”

“Back to the beginning of life. Back to the primordial soup. Where the engine of evolution first switched on.”

Lisa recalled Anna making some mention before about the story of the Bell stretching back to the origin of life. Was this where Anna was leading now? Lisa pricked her ears a bit more, ready to hear where this might lead.

“Let’s turn the clock back,” Anna said. “Back before the first cell. Remember Darwin’s tenet: what exists had to arise from a simpler, less complex form. So before the single cell, what was there? How far can we reduce life and still call it life? Is DNA alive? Is a chromosome? How about a protein or an enzyme? Where is the line between chemistry and life?”

“Okay, that
is
an intriguing question,” Lisa conceded.

“Then I’ll ask another. How did life make the leap from a chemical primordial soup to the first cell?”

Lisa knew that answer. “Earth’s early atmosphere was full of hydrogen, methane, and water. Add a few jolts of energy, say from a lightning strike, and these gases can form simple organic compounds. These then cooked up in the proverbial primordial soup and eventually formed a molecule that could replicate.”

“Which was proven in the lab,” Anna agreed, nodding. “A bottle full of primordial gases produced a slurry of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.”

“And life started.”

“Ah, you are so eager to jump ahead,” Anna teased. “We’ve only formed
amino acids
. Building blocks. How do we go from a few amino acids to that first fully replicating protein?”

“Mix enough amino acids together and eventually they’ll chain up into the right combination.”

“By random chance?”

A nod.

“That’s where we come to the root of the problem, Dr. Cummings. I might concede with you that Darwin’s evolution played a significant role
after
the first self-replicating protein formed. But do you know how many amino acids must link up in order to form this first replicating protein?”

“No.”

“A minimum of thirty-two amino acids. That’s the smallest protein that holds the capacity to replicate. The odds of this protein forming by random chance are astronomically thin. Ten to the power of forty-one.”