Sextasies

Is Sex the Trigger or the Gun?

By Howard Bloom

At the heart of sex are genes. It’s been over 70 years since we first detected genes, and we still know less than we think about how they work.

We don’t know, for example, how a string manufactures a box. We don’t know how a thread-like genome builds the walls and interior scaffolding — the cytoskeleton — of a cell. We don’t know how a hundred trillion gene strings make the tower of 100 trillion boxes stacked together as you and me.

Yes, we are getting a handle on how genes make proteins, but protein-making doesn’t give you the walls, ceilings, and floors called cell membranes. Or the architecture that turns these membranes and the cytoskeleton struts within them into housing. It only gives you a soup.

We also have only the faintest clues to how and why the cosmos invented the most intricate process it has ever conceived — sex. Why not just stick with duplicating what you’ve got? Why go through the agonies of materialism, consumerism, waste and vain display — not to mention what Shakespeare calls “the expense of spirit”, the pains and tortures — that Henry VIII expressed in his letters to Anne Boleyn?