vitro evolution, in which one species is made
to evolve into another by raising it under
conditions carefully calibrated to favor specific
adaptations. This methodology can also be
used to probe genetic relationships between
organisms: You can measure how much effort it
takes to make one species become another.
After examining a broad range of species, I
hypothesized that God was genetically most
closely related to cyanobacteria. Numerous
considerations led to this hypothesis, not least
of which was the fact that cyanobacteria are
the oldest extant organisms in the fossil record.
If God came first, I reasoned, then God would
be most closely related to whichever species
came second. So I acquired a clonal strain of
the cyanobacterium Fremyella diplosiphon from
the University of San Francisco. Then it was
a simple matter of mutating it appropriately.
Since people often pray to God, I reasoned
that God must somehow metabolize worship.
I prepared four Petri dishes, three of which
I exposed to pre-recorded prayer (Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim) while the fourth
served as a control (my control group was
raised exclusively on talk radio). As a marker
of godliness, I opted for omnipresence, since
it’s scientifically quantifiable: You can see if
a species is evolving to become more godlike
simply by looking for abnormal population
growth. With my clonal strain of cyanobacteria,
that’s precisely what I observed. Specifically, the
cyanobacteria exposed to the Christian prayer
known as the Kyrie significantly outgrew the
talk-radio control group as well as the two other
test groups.
The First Copernican Art Exposition (Modernism Gallery, San
Francisco, CA, 2011). Photo courtesy of the artist and Modernism
Gallery, San Francisco.
SciArt in America February 2014
Film Still from Cinema Botanica: Pornography for Plants
(1078 Gallery, Chico, CA, 2007). Photo courtesy of the artist and
Modernism Gallery, San Francisco.
Of course this experiment was almost
meaningless in its own right. I needed to make
comparisons with other species: to triangulate
God’s position on the phylogenetic tree.
Many people pointed out that, according to
the Bible, God created man in His image, so
I decided to do the same experiment on a
species that’s taxonomically very similar to
humans—on the same branch of the tree of
life—but a lot quicker and easier to breed: fruit
flies. In collaboration with U.C. Berkeley, I
subjected four groups of laboratory-raised fruit
flies to continuous in vitro evolution. There
was population growth once again in the test
groups, but it was not as great in comparison to
the control as it had been for the cyanobacteria.
Of course these two pilot studies are only
the beginning of what would need to be
a much larger research effort. I founded
an International Association for Divine
Taxonomy to help facilitate future studies, and
enlisted researchers at institutions including
U.C. Berkeley and the Smithsonian for the
advisory board. So far nobody has submitted
experimental results confirming or refuting
my initial findings. I hope that people will.
Like science, all of my projects are completely
open source. Others can take these thought
experiments much further than I c