“When God became known to us in the flesh, He neither received the passions of human nature, nor did the Virgin Mary suffer pain, nor was the Holy Spirit diminished in any way, nor was the power of the Most High set aside in any manner, and all this was because all was accomplished by the Holy Spirit. Thus the power of the Most High was not abased, and the child was born with no damage whatsoever to the mother’s virginity,” wrote St. Gregory of Nyssa in his tract on trinitarian theology in the 4th century, crystallizing the Christian idea of the desexualized female vessel as the divine feminine. The sanctity of the virgin birth comes to us mistranslated by patriarchy. The Greek word used to describe Mary’s virginity was Parthenos, an epithet that had previously been used to refer to autonomous female goddesses such as Athena, Artemis, and Hestia. Parthenos did not mean a woman who had not had penetrative sex. Instead, Parthenos described women, typically young, who were unmarried and responsible for their own needs – most often women who had dedicated their services and lives to similarly independent goddesses. The term is neutered alongside the early church’s active effort to classify female-led Christian communities as heretical and create a male-only apostolic succession. Given Christianity’s collusion with violent misogyny, it has always felt important to me to complicate ideas of purity that so directly conflict with Jesus’s own inclusion and celebration of what is deemed culturally “impure”. That being said, virgin births are not the sole property of Christianity. Although, perhaps it is more accurate to remove the word virgin: births involving a single parent occur again and again across different mythologies including Rhea, the mother of Remus and Romulus and Nana the mother of the wounded Phrygian god Attis.
Virginity and miraculously chaste motherhood are the favorite accessories of patriarchal paradigms. But there is a flipside. Virgin births can also signify something terrifying to male-dominated systems: the loss of meiotic sex and sexual dimorphism. More simply, when you can give birth without another partner, suddenly the calculus on who is evolutionarily important recomputes. Bucking simplistic projections of socialized gender, we can turn from mythology to biology for real virgin births, produced by a monomorphic (single) sex not easily categorizable as male or female.
Uncomfortable with the anthropocentric fixation on a human divine feminine, I find myself praying to someone smaller, weirder, and much older than hominid deities. If I am uncomfortable with the meek virgin of medieval iconography, I am finally at home in the dirty puddle next to my favorite Parthenos: Bdelloid rotifera, a relative of the flatworm. Under a microscope she is crystalline, blown from glass, coming in at between 150 and 700 µm in length. She oscillates like a visual sound wave, sometimes suctioning to a surface, and undulating her body, other times free-swimming through a thick soup of sewage - for Bdelloid likes it dirty, preferring brackish water, sewage treatment plants, and drops of soil-speckled moisture. She has teeth, an esophagus, and a developed digestive track. And she is virtually indestructible, putting even the tardigrade to shame, as she reliably withstands up to 1,000 grays of radiation. Practicing anhydrobiosis, Bdelloids dehydrate their bodies and can live in a desiccated limbo for up to 24,000 years as evidence by the recent resurrection of a prehistoric worm preserved in permafrost in Siberia. And, unlike the comet streak life of a Galilean maid, Bdelloid has been flaunting her virginal status for some 80 million years longer.
Bdelloids confound popular genetic theory with their longstanding adherence to a mode of sexual reproduction generally thought to be a species’ death sentence. Meiotic sex is traditionally considered to be the most effective mode of “remixing” genetic material as it combines the chromosomes of two different parents. Through this constant genetic experimentation, novel adaptations can occur that allow for a species to evolve and survive shifting circumstances. Asexual reproduction, involving the genes of only one parent, is a type of clonality. The same genes repeat ad infinitum without the ability to diversify. Theoretically, instead of branching off into fresh adaptations, these clonal species undergo genomic decay. Evolutionary biology tells us that asexuality is a reproductive dead end, ensuring that a species will eventually be unable to keep apace of changing environmental factors. And for many asexual species this holds true, their lines lasting only 104–105 generations, at longest hanging around two million years. A biologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, explains, “Sex must be important – if you lose it, you go extinct”. Bdelloid rotifera sticks her tongue out at this theory though, well outliving the estimates for asexual lineages. Not only that, she is far from frail, representing one of the hardiest beings.
