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If a person is homozygous recessive for a gene, are they therefore not fully human? Should they be treated as less human than you or I (assuming we are not homozygous recessive for any human genes), with less rights, and less dignity?

I know a boy who died today, who was homozygous recessive for a certain gene. He was 17 years old. In spite of his condition, he was fully human, even though his genetic defect did not allow him fully to express his human nature. (Say a pray for him and his family, if you would; he is with the angels and saints now, and happier than he has been in a long, long time.)

It is reductionistic to equate human nature with a having a certain set of genes or chromosomes. That is why all this speculation about Jesus's DNA is silly. Jesus took his human nature from Mary. That's all we know. From that, we can deduce nothing about the DNA of Jesus. Human nature per se is at a deeper ontological level than the information and arrangement of DNA, even though human nature is manifested in that information and arrangement. Human nature is not *reducible* to that information and arrangement.

-A8

Hi, adiaireton8,

This discussion of Jesus' DNA is actually fascinating to me, because while Jesus can't be a clone of Mary (if He were, he would be a she!) we know that he assumed his flesh from Mary's flesh ---she was His true genetic as well as parturient mother --- and that he had bloodlines going all the way back to David, and beyond David, to Adam and Eve.

If you have any ideas on this. would you like to speculate why it says in Genesis 3:15 "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed..." thus, oddly when you come to think of it, identifying the coming Messiah with the seed of the woman, and not with Adam?

Of course Jesus is Adam's natural descendant ("son of Adam still Thou art, Savior to our race") but doesn't God do something counter-intuitive there, taunting the Serpent to the effect that the woman's seed would defeat him?

Thoughts?

I know a boy who died today, who was homozygous recessive for a certain gene. He was 17 years old. In spite of his condition, he was fully human, even though his genetic defect did not allow him fully to express his human nature. (Say a prayer for him and his family, if you would; he is with the angels and saints now, and happier than he has been in a long, long time.)

Prayers are sent, and I am very sorry to hear about this.

I haven't been arguing that Jesus' human nature is dependent on having Mary's DNA. God "COULD" have zapped a baby into Mary's womb with a human nature, but no human blood related to anyone else. I just don't personally think it happened that way for the other reasons stated in the discussion, the lineage requirements, and the fact that it would have been totally unnecessary to do it that way, when a perfectly viable, more genuine option was available. We have seen lots of scripture that tends toward the way my side has described it. I can't think of much that I have seen so far toward the "Immaculate Incubator" theory. Does the Church teach this as dogma? From what you have said, I don't think that can be. So, why not take the view that leans more toward direct scripture?