Science has attempted to explain it, but ties itself in knots.
On March 25, we celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation, also known as the Feast of the Incarnation in which we commem-orate the archangel Gabriel’s visit to the Blessed Virgin Mary marking the moment she conceived her son Jesus Christ. So important is this event in human history, that for many centuries, Christians celebrated the beginning of the new year on this feast day.
Now although modern science has nothing to say about the possibility of a divine person becoming incarnate, there has been some scientific speculation on whether it is biolog-ically possible for a virgin to conceive a child. This gained a degree of scientific res-pectability in 1955 when the gen-eticist Dr Helen Spurway gave a lecture reporting the case of a female guppy fish that was able to produce offspring, all of them female, without any involvement of the male. Thisphenomenon is known as parthenogenesis,coming from the Greek words parthenos meaning virgin and genesis meaning creation. Parthenogenesis has been known about since the 18th century when the naturalist and philosopher Charles Bonnet discovered that aphids could reproduce asexually. Spurway’s lecture is particularly noteworthy because she concluded it by speculating that perhaps parthenogenesis is also possible in human beings. This suggestion captured the public imagination.
Accordingly, a Sunday tabloid put out a call for women who thought they might have given birth to a parthenogenetic daughter, and a prominent physician, Dr Stanley Balfour-Lynn, ran tests on the 19 mothers and their daughters who responded to this call. Balfour-Lynn was able to show that in 18 of the 19 cases, the daughters must have had fathers. But there was however one mother, Emmie Jones, and her daughter Monica who were found to have identical blood type, saliva and sense of taste. A skin graft test was inconclusive, but Balfour-Lynn thought that the other tests together with the mother’s testimony were sufficiently persuasive for him to declare that he was unable to prove that any father took part in the creation of this child.
Balfour-Lynn’s declaration caused quite a stir. Some scientific commentators claimed that human parthenogenesis would have to be very rare, perhaps as infrequent as one in three billion births, while less restrained commentators suggested it was more frequent than identical twins. Since then, the excitement has died down. It seems highly probable that if Balfour-Lynn had had acc-ess to modern genetic sequencing, he would have come to a very different conclusion.
But speculation on human parthenogenesis hasn’t entirely ceased. In 2014 two Italian doctors, Giuseppe Benagiano and Bruno Dallapiccola, published an article in The Journal of Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine asking whether modern biology can interpret the mystery of Christ’s birth. They highlighted some research in which cells from the tails of mice could be genetically manipulated to create cells with very similar properties to embryonic stem cells. These cells could indeed develop into fully developed mice, but they needed to be injected into a complex of cells that would provide the extra-embryonic portion of the pregnancy such as the placenta and membranes necessary to nourish and protect the embryo, and the only known way of producing this latter complex of cells was by manipulating embryonic stem cells that have been created through sexual reproduction.
The same authors note that the eggs of mammals can sometimes begin a process of cell-division which to begin with looks very similar to that of a developing embryo, but this process has never been observed to result in viable offspring. And even if the offspring were viable, there is the question of how any such offspring could be truly male, since males require a Y chromosome, whereas the female eggs contain only X chromosomes. There are some very rare cases in which a person can be genetically female but still possess male anatomy, but in all such cases the person has been found to be infertile – so would not have a perfect human nature as Christ is believed to have. They conclude that there is no known biological mechanism capable of explaining the conception and birth of Christ.
There were however some interesting responses to this article. In the same journal, another doctor, Zeki Bayraktar, highlighted the 1990 report of a hermaphrodite rabbit that was kept in isolation, but nevertheless became pregnant producing seven healthy offspring. But many Catholics, myself included, will balk at Bayraktar’s suggestion that such a biological mechanism could account for the Virgin Mary’s conception of Jesus.
Although Mary was in many ways an extraordinary woman, from a biological point of view she was entirely ordinary. According to Gabriel’s message, Mary did not conceive by her own natural power but by the power of the Holy Spirit. The conception of every human person is a cause for great wonder. But the conception of a divine person is more wondrous still, a true miracle, and so we shouldn’t expect to find any biological explanation of this great event in human history when the eternal Son of God became incarnate.
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