Modular gene networks as agents of evolutionary novelty

A while back, I told you all about this small piece of the biochemistry of the fly eye — the pathways that make the brown and red pigments that color the eye.

I left it with a question: if even my abbreviated summary revealed considerable complexity, how could this pathway evolve? Changing anything produces a failure or change in the result. Before I answer, let’s make the problem even harder, because I love a challenge (although actually, I’m cheating — it’s going to turn out that complexity is not a barrier, but an opportunity).

The pigment pathways above are far downstream: they operate in the differentiated compound eye of the fly. Long before that, there are a set of genes that have to be activated first to trigger formation of the head and eye in the larva. And this is that pathway:


Regulatory scheme on the top of the eye developmental pathway. Twin of eyeless (toy), eyeless (ey), and possibly eyegone (eyg), three Pax genes, are master control genes on the top of the hierarchy. Sine oculis (so), eyes absent (eya), dachshund (dac), and optix are second-order transcription factors regulated by the master control genes. Note that the pathway is not linear, but rather a network interconnected by feedback loops.

At the top of the hierarchy are two genes in Drosophila, eyeless (ey) and twin of eyeless (toy). Remember, genes are named for their mutant effect, so the normal function of eyeless is to initiate eye development. These genes switch on sine oculis and eyes absent (notice the effort to find synonyms to describe genes that cause missing eyes when broken) that activate each other and feed back on eyeless to generate a robust response. Another gene, dachshund (this one named for another part of its phenotype: it makes flies with very short legs) also feeds back on eyeless.

This circuit has multiple outputs: so, dac, optix and eyg. All of these have effects further downstream, in that catch-all category labeled “eye development” here. In that broad label lie multiple processes: the pigment pathways above, but also all kinds of elaborate interactions that recruit cells to specific photoreceptor functions, that organize supporting cells, like hair cells and lenses, and that induce the neural tissue of the retina and deeper parts of the nervous system. The genes ey and toy initiate a whole deep, branching network of genes that cascade together to build the many bits and pieces of the eye.

These two master control genes, eyeless and twin of eyeless, also have a synonym. To everyone’s surprise, versions of this circuit are found in all animals with eyes, and the common name for this universal regulator of eye formation is Pax6, and that’s what I’ll call it in the rest of this article.

And look at this! Isn’t it cool? All these eyes use this same Pax6 gene regulatory network to initiate development.


General scheme of eye evolution. The first step in eye evolution is the evolution of a light receptor molecule which in all metazoans is rhodopsin. In the most ancestral metazoa, the sponges, a single Pax gene, but no opsin gene has been found. In the cubozoan jellyfish Tripedalia, a unicellular photoreceptor has been described in the larva. The adult jellyfish has complex lens eyes that form under the control of PaxB, whereas the eyes of a hydrozoan jellyfish (Cladonema) are controlled by PaxA. We propose that from the unicellular photoreceptor cell, the prototypic eye postulated by Darwin originated by a first step of cellular differentiation into a photoreceptor cell and a pigment cell, controlled by Pax6 and MITF, respectively. From this prototype, all the more complex eye types arose monophyletically. As a mechanism, we propose intercalary evolution of progressively more genes such as lens genes into the eye developmental pathway (after Gehring and Seimiya 2010). Starting from the common prototype, the various eye types evolved by divergent, parallel, and convergent evolution, generating a magnificent biodiversity.

That’s the power of a gene regulatory network. Switch on just one of the key genes, and it recruits all the downstream genes and triggers a whole series of actions to assemble a complex structure. That strange grey object to the right is a developing Drosophila wing — the dark fringe is the line of bristles that surround the leading and trailing edges of the fully-formed wing — which has had the Pax6 gene inappropriately expressed in a few cells at the base. Just switching on that one gene has led to the construction of an eye with its red pigment right there, where flies should not have eyes.

The ability to build elaborate organs with a simple switch is a reflection of the modular nature of developmental programs. It also simplifies evolution; small, simple changes can lead to dramatic novelties. Zap, one mutation can lead to an abrupt saltational change.

Now wait a moment, you will say. Suddenly plopping an eye onto a wing sounds disastrous: it really is a kind of hopeful monster, emphasis on “monster”, and is almost always going to be grossly deleterious. This can’t be a viable pathway for evolutionary change, can it? And you’d be right. But what about portions of a pathway? Look back up at the eye development pathway, the second figure in this article. What if you just switched on optix, one of the second-order transcription factors? Then you’d just activate some of the tools of eye construction.

