Michael O. Garvey.

Human animality is something with which certain sorts of writers like to startle the straitlaced. Eric Gill, who certainly knew a thing or two about animals, remarked in his autobiography that "man, physiologically speaking, is a pretty comic contraption--a curious bag of tricks, marvelously intricate and subtle and complicated and sensitive, but none the less comic." By way of illustration, he invited his readers to "fancy Mr. Neville Chamberlain having twenty-five feet of intestines and a heart going pit-a-pat all the time."

In recent months, a bunch of genomic cartographers, if I understand them, has begun to suggest that Gill and Chamberlain are no more genetically interesting than Marisa Tomei, who is herself no more genetically interesting than a nematode. The brainiacs who aced the organic chemistry exam are haughtily explaining to us benighted English majors that the human contraption is not all that complicated, after all, or at least no more complicated than that of a silverfish, a rhinoceros, or a penguin, no matter how comic it (or we) may be.

All of this makes me think that I've too harshly judged those playground bullies at Christ the King School who used to enjoy beating up the innocent nerds who were luminaries in our science classes. I could never condone their brutality, of course, but I think I now understand a little better what animated it.

Undoubtedly important as these genomic findings are, they will have the annoying consequence of emboldening the sort of cracker-barrel atheists who like to pose such triumphally iconoclastic questions as: If God is all-powerful, can he create anything heavier than he can lift? Har, har! It's depressing to speculate on the use to which these yokels will put the New Leveling.

But scientific breakthroughs should not be despised. How can we believers hope to know God without learning as much as can be learned about what he has done? How can we look exactly the same way on someone we despise, knowing how much genetic material he or she shares with the One who will come to judge the living and the dead?

And such discoveries as those made by the gene-mappers are seldom entirely without social benefit. When, for instance, my involuntary belch or off-color remark once again leads my wife to announce to our dinner-table companions that she has married a pig, I will now console myself with the knowledge that this very good woman is not being uncharitable--only a little imprecise. And even if there's no more than, say, 0.1 percent of genetic material to distinguish each of us from all the rest of us, we would all do well to ponder the amazing difference that 0.1 percent is able to make.

Just look at what Peter Singer, the Ira. W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in Princeton University's Center for Human Values, has been able to do with his 0.1 percent: He's landed one of the most prestigious and lucrative jobs in the professorate while urging his peers to understand that "sex across the species barrier" need no longer be regarded as "an offense to our status and dignity as human beings." We have yet to hear whatever misgivings his academic colleagues may retain about bestiality or about Singer's benignly nonchalant account of it, but, all in all, this is a pretty impressive achievement for a creature that has discovered itself to be, genetically speaking, kissing cousin to a goat. In one of his most celebrated books, Practical Ethics, Singer solemnly admonishes "it is speciesist to judge that the life of a normal adult member of our species is more valuable than the life of a normal adult mouse." He may very well be onto something there, but the question must be asked: How many adult field mice have (yet) become Ira W. DeCamp Professors of Bioethics?

Michael O. Garvey, the author of Finding Fault, never resorted to violence on the playground.