Editorial May 10, 1969 Issue

Are You a Victim of Your Chromosomes?

William Milford Correll

In recent news items there have been reports of criminals who claim that they are the helpless victims of their chromosomes. The theory is that certain criminal tendencies are inherited and that the victim cannot help himself and therefore should not be held liable for his actions. Such a defense has not been generally accepted, but it brings up the whole theory of heredity, the belief in the transmission of human characteristics, sinful tendencies, and also of disease. All these theories, including those concerned with DNA, which is considered the chemical bearer of hereditary characteristics, rest upon the belief of intelligence as resident in matter. Christian Science takes radical exception to this basic error. Mary Baker Eddy states in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "In proportion to our understanding of Christian Science, we are freed from the belief of heredity, of mind in matter or animal magnetism; and we disarm sin of its imaginary power in proportion to our spiritual understanding of the status of immortal being."^{Science and Health, p. 178;}

One of the fundamental errors of human investigation in this field is to treat these chromosomes as causes rather than as effects. Christian Science shows us that the human body is the expression of the human mind, and that it is false belief that is the source of hereditary deficiencies and not the physical chemistry. And it is the application of the truth of being that corrects the difficulty. This Science teaches that man is the child of God, that he is spiritual, that he reflects all the qualities of God and is conditioned only by this perfect relationship with his source, divine Truth and Love. It reveals cause and effect as being God and man, divine Principle and idea, and thus it lifts human thought above the lower theories and enables one to correct the errors of material belief.

It is both the belief in evil as real and the belief in the material transmission of evil tendencies that perpetuate these errors, including disease. The Christian Science textbook, Science and Health, tells us: "The transmission of disease or of certain idiosyncrasies of mortal mind would be impossible if this great fact of being were learned,—namely, that nothing inharmonious can enter being, for Life is God. Heredity is a prolific subject for mortal belief to pin theories upon; but if we learn that nothing is real but the right, we shall have no dangerous inheritances, and fleshly ills will disappear."^{p. 228;}