It’s been done. The hideous blob to the left is the nascent antenna of a fruit fly, and optix has been inappropriately switched on…and what do you get? It activates the pigment pathway (that biochemical sequence illustrated in the first image at the top of this page), and it creates a bright red spot on the antenna. This is non-trivial; it means the precursors and transporters are all at work, and all the enzymes in the xanthomattin and drosopterin pathways are doing their job. One switch, and you get a whole hierarchy of genes producing a complex output. This could be one way new traits appear, by redeploying genes from established pathways.

Saying they could isn’t the same as saying they did, of course. But here are a few examples that suggest that eye network genes have been redeployed to create morphological novelties. In Heliconius butterflies, for instance, the red spots on their wings can be traced back to embryonic patterns of expression of optix in the developing wings.


Heliconius butterflies express optix in wing epidermal cells that will produce red ommochrome pigments. A: Heliconius erato. B: Forewing and hindwing patterns from different races of H. erato (top: H. e. petiverana; bottom: H. e. erato). C: Pupal wings expressing optix mRNA in a pattern corresponding to the areas of red pigment in wings depicted in (B).

Even more dramatically, here’s an extinct biting midge preserved in amber, and look at that wing: what was I saying about switching on eye genes inappropriately in the wing would be deleterious? I was wrong. This is an insect with a compound eye growing in its wing.


A. The extinct biting midge, Eohelea petrunkevitchi, with a unique wing organ that resembles the surface of its compound eye. B: The dorsal surface of the wing organ. C: The midge’s compound eye. D: The ventral surface of the wing organ.

It’s extremely unlikely that that alar eye functioned as a visual organ: any photoreceptor signals coming from a platform flapping several times a second would be hopelessly confusing. Most likely what it was was a species-specific sexual signal, like the spots on many fly wings — this one is just more elaborately structured and expensive than most. Alternatively, one hypothesis for the formation of spots on insect wings is that they are intended to resemble eyes — large eyes, far apart, making the animal look much larger to predators — so Eohelea may have just been carrying the eyespot mimicry to an extreme. Either way, building these eyes is developmentally trivial.

It may also represent a transitional state: first the initiator of a genetic cascade is co-opted and expressed at a novel time or place, and then selection can hone it down over time, adding new control points that, for instance, suppress irrelevant ommatidium formation in the alar eye while allowing the functional pigment expression to continue.

One last example: this is the Cambrian worm, Microdictyon. Notice anything unusual?


Microdictyon sinicum, a Cambrian Lobopodian fossil from Chengjiang (China) with compound eye on every annulus (segment) above every leg. (A) Reconsruction (after Bergström and Hou). (B) Lateral view.

There’s a pair of eyes in the head, where you’d expect them…but all those other eyes along the sides are morphologically indistinguishable from the anteriormost pair. There is some argument about whether these structures actually are eyes, but they are definitely hexagonal arrays that closely resemble the hexagonally structured ommatidia of the compound eyes of insects. If they weren’t functional eyes, it seems likely that they are at least produced by the redeployment of the structural genes of the compound eye.

And if they were functional eyes, well, that is just freakin’ cool.

The bottom line, though, is that because complex developmental networks are functionally constrained — think of them as software modules that respond to molecular inputs and produce morphological outputs — their complexity is not a barrier to evolution at all, but instead provide opportunities for generating interesting evolutionary novelties.

Gehring WJ (2012) The animal body plan, the prototypic body segment, and eye evolution. Evolution & Development 14(1):34-36.

Monteiro A (2012) Gene regulatory networks reused to build novel traits. Bioessays 34:181-186.

(Also on Sb)

Why I am an atheist – Wayne Schroeder

I was raised as a Christian, but gained my free thought in my teenage years, in the late 1960s. My father was a minister in a moderate protestant church, the Evangelical United Brethren (which merged with the Methodist church in 1968), and I was a believer in my early life, like the rest of my family, friends, and all of society it seemed. But as I learned about evolution I began to question the need for God to explain much of the world. I was taught that evolution was the how but God was the why, but that didn’t seem very plausible. Over the course of a few years, a world without god started to seem more likely. My breakthrough though was finally discovering that there are people in the world who do not believe in any god, that it is possible to be an atheist, and realizing that, it fell into place that that was my world view too. John Lennon’s “Imagine” and the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar” are wonderful.

