I thought about the influence of my ancestors on me and my influence on my descendants.
Japanese Edition
My Ancestors,Myself,
My Descendants
I have inherited DNA from my ancestors via my parents. I have four grandparents and eight great-grandparents.
The farther the generation of the ancestors becomes, the weaker the influence of each ancestor on us becomes. Of course, the same occurs to my descendants. My DNA will be gradually diluted. As a result of a combination of DNA gathered up from a huge number of ancestors, I am existing and living at this moment in the long history of humans and their ancestors, that is, animals. The population of my ancestors maybe fluctuated. But the fact that I am living now means that all of my ancestors have luckily continued to win the struggle for existence. Of course, my DNA, will be gradually diluted to nearly zero. The way of my thinking brings out the preciousness and vanity of a person's life in sharp relief.
In a way, my parents and ancestors are continuing to live in my body as DNA. At the same time, my posthumous living has already begun as a part of my children's and grandchildren's life. I especially feel so when I find my appearance and my way of thinking resemble those of my father or mother very much. I think that my mind, which consists of hardware called DNA and software called education, is the most important part of myself. Education is given by children's parents and various people. This would be more advantageous for children because they can get more knowledge to survive. But I think that their parents should strictly inject the OS, which is the basic software, into their children to receive education from other people. This is the most faithful way to my instinct. Usually husband and wife individually have their own ancestors. Although their hardware (DNA) is different, their software (mind) is strongly influenced by each other. I think that the mind of my partner's parents is gradually inherited by this process. I think this phenomenon also occurs to other than the two people and leaves some kind of chemical change in our brains. I think this is a more reliable thing than the idol.
Now we often hear about the following words: clone, surrogate mother, and in vitro fertilization. In case of 'in vitro fertilization', sperms of the husband and the ovum of a woman except his wife are fertilized in the test tube and the ovum is moved into his wife's womb. These words complicate the relation between ancestors and descendants. So we have to have the knowledge about the fundamentals of the new biochemistry and life science to understand our own situations, and at the same time we need a new legal interpretation. Though I don't know about the tasks of the persons of religion, I think it is an important task to help the understanding of the people who are put in the special situations such as clone.
I do not think the new technology is against Divine Providence or Nature because the people who developed the technology are also a part of nature. I think that there is basically no problem when the babies who were born with such new technology are accepted as humans. But in practice, we have to consider that the babies and their descendants have to shoulder their own life. Until we can believe that the babies born with the new technology grow up like normal babies, we should not use the new technology. Of course, I think we need the rules when we use it.
We can use the laws of nature, but we cannot create, or change them. In the above cases, we have to modify or newly establish the rules for the human society such as the constitution, religion, morals, and custom.
uploaded
April 29, 2002
revised October 25, 2002
corrected
March 1, 2003(by an English teacher)
revised November 17, 2003