Long on Embryonic Rescue

From Steven Long, "An Argument for the Embryonic Intactness of Marriage," The Thomist 70 (April 2006), 267-88.

8. It is surely true that it is more natural for an embryonic child to be carried by a woman in her womb than by a machine such as an artificial womb, and also that it is more natural for the embryonic child to develop and live rather than to die. But the conclusions drawn from this are erroneous. For while it is generically speaking more natural for the child to be carried in a woman's womb than in a machine or artificial womb, the accruing of an additional form may make such carrying of the child to be unnatural. Similarly, it is generically better not to kill human beings than to kill them, but subsequent upon a certain form of justice, it may be better to kill--say, in just war, in defense, or in the case of the death penalty. Likewise, generically it is more natural for the embryonic child to be carried in the womb of a woman. But when one considers the added formality that the woman in question is not the mother of the child, so that such carrying constitutes either a sin against marital intimacy, against the chastity of the unwed, or against the vow of religious chastity, it is clear that by this form it is contrary to natural order for such a woman to carry the child of other parents. Indeed, it is the sin of surrogacy which the Church has proscribed. It is clear that it is then more natural for the child to be saved in an artificial womb than that anyone contrary to moral precept materially violate marital intimacy, or unwed chastity, or religious chastity. With respect to it being more natural for the child to live than to die, this is generically true; but, consequent upon the form that for the child to live someone must do moral evil, one sees that in this case, even were death the only remaining likelihood for the child, it would be better that no morally evil act be done. For one may not do evil that good may come.

With respect to the claim that it is simply natural for women to carry children (to gestate) and therefore it is natural for a woman to gestate another's child, one must say: this is overly generic, too general. Generically speaking, yes, it is natural for

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women to carry children, to gestate; and generically speaking, one might also say it is natural to human beings to gestate; or indeed, one might say it is natural for human beings to engage in sexual activity, or for human beings to marry. But what is generically true requires specification. It is natural to the mother to carry the child she conceives, but not for the woman to go to a clinic and carry a child she never conceived. It is natural to man and wife within the bounds of matrimony to procreate children, but it assuredly is not a perfection of normative natural teleology for all human persons of whatsoever age and sex, and apart from matrimony, to engage in sexual activity. It is natural to those fit for and desiring marriage to marry, but it is not natural to one who is called by God to religious life or the priesthood to deny the divine call, or alternatively and by way of defect for one who cannot engage in the procreative act to marry. It is natural for the prison guard to hold prisoners in jail, but it is not natural for the prison guard to hold someone in jail who is known by all to be innocent or if such holding is clearly contrary to law, justice, and charity. From such a generic proposition as "it is natural for women to carry children" one does not sufficiently fathom normative natural teleology, for the children carried do not naturally fall out of the air, but are conceived by man and wife. It is natural for a wife to conceive a child and then to carry the child in her womb, but the normative teleology is not for a woman to have an embryonic child whom she never conceived implanted in her womb by a clinic.

It remains true that one may not do evil that good may come--one may not violate marital intimacy, the chastity of the unwed, or religious chastity, for the end of saving the lives of embryonic children wrongfully alienated from their mothers' wombs and in danger of death. Yet there is in fact hope that these children may be rescued through the development of an artificial environment that can medicinally provide some minimal degree of what the mother should have provided her child in her womb.

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9. It is true that many acts that are not otherwise permissible may become permissible on the supposition of some prior evil, danger, or grave situation. Nonetheless no such act is permissible if it involves the objective transgression of negative precept, that is, if its moral species is one of wrongdoing. One may not do evil that good may come. Hence the reason why the apostate priest may not habitually dispense the sacrament is that his state of unbelief would render this sacrilegious given his public unbelief, and that he lacks the habitual grace minimally proportionate to such habitual sacaramental action, and that this might even in the external forum be an occasion for the ridiculing of the sacrament. But just as in the case of a penitent in extremis there is an extreme need, so the apostate priest may in such a state, mindful of that dignity to which he had been called, receive from God the graced motion of will whereby he wills in this extreme case to provide the sacrament. One notes that the giving of the sacrament is an end that is good in itself. Likewise, for the child's mother to bear her child is good in itself; but for one who is not the mother to carry the child is not good in itself because contrary, as has been said above, either to marital intimacy, the chastity of the unwed, or religious chastity. And so there is no moral parity here between an apostate priest hearing confession of a penitent in extremis and the case of the woman who chooses to carry a child she has not conceived with her husband in a specific act of conjugal unity: for the former is (or at least may be) good, while the latter is, simply speaking, not good, because it is surrogacy.