I’m an atheist because there is overwhelming evidence that there are no gods. There are many lines of evidence but an important one for me is that when you rationally and dispassionately consider religious development, it is clear that people create gods, not vice versa. The more distant the cultures, the more different the religions but if people were actually perceiving reality, they would not. Religions battle each other and evolve, each striving to gain and retain believers. Dispassionate reasoning, not religious/emotionally thinking, is a better way separate truth from fiction.

The scientific method is clearly humanity’s most effective way to discover actual truth. To see how well it works, you only have to consider the the wonders of our technological society and compare life in it now to times and places where religion rules. Scientific understanding has been displacing religious beliefs over the last few centuries. It was once believed that a god or gods caused disease, rain, drought, the apparent movement of the sun, even life, death, a lots more. We certainly don’t know everything, but we know and understand a great deal more than the ancients did.

There is some comfort in religion, as most all of us would like to live beyond death, but believing something doesn’t make it so. Truth is more important than comforting falsehoods, and is better for us as individuals and for society as a whole. People have many ways of deluding themselves into believing what they want, so we need to avoid those tendencies, via skepticism and critical thinking.

At the same time, there is great beauty, wonder, and mystery in the real world; the fact that we, and all life, evolved here on Earth over billions of years, that there are billions of galaxies with billions of stars in each, that the atoms of our bodies were formed in stars (which flow through us like water in a stream), etc, etc, etc. It’s really sad that some people avoid seeing reality, in this one life we know we have, for a hope in a life after this.

Wayne Schroeder
United States

I propose that states seize all the Catholic schools

I will never understand Catholicism. On the one hand, they claim to be all about the babies: procreate wildly, let nothing interfere with the spawning. On the other hand, though, they promote deep ignorance and confusion about sex and reproduction, as if they’re afraid of it.

So here’s this lovely case of a teacher at a Catholic school in Indiana who was evaluated as excellent in her work, but who, in her lawfully married and entirely conventional life with her husband at home, wanted to have children — something that ought to be fully copacetic with Catholicism. Except…she had a medical condition that made her infertile, so she and her husband were going through in-vitro fertilization.

Which meant, of course, that the priest at the local Catholic church had the right to meddle.

“On May 24, 2011, Herx, her husband, and her father met with Msgr. Kuzmich and [St. Vincent Principal Sandra] Guffey,” the complaint states. “Msgr. Kuzmich repeatedly told Herx that she was a ‘grave, immoral sinner‘ and that it would cause a ‘scandal’ if anyone was to find out that St. Vincent de Paul had a teacher who received fertility treatment. Msgr. Kuzmich told Herx that this situation would not have occurred had no one found out about the treatments, and that some things were ‘better left between the individual and God.'”

The end result: despite the priest saying that “her performance had nothing to do with the decision to terminate her employment”, she was fired for “improprieties related to Church teachings or Law.” An appeal farther up the hierarchy failed as well, because she’s just plain evil.

“Bishop Rhoades refused to renew Herx’s contract, stating that ‘The process of in vitro fertilization very frequently involves the deliberate destruction or freezing of human embryos,’ and ‘In vitro fertilization … is an intrinsic evil, which means that no circumstances can justify it.’ Herx’s appeal to the Bishop was the final step in the administrative appeals process within the Diocese.”

There’s a bit of lashing out going on now, too.

Herx says she was fired even though the defendants still employ teachers who do not regularly attend Catholic mass; who are divorced (including Guffey); who have had hysterectomies, vasectomies and other procedures that have altered their reproductive organs; and who use contraceptives.

Nobody should be fired for those things, either.

It seems to me that the problem is that the church is playing the role of a secular employer in what ought to be a secular profession, the education of children, while trying to impose arbitrary and obsolete medieval religious rules on its employees. I propose a simple change: seize the Catholic schools, remove the priests from control, and manage them as assets of the community’s public school system.

Do this everywhere for all religious schools, not just the Catholic ones. The strengths of those schools have always been in the teachers, not the dogmatic nitwits in the religious hierarchy who mismanage them. It also ought to be considered a violation of basic civil rights when an employer decides that they have the power to regulate the private, personal behavior of all employees at all times, even when they are not on the employer’s time and property — they have no right to interfere to such an egregiously excessive extent.