How, then, does such a disadvantaged sexual strategy make for such an innovative and long-surviving species? The answer is delightfully subversive. Bdelloid is not only a dirty puddle virgin, she is also a thief. A close look at Bdelloid’s genome reveals something extraordinary: 8 to 10% of its genes are non-metazoan, indicating a genetic strategy usually only reserved for bacteria and microbes. Instead of replicating into obsoletion, Bdelloid has continued to evolve and diversify through a process called horizontal gene transfer, stealing genes from other species. Many of Bdelloid’s neatest tricks aren’t self-generated, coming instead from fungal, bacterial, and plant species. Bdelloid’s ability to break down the poisonous benzyl cyanide from bacteria and the worm’s resistance to cellular damage comes from parasitic protozoa. Kleptogenesis, a term meaning “origin by thievery”, is Bdelloid’s very successful alternative to sex.
Having stolen genetic material from up to 500 different species, we must ask, how does this thievery actually work? One theory about the Bdelloid’s Kleptogenesis is that the worm lives in swampy detritus that it also eats. This detritus includes the rogue DNA of various beings, and it is through selective indigestion that Bdelloid hangs onto certain genes, stitching them into its ragged genome.
Virgin birth doesn’t go out of style, not because of its purity, but, paradoxically, because of its proximity to shit and impurity. It turns out a really successful virgin is a parthenogenic pirate, a shit-eater, a genomic Frankenstein.
Finally, another theory about Bdelloid’s hybrid genome relates to her ability to survive extreme desiccation. Perhaps Bdelloid’s depend on consistent trauma and drought – their genomes fragmenting when they dry up and then “restitching” when they encounter water again. The restitching allows for the kind of patchwork DNA we see in the worm: scrambling their own genes and also, accidentally, adding other foreign DNA as part of the repair process. Trauma, then, could be seen as being integral to the survival and evolutionary fitness of the Bdelloid. They need, at regular intervals, to be destroyed in order to restitch themselves together with new adaptations.
As someone disabled by a genetic “glitch”, as someone with a legacy of trauma, as someone mourning a miscarriage and the derailment of a narrative where I get to have a child with a partner, I have found great comfort, not in the anthropocentric virgin mother, but the shit-eating, pirate queen Bdelloid. She tells me that it’s alright to be incorrect and to confound traditional ideas about sex and physical fitness. She tells me that although our culture is remarkably good at abstracting itself from waste, sometimes it is in the trash, the detritus, the dirty puddles, where you will find your superpower swimming. Maybe that’s where you’ll eat up your ability to repair bodily harm and produce poison-melting enzymes. Unisexuality, considered a poor long-term strategy, is extremely good at repairing diminished population numbers, reproducing at twice the rate of sexual species. It is a survival tactic that often, like apocalyptic Marian visions, arrives on the brink of species apocalypse and extinction. Not only that, Bdelloid asks uncomfortable questions about trauma. What if trauma created the “fragments” that made us consciously restitch ourselves, reaching for other species and other strategies in the process? What if these moments, like the drought-shattered Bdelloid, provided the “openings” for other species to come and teach us how best to survive in increasingly chaotic circumstances?
I don’t have any answers. But I know that Bdelloid teaches me that breaking the rules is a good way to survive extreme conditions. She tells me that opening my body to other species may be the best way to evolve. That genetic banditry is a kind of lovemaking. That when we are shattered, we are given a unique opportunity to include newness in our restitched shapes. I bow to you, pirate queen of kleptogenesis.
Resources:
Massive Horizontal Gene Transfer in Bdelloid Rotifers from Harvard Digital
Bitch by Lucy Cooke
Tiny Creatures Survive Permafrost in NY Times
Bdelloids Surviving on Borrowed DNA in Science Magazine
Biochemical Diversification through Foreign Gene Expression in Bdelloid Rotifers in PLOS Genetics
Evolutionary dynamics of transposable elements in bdelloid rotifers in ELife Magazine
Bdeloid Rotifers Could Redefine Sex in Quanta Magazine
My book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine is now available for pre-order from all online booksellers here and from my publisher Inner Traditions.
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This couldn't come at a better time for me as I'm working on a clay rotifer - they are visually so interesting and this essay adds so much depth and dimension to the subject!🙂
There are myriad examples in the natural world of reproduction that is decidedly nonparochial. Look no further than parthenogenic nematodes and so called "promiscuous" bacteria "stealing" genetic material. The numerous fungi imperfcti (having no known male form) are perfectly adapted for reproduction with spores. Thanks for adding Bdelloid rotifera to the list 💚