Free The Flamingo’s Smile by Stephen Jay Gould Page B

conclusion.
    Fertilized human eggs usually develop into single individuals. Rarely, the dividing cells separate into discrete groups, and two embryos develop. These one-egg (or identical) twins are genetic carbon copies. In some ultimate, biological sense, they are the same iterated individual—and the psychological literature contains ample testimony to feelings of imperfect separation shared by many so-called identical twins. Yet, at least for definition’s sake, we experience no difficulty in identifying one-egg human twins as undeniably separate personalities for two excellent reasons: first, physical separation is the essence of our vernacular definition of individuality (see following essay); second, human personalities are so subtly and pervasively shaped by complex environments of life (whatever the quirky similarities between one-egg twins reared apart) that each person follows a unique path.
    With vastly greater rarity, the dividing cells of a fertilized egg begin to separate into two groups, but do not complete the process—and conjoined (or Siamese) twins develop. Conjoined twins span the entire conceivable range from a single individual bearing a few rudimentary parts of an imperfect twin, to superficially joined, complete individuals like Chang and Eng. Ritta and Christina fall squarely in the middle of this continuum. With our modern knowledge of their biological formation, I fear that we must reject Serres’s solution, and admit instead that his dilemma cannot be answered.
    We inhabit a complex world. Some boundaries are sharp and permit clean and definite distinctions. But nature also includes continua that cannot be neatly parceled into two piles of unambiguous yeses and noes. Biologists have rejected, as fatally flawed in principle, all attempts by anti-abortionists to define an unambiguous “beginning of life,” because we know so well that the sequence from ovulation or spermatogenesis to birth is an unbreakable continuum—and surely no one will define masturbation as murder. Our congressmen may create a legal fiction for statutory effect but they may not seek support from biology. Ritta and Christina lay in the middle of another unbreakable continuum. They are in part two and in part one. And this, I am sorry to say, is the biological nonanswer to the question of the centuries.
    If this argument leaves you with an empty feeling after so much verbiage, I can only reply with the paradoxical phrase that is, so often, the most liberating response to an old mystery: The question has no answer because you asked the wrong question. The old question of individuality in Siamese twinning rests upon the assumption that objects can be pigeonholed into discrete categories. If we recognize that our world is full of irreducible continua, we will not be troubled by the intermediate status of Ritta and Christina.
    Dante punished schismatics by dismembering them in hell to exact a physical punishment worthy of their ideological crime: “Lo, how is Mohammed mangled…. Whom here thou seest, while they lived, did sow scandal and schism, and therefore thus are rent.”
    Let us value connections. As Dante analogized physical with ideological separation, perhaps we can learn from the indissoluble union of Ritta and Christina that our intellectual world revels in continuity as well.

5 | A Most Ingenious Paradox
    ABSTINENCE HAS its virtuous side, but enough is enough. I have always felt especially sorry for poor Mabel, betrothed to Frederic the pirate apprentice. On the very threshold of married happiness, she discovers that she must wait another sixty-three years to claim her beloved at age eighty-four—and, as could only happen in Gilbert and Sullivan, she actually promises to wait.
    The Pirate King and Ruth, Frederic’s old nursemaid and jilted paramour, present the reason for this extraordinary delay. Frederic, wrongfully apprenticed to the pirate band, has reached his twenty-first year and longs for freedom,