The Texas State Board of Education stars in a movie

If you’re wondering why Don McLeroy was on Colbert, here’s your answer: he’s one of the subjects of a new documentary, The Revisionaries. Note that the documentary isn’t his, he’s the king clown exposed in it…and somehow he thought that being targeted this way was a good thing, and that it was a smart move to appear on Colbert for it.

Hey, do you think that if McLeroy showed up at a theater showing the movie, he’d get expelled?

The NDE delusion

Salon has had a redesign, which is fine; they seem to do this periodically just to confuse us. I’ll adjust to that, but what I don’t like is that the first thing I saw highlighted was an article so full of woo that for a moment I thought I’d stumbled onto the Huffington Post. We are now supposed to believe that science has explained near-death experiences (NDEs), and the answer is proof of life after death. It’s all nonsense; some editor somewhere needs to learn some critical thinking, because this article is filed under “neuroscience” when it ought to be in a category called “bullshit”.

The first clue that this is going to be bad is the author, Mario Beauregard. Beauregard was co-author with Denyse O’Leary of one of the worst, that is most incompetently written and idiotically conceived, books I’ve ever read, The Spiritual Brain. It’s not just that he thought it sensible to team up with a well-known intelligent design crank, but that the content is unreadable and the “science” is gobbledy-gook — Beauregard is a well-established kook, and here he is, writing for Salon.

NDEs are evidence of nothing but the creative power of the human mind. NDE proponents are constantly trotting out the same tired old anecdotes and the same tired old bogus misinterpretations, and this article is just more of the same. If you’ve ever looked into the NDE literature, you’ll know that two cases that are repeatedly brought up are the 20-30 year old stories of Pam and Maria’s Shoe; they have become something close to legend. These stories are poorly documented — “Maria”, for instance, can’t even be found in any hospital records, despite a story that details many medical details. Beauregard blithely recounts this anecdotal story as evidence that NDEs are real.

Maria was a migrant worker who had a severe heart attack while visiting friends in Seattle. She was rushed to Harborview Hospital and placed in the coronary care unit. A few days later, she had a cardiac arrest but was rapidly resuscitated. The following day, Clark visited her. Maria told Clark that during her cardiac arrest she was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body. At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building. She was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and that the little toe area was worn. Maria wanted to know for sure whether she had “really” seen that shoe, and she begged Clark to try to locate it.

Quite skeptical, Clark went to the location described by Maria—and found the tennis shoe. From the window of her hospital room, the details that Maria had recounted could not be discerned. But upon retrieval of the shoe, Clark confirmed Maria’s observations. “The only way she could have had such a perspective,” said Clark, “was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very concrete evidence for me.”

The case is touted as a clear example of veridical perception. “Veridical” is one of the favorite words of the NDE/OBE crowd; it simply means an observation that aligns with reality, so they’re always babbling about people wafting about in a ghostly disembodied state and seeing things that no earth-bound human could possibly have seen, which are later confirmed. Unfortunately, all we get are second- and third-hand accounts full of embellishments, and tall tales whose highlights are depressingly mundane, such as seeing a shoe on a ledge. It’s always trivia that gets reported. It seems that all dead people want to do is hover.

And, of course, Maria’s story has been totally demolished. The little details are all inflated; for instance the claim that details of a shoe on a ledge could not possibly be discerned has been tested on that hospital building, and it turns out that a shoe on the ledge actually is really easy to see and jumps out to the eye of people passing beneath.

So, a few well-worn exaggerations are all these guys have to go on. I don’t think Beauregard can claim science has had any “shocking results” when this is the best he’s got.

Furthermore, Beauregard, who is supposed to be a neuroscientist, says some awesomely stupid things.

This case is particularly impressive given that during cardiac arrest, the flow of blood to the brain is interrupted. When this happens, the brain’s electrical activity (as measured with EEG) disappears after 10 to 20 seconds. In this state, a patient is deeply comatose. Because the brain structures mediating higher mental functions are severely impaired, such patients are expected to have no clear and lucid mental experiences that will be remembered. Nonetheless, studies conducted in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States have revealed that approximately 15 percent of cardiac arrest survivors do report some recollection from the time when they were clinically dead. These studies indicate that consciousness, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings can be experienced during a period when the brain shows no measurable activity.