Yet the gravity of the case of the embryonic human persons needs to be addressed. How shall it be addressed? It has been seen above that whereas it is generically better for a woman to carry the child, consequent upon a certain form it is seen that to carry a child not her own is wrongful because materially violative of marital intimacy, the chastity of the unwed, or religious chastity. Likewise, as already seen it is generically inferior for an embryonic human being to be placed in a machine rather than in the womb of a woman. But given the realization that this child cannot be placed in the maternal womb as ought to be the case,

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and that this child can be placed in the womb only of a woman for whom this act will be violative of marital intimacy, unwed chastity, or religious chastity, clearly it is better for the child not to be placed in such a woman's womb, and to be placed in an artificial womb. For this offers both to supply medicinally at least some minimal degree of that of which the child has been deprived by its mother, and also it does this without any violation of the moral law. It is, accordingly, the only moral option for attempted rescue of frozen embryonic human beings. But if there is no such artificial womb that is workable, or if any attempt at thawing in the current state of technology should prove to be lethal, may these embryonic children be kept in their unnatural and frozen state in the hope that a technical means may be found to enable at least some of them to survive and live normal human lives?

Although this is not formally part of the question at hand, it seems fitting to conclude by noting that this is indeed one of the circumstances in which, supposing the prior evil, and supposing that there is real hope of normal life for these beings, we may do what elsewise we would not, namely, retain them in their frozen state. Although this is unnatural, and it was wrong initially for them to be alienated from their mothers, yet to unfreeze them is lethal and arguably thus to do them even worse injury; and by unfreezing them it seems that we deliberately choose to take responsibility for their deaths. Hence insofar as there is a realistic prospect of providing a means for at least some of these children to live, it seems not unreasonable to retain them in this unnatural condition in the hope, finally, of freeing them not merely from this affliction by thawing them unto their deaths, but of freeing them from this unnatural state for the sake of living a normal human existence.

In the absence of any such realistic prospect, however--if it is correctly judged that this is now, and for the foreseeable future will remain, impossible--then to unfreeze them, baptize them, and permit them to perish free of their unnatural and unnaturally imposed state, is permissible under the principle of double effect, inasmuch as the circumstances pertinent to their unnatural

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condition rather than the effort to free them therefrom exerts the decisively baneful influence. For to keep innocent human persons trapped in unnatural rigidity indefinitely, in quasiperpetuity and with no practical plan to free them, is unjust. Further, in such circumstances the caretaker's principal responsibility is to baptize them--which means also letting them thaw and die, since there is more probability that they will be alive to be baptized earlier rather than later. To insist upon keeping them in their frozen state without any practical hope of normal life is to perpetuate the wrongful act of those who initially separated them from their mothers and froze them. Only a reasonably practical hope of enabling normal life for these embryonic persons could justify failing to baptize them and keeping them for some slight increment longer in their present unnatural frozen state.

M is for Messy

M is for messy
By Martin Gardner

Lee Smolin
The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next.
Houghton Mifflin, 392 pages, $26

Peter Woit
Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law.
Basic Books, 291 pages, $26.95

For more than thirty years, string theory has been what Murray Gell-Mann called “the only game in town.” By this he meant that it was the only good candidate for a TOE, or Theory of Everything. Not only does it claim to unify relativity and quantum mechanics, it also explains the existence of all fundamental particles. Instead of being “pointlike,” they are modeled by filaments of energy so tiny that there is no known way to observe them or even to prove they are real.

A string can have two ends or be closed like a rubber band. Of great tensile strength, strings vibrate at different frequencies. They live in a space of ten or eleven dimensions, of which six or seven are “compacted” into inconceivably minute structures attached to every point in our four-dimensional spacetime. The simplest vibration of a closed string produces a graviton, the quantized particle of gravity. One of string theory’s earliest triumphs was forcing the reality of gravitons.

