“Adam had ‘em.” Or did he? The “‘em” are lice and, although odd sounding to us, there’s a real theological conundrum here. The bit of doggerel is shorthand for the kind of logical/theological puzzle that medieval eggheads found fascinating.
The conundrum has to do with two possibilities, both of which are unacceptable. Suppose Adam did have ‘em. Then, the Garden of Eden was not much of a paradise. Even without body lice (they need clothes), there are still head lice and pubic lice to make life uncomfortable. So, problem one: if lice were around in Eden, the place was not that Edenic.
Suppose, on the other hand, that Adam (and Eve of course) did not have the annoyance of body lice. Then Eden would be a paradise. This is good. But another problem crops up. If lice were not part of God’s original creation, where did they come from? This gives problem two: If God’s work of creation was complete after the vaunted 6th day, and if lice were not part of that work, then they must have arisen via creation after creation stopped.
It’s quite a conundrum, for Biblical literalists at least. For the rest of us the conundrum just shifts territory. Parasites, biologically, are fascinating, and the source of puzzling questions.
The presence of lice, as is the case with all parasites, occasions not just physical discomforts but also questions about origins. After all, parasitism, as a life strategy, is fairly narrow and specialized. Human lice, cat lice, and dog lice, for example, are not interchangeable. Each must find its way to a specific host. There’s also the move from free standing organism to parasite. Parts of the trajectory can be retraced, but some gaps remain. Was the narrow and absolute dependence on another entity already prefigured structurally when the former free-standing organism lost the ability to exist independently? Was there a prior shift in behavior and/or structure that made successful parasite status possible? There’s also always the challenging issue of absolute origins. Could it be that parasites have co-evolved with free standing animals and plants from the beginning?
What we do know about lice are the following: (1) They are around; (2) they have been around a long time; (3) they need blood; (4) they have very specific sources for that blood.
Post-Renaissance European philosophy was fixated on autonomy and self-sufficiency. This meant that parasites were either off the radar screen entirely or were treated as marginal and unusual, the exception, certainly not the rule. Post-ecological thinking has changed the assumptions. Interdependence it turns out is the rule rather than the exception. Parasites, it is now recognized, are fairly common. Not only that, it also turns out that, despite inflated notions of self-sufficiency, even humans are a species characterized by dependence.
The philosophical fascination with autonomy provides a good example of how a conceptual framework impacts what we attend to. It shapes how we taken account we take account of our surroundings, what becomes focal, what gets marginalized. The framework does not invent facts. It just make some of them prominent at the expense of others. When autonomy provides the general framework, then attention will move away from dependencies and interconnections. That is what happened with parasites. It is why parasites were once considered rare.
In a post ecological world the paradigm