This is another common claim. The subject, they say, was flat-lined during the incident — the heart was still and there was no brain activity, and yet, they claim, the subject was experiencing detailed perceptual events during this period of material inactivity. What they gloss over is the simple fact that, while there was definitely a period when their brain was functionally inert, they are describing these events afterwards, in a period when their brain is fully active. Beauregard is making the ignorant mistake of assuming that our consciousness is a continuous stream of recorded mental activity, and that a remembered event must necessarily have actually occurred.

That’s not how memories work. Our brains don’t tuck away a movie of our experiences somewhere in our temporal lobe; they store a few little details away, with a web of associations, and basically reconstruct the event when we try to recall it. This is why eyewitness testimony is unreliable — memory is dynamic and constantly being modified by later experience. When we lose conscious awareness and later recover it, the brain has absolutely no problem inventing a continuous narrative to fill in the blanks, and in fact, the way our minds work, we want that narrative. To consider that we didn’t exist for an interval of time is something we linear creatures tend to shy away from.

So when someone claims that a report of a recollection from a time when they were clinically dead is evidence of a mind functioning during that period when the brain was non-functional, you should know…they’re full of shit. It’s evidence of no such thing.

I also have to add that all of the accounts of NDEs and other such out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are peculiar in their attachment to ordinary patterns of perception. They claim to become a non-corporeal, immaterial, invisible entity that floats around, but somehow, they use the same mundane senses they do in the body. How do invisible eyes capture photons? How do immaterial minds detect physical vibrations in the air? Sensory transduction is a real problem for beings that lack hair cells and photoreceptors, I would think. It’s much more likely that they are using those fleshy sensory organs (or even more likely, the memory of using those organs), while experiencing an illusion of detachment from their body.

No reservations trouble Beauregard, though. He blindly charges on to claim revelation.

These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire veridical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.

NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality.

As I’ve said, the recollection of vivid and complex thoughts while the heart is stopped is not only easily explained, it’s pretty much the default understanding by neuroscientists of how the brain works. The acquisition of veridical information would be more difficult to explain…if it had ever occurred. Trundling out the same hoary folk tales and anecdotes is not at all convincing that it has.

He is right that this idea of minds existing independently of brains is incompatible with materialist views. It’s also incompatible with the existing evidence, and he has presented no counter-evidence. His extremely badly argued article is yet another piece of evidence, though, that Beauregard is a crank.

P.S. It’s a shame that tripe got published in Salon, but don’t read the comments, or you’ll discover why it got published. There sure are a lot of mystically-inclined, quantum-woo-spouting diddledingles fulminating away in their readership.

Philosotroll covers a few other points.

Why I am an atheist – Loren Lemos

The answer to that is not particularly interesting: Gods are impossible by definition. Any being constrained by natural laws can’t rightly be called a god, and any being unconstrained by natural laws can’t exist. Q.E.D. However, I would like to share the story of how I became an atheist.

I was baptized as a Catholic before I was two weeks old. I was sprinkled with water blessed by an ordained priest and was anointed with oil on my forehead, thus giving me a shield against Satan’s evil. I grew up a very trusting and very shy little boy, entranced by the power and authority of the priests who spoke so definitively. God was all-powerful. When I became sick, I wondered what I had done to deserve influenza or an ear infection, and prayed my apologies every night as I fell asleep. I knew that piety and devotion were the way to be good, and I only wanted to be good.

When I was a little older, I heard a priest speaking his homily in my grandmother’s impressive church in Hacienda Heights. He said that we were all called to be saints, and this seemed conclusive and sensible. There was no reason to strive for anything less. God abhorred sin of all kinds, and He only ever gave us good things. To sin at all was an unwarranted failing, and He noted all of them in His perfection. To be Christian meant to be like Christ, and the Prince of Peace was a sinless human being.

You may here divine my coming troubles.