After an obscure, bumbling start, string theory slowly began to gain momentum until it became the hottest topic in physics. Thousands of papers were published and thick textbooks written. The fastest way to advance in departments of great universities was to work on strings. Richard Feynman and Sheldon Glashow were almost alone among famous physicists who were skeptical of the trend. Not until a few years ago did skepticism begin to surge. Simmering doubts reached a boiling point last September when two eminent physicists published slashing attacks on string theory. Their books may mark a dramatic turning point in the history of modern physics.

For years, Lee Smolin rode the string bandwagon. After teaching at Yale and Penn State, he became a researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, a think tank he helped found. The Trouble with Physics, his third book, is a powerful indictment. He sees string theory as not a theory—only a set of curious conjectures in search of a theory. True, it has great explanatory power, but a viable theory must have more than that. It must make predictions which can be falsified or confirmed.

In addition to this whopping lack of evidence, string theory has suffered other setbacks. It has been absorbed into a richer set of conjectures called M-theory. The M stands mainly for membranes (branes for short), or for Magic, Mystery, Mother of all theories, or any other term you like that begins with M. In M-theory, strings are one-dimensional branes that can roam free or be attached to two-dimensional branes. Branes may be of any dimension from 1 through 9. One wild speculation is that our 3-brane universe floats within a monstrous higher-dimension brane. To a mere science journalist like myself, the great mathematical beauty of early string theory has degenerated into M for Messy. Its membranes, in Smolin’s opinion, are as ugly as the epicycles Ptolemy fabricated to describe the curious paths of planets as they seem to circle Earth.

The most troubling aspect of string/M-theory is that the compacted dimensions, known as Calabi-Yau manifolds, can take at least a hundred thousand different shapes. This has led to the mind-boggling concept of a vast “landscape” consisting of a multiverse containing a hundred thousand, perhaps an infinity, of universes, each with its own Calabi-Yau space! Every universe would have a random selection of physical constants, such as the velocity of light. By anthropic reasoning, we of course live in a universe with just the right set of constants that make possible galaxies, stars, planets, and, on one small planet, such improbable creatures as you and me.

Other string/M-theory embarrassments are carefully detailed by Smolin. Cosmologists have discovered that most of our universe consists of “dark matter,” so called because it is totally invisible. String theorists failed to predict it and have nothing useful to say about it. A more recent discovery is that the universe is expanding at a slightly increasing rate. Such acceleration can only be caused by the pressure of a mysterious “dark force.” Again, writes Smolin, dark force was not predicted by string theory, and the theory has no good explanation for it.

A chapter in Smolin’s persuasive book divides physicists into two classes: craftsmen who test theories; and seers, like Newton and Einstein, who create theories. What physics now desperately needs, Smolin is convinced, is a new Einstein who can replace M-theory with a TOE that can be confirmed by a workable experiment.

Another chapter is devoted to lonely seers, working patiently outside the establishment on conjectures as revolutionary as string theory. Roger Penrose, Oxford’s famous mathematical physicist, is the best known seer. His twistor theory, alas also untestable, is M-theory’s chief rival. Like many other seers, Penrose thinks Einstein was right to regard quantum mechanics as “incomplete.” Other intrepid seers are starting to question even special relativity. Because both relativity and quantum mechanics are essential to M-theory, finding either theory in need of revision would be, Smolin writes, another severe blow to string/M-theory.

In a chapter on sociology, Smolin introduces the concept of “groupthink”—the tendency of groups to share an ideology. This creates a cultlike atmosphere in which those who disagree with the ideology are considered ignoramuses or fools. Most physicists tied up in the string mania, Smolin believes, have become groupthinkers, blind to the possibility that they have squandered time and energy on bizarre speculations that are leading nowhere.

In spite of such criticisms Smolin, like Edward Witten, by far the most energetic and creative of the stringers, believes that even if string/M-theory is finally abandoned, portions of it will remain fruitful. Peter Woit, a mathematical physicist at Columbia University, is less optimistic. He sees little hope that any aspect of M-theory will survive. The harshness of his rhetoric is signaled by his book’s arresting title, Not Even Wrong. It’s a famous quote from the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli. A certain theory was so bad, he said, that “it was not even wrong.” By this he meant it was so flimsy it couldn’t be confirmed or falsified.

Most of Woit’s book is a moderately technical, equation-free survey of quantum mechanics, the standard model of particle theory, and the history of superstrings. The prefix “super” indicates the linkage of strings to an earlier theory called supersymmetry. Not until the last third of his book does Woit take up reasons for regarding string theory a failure, destined to give way to a testable TOE.

Although Woit sees Edward Witten as the guru of what resembles a religious cult, he has only the highest respect for Witten’s genius. Amazingly, Witten’s early training was in economics. He soon shifted to mathematics and physics at Princeton University. There, he obtained his doctorate and became a professor for several years before moving to New Jersey’s Institute for Advanced Study where he has remained ever since. He has been given a MacArthur award and a Fields medal, the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize.

When Woit was a graduate student at Princeton, he once followed Witten up a stairway from a library to a plaza. When he reached the plaza, Witten had mysteriously vanished. “It crossed my mind,” Woit writes, “that a consistent explanation … was that Witten was an extraterrestrial being from a superior race who, when he thought no one was looking, had teleported back to his office.”

Woit’s main objection to string theory, of course, is that it has not, in Glashow’s words, “made even one teeny-tiny experimental prediction.” Woit quotes Feynman: “String theorists do not make predictions, they make excuses.”

In his book Interactions, Glashow writes:

Until string people can interpret perceived properties of the real world they simply are not doing physics. Should they be paid by universities and be permitted to pervert impressionable students? Will young Ph.D’s, whose expertise is limited to superstring theory, be employable if, and when, the string snaps? Are string thoughts more appropriate to departments of mathematics, or even to schools of divinity, than to physics departments? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? How many dimensions are there in a compacted manifold, 30 powers of ten smaller than a pinhead?
Woit quotes from another Nobel Prize winner, the Dutch physicist Gerard ’t Hooft:
Actually, I would not even be prepared to call string theory a “theory” rather a “model” or not even that: just a hunch. After all, a theory should come together with instructions on how to deal with it to identify the things one wishes to describe, in our case the elementary particles, and one should, at least in principle, be able to formulate the rules for calculating the properties of these particles, and how to make new predictions for them. Imagine that I give you a chair, while explaining that the legs are still missing, and that the seat, back and armrest will perhaps be delivered soon; whatever I did give you, can I still call it a chair?
Woit has only harsh things to say about the recent acceptance of an anthropic principle by several leading string theorists, notably Weinberg and David Susskind. Susskind has even written a popular book about it—The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. The notion that there could be millions of other universes, each with its own Calabi-Yau structure—or what amount to the same thing, with its own basic state of what physicists like to call the “vacuum”—is not one that appeals to Witten. “I’d be happy if it is not right,” Woit quotes from a 2004 lecture, “but there are serious arguments for it, and I don’t have any serious argument against it.”
In the nineteenth century, a conjecture called the vortex theory of the atom became extremely popular in England and America. Proposed by the famous British physicist Lord Kelvin, it had an uncanny resemblance to string theory. It was widely believed at the time that space was permeated by an in- compressible frictionless fluid called the ether. Atoms, Kelvin suggested, are super-small whirlpools of ether, vaguely similar to smoke rings. They take the form of knots and links. Point particles can’t vibrate. Ether rings can. Their shapes and frequencies determine all the properties of the elements. Vortex theory isn’t mentioned by Woit, although Smolin considers it briefly.

Kelvin published two books defending his conjecture. It was strongly championed in England by J. J. Thomson in his 1907 book The Corpuscular Theory of Matter. Another booster of the theory was Peter Tait, an Irish mathematician. His work, like Witten’s, led to significant advances in knot theory. In the United States, Albert Michelson considered vortex theory so “grand” that “it ought to be true even if it is not.” Hundreds of papers elaborated the theory. Tait predicted it would take generations to develop its elegant mathematics. Alas, beautiful though vortex theory was, it proved to be a glorious road that led nowhere.

Will string theory soon meet a similar fate? Glashow wrote a clever poem that he recited at a Grand Unification Workshop in Japan. It ends with the following lines:


Please heed our advice that you too are not smitten—
The book is not finished, the last word is not Witten.