I began to leave all my allowance in the collection plate every Sunday, and I examined my conscience studiously. When I learned how to give a proper confession, I sought out priests to unburden my soul, and left every time with a light heart. But that light heart never lasted. I couldn’t seem to refrain from spite, from jealousy, and as I aged, especially from lust. I began to change, to see the world beyond my family, school, and church, and I was pained by what I saw. The world was full of greed, poverty, and hatred, and I myself couldn’t stop desiring the bodies of the women and girls I saw. That dream of piety began to fade with my awakening, and I became desperate to reclaim it. I prayed the Act of Contrition with all the focus I could summon, even as I witnessed the words “I will sin no more” become shamefully fake. I cashed all my birthday checks and bought cans of vegetables for an Easter food drive. I kept a Rosary in my pocket and prayed while riding to school and while waiting for friends. When I was sixteen, I cut down a fifty-pound cottonwood log and carried it across my shoulders while I performed the Stations of the Cross, a series of fifteen prayers commemorating Jesus’ march to Cavalry and His Resurrection, in an attempt to understand the Sacrifice which redeemed the world.

But I was still a sinner.

I believed absolutely, but I knew that I would never be able to joyfully proclaim that I was following the true Will of God. I could be forgiven, but I could never master my sinfulness. I would always choose to stain the perfection of God’s Kingdom. There was only one conclusion: there was something wrong with me. I was too weak to follow or too stupid to understand and I was always too undisciplined. I begged for wisdom, strength, and courage every night. I confessed my shame to middle-aged priests at my high school, stumbling over the words “sexual sins” every single time. Masturbation was never followed by a simple contented sigh, but by anger and humiliation. At certain times afterward I was so furious and ashamed I took all the strength I had and cracked myself in the jaw with a closed fist, desperate for a bolt of pain sharp enough to sever my need for sexual release. I literally tried to beat myself into compliance with the dogma of Holy Mother Church.

It never worked.

Around this time, my appetite for books led me to the Kurt Vonnegut works in my high school library. In the middle of that despicable Catholic institution, a few cheap paperbacks were my first step on the way out. In one of his major novels, he described a tenet of morality: do what is good because it is good, not because you desire reward or fear punishment. There was something attractive about that sentiment. I came to understand that
it was self-contained. This was a method of being good which did not rely on a complicated world of obscurely interdependent prophesies and fulfillments. I liked it.

As I contemplated this idea, my Catholic faith continued to wear me down. The golden land of my youth had become a twisted carnival of guilt. Every week, I sat before a man who continually bled to death in an unappreciated attempt to save people who hated Him. I hated Him, and He died because of me. I could do nothing in His churches but apologize. His hands began to look like pointing fingers. I was looking for a way out and this was my weakness trying to please Him. I was miserable. I don’t know when, but some day I said “I refuse to be ashamed”.

This repeated in my head, almost unbidden. “I refuse to be ashamed.” I was tired. I was exhausted. I had tried with all the strength I had for my entire life and I never won. How do you have a relationship with a Savior who is perfect? You can do nothing for Him but fail to meet the goals He sets. I was tired of missing a bar which He in His fucking perfect Arrogance had set too God-damned high. I went to Mass less and less. One day, I never went back. I don’t even remember the last time.

I still had a confused ball of spiritual beliefs inside me. I believed in love, in the unity of people, in a God who could be found through the discipline of any and all religions. I divested myself of the shameful parts of my Catholicism, but still sought God. As I worked through this, a dear friend of mine who had been raised in Protestant churches explained to me that she no longer believed in any god. I respected her viewpoint but couldn’t abandon the idea of a being who was central to all of existence. Then one day she emailed me a copy of The God Delusion and insisted that I read it. I was bored at work, so I did. Then I read it a second time. Later that week, I told her these words: “There’s probably no god”. She was right.

There is still so much anger inside me. I hurt, and wept, and injured myself while I was a child. I contorted myself into an alien shape to please a master who never existed, because I believed. Do you
understand? I believed what they told me. That was all I ever did. I tried so hard to be the person they wanted me to be and never blamed anyone else for my own shameful failing. I only blamed myself.

The Church taught me to hate myself.

I have no professional training in this area, but I believe there
are strong commonalities with the experiences of people who were abused emotionally as children. I cling to the rational arguments of Dawkins and Sagan and P.Z. himself like life preservers when I feel overwhelmed. I worry if I am obsessing over my church experiences too much. Sometimes I think it was all my fault for taking the church teachings too seriously; if I had only lightened the fuck up maybe I wouldn’t have been such a little bitch for so long. I still can’t talk about my worst experiences without crying, and I bring them up way too often when I’m drunk. I worry that my friends would feel contempt for me if they knew how I can’t seem to heal.

When I hear people say religion does no harm, I want to punch them in the fucking mouth.

Loren Lemos
United States