Onan: Gratuitous Theological Misinterpretation

An observation from my friend Claude: written-up by ChatGPT

Genesis 38 contains the story of Onan, a tale often misunderstood and misapplied. Here is the key passage:

“Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn; her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death.

Then Judah said to Onan, ‘Go in to your brother's wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her; raise up offspring for your brother.’ But since Onan knew that the offspring would not be his, he spilled his semen on the ground whenever he went in to his brother's wife, so that he would not give offspring to his brother.

What he did was displeasing in the sight of the Lord, and he put him to death also.” (Genesis 38:6-10)

Cultural Context and Onan's Motivation

This story revolves around the ancient practice of "levirate marriage", where a man was obligated to marry his deceased brother’s widow to produce offspring on his behalf. Any child from this union would legally inherit the deceased brother’s name and property. Onan’s act of spilling his semen was not just contraception but a calculated move to deny his brother’s lineage while maintaining an appearance of compliance. Onan’s selfishness - putting his inheritance above his duty - was the core issue, and God’s punishment reflects this breach of moral and social order.

The Church’s Use and Misuse

Over time, the Church interpreted this story to condemn not just Onan’s selfishness but also certain sexual practices, including contraception and masturbation. Early theologians like St. Augustine, influenced by natural law theory, emphasized the procreative purpose of sexuality. Onan’s act - interpreted as contraceptive - was generalized to include masturbation, as both were seen as “wasting” reproductive potential.

This overextension arose from focusing on Onan’s physical act rather than its context. While the Church’s broader teaching on sexuality aimed to safeguard its procreative and unitive purposes, the Genesis account per se is not about masturbation. It highlights familial duty, justice, and Onan’s moral failure, not the morality of specific sexual acts.

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"The £20 BILLION race to create an AI sex doll"

From the Daily Mail Online today.

"The 'sex tech' market is worth an estimated $30.6bn - and across the globe, firms are racing to create a radical new type of robot they say could change sex forever.

"From AI personalities capable of holding a conversation to models with a functioning G-spot, firms are hoping consumers will pay up to $15,000 for a sex doll that never says no.

"Among the most impressive is RealDoll's Harmony - an artificial intelligence based sex bot that can hold conversations, remember what she's told and even has a customizable personality. ..."

The Guardian also has the story, their extensive article suggesting that (unfortunately?) hype is still running way ahead of reality.

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I was always puzzled (quick disclaimer: when I thought about the subject at all) as to how the sexbot's responses would be programmed.

I imagined over-excited yet poorly-paid programmers toiling in robot control language, trialling this limb movement in response to that input.

Silly me: still trapped in that old GOFAI paradigm.

They'll simple enroll thousands of couples, wire them up to a dense mesh of sound and motion sensors .. and set them to go.

With so much fine-grained big data at their disposal, they'll unleash a DeepMind-style artificial neural net .. and just learn optimised responses.*

It'll be 'Go' all over again.

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* I seriously would not want to be on the test team ... .

Helena Cronin on "Sex"

Edge mission statement:

"To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."

Every year, Edge asks these great minds a question. This year the question is "Which Scientific Term or Concept Ought To Be More Widely Known?"

By now you probably have a question of your own. What word best describes this mutual back-slapping fest?

• Smug 
• Pretentious
• Self-indulgent
• Conceited
• Pompous?

The full list of essays is here.

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Amongst the self-satisfied, complacent, virtue-signalling there are a few intriguing articles.

Take Helena Cronin's piece on "Sex"

"The poet Philip Larkin famously proclaimed that sex began in 1963. He was inaccurate by 800 million years. Moreover, what began in the 1960s was instead a campaign to oust sex—in particular sex differences—in favor of gender.

Why? Because biological differences were thought to spell genetic determinism, immutability, anti-feminism and, most egregiously, women's oppression. Gender, however, was the realm of societal forces; "male" and "female" were social constructs, the stuff of political struggle; so gender was safe sex.

The campaign triumphed. Sex now struggles to be heard over a clamor of misconceptions, fabrications and denunciations. And gender is ubiquitous, dominating thinking far beyond popular culture and spreading even to science—such that a respected neuroscience journal recently felt the need to devote an entire issue to urging that sex should be treated as a biological variable."

It's the usual issue: equality of opportunity (ie no discrimination) vs equality of outcome (ie no differences in preference).

"Bear in mind that equality is not sameness. Equality is about fair treatment, not about people or outcomes being identical; so fairness does not and should not require sameness. However, when sameness gets confused with equality—and equality is of course to do with fairness—then sameness ends up undeservedly sharing their moral high ground. And male/female discrepancies become a moral crusade. Why so few women CEOs or engineers? It becomes socially suspect to explain this as the result not of discrimination but of differential choice.

Well, it shouldn’t be suspect. Because the sexes do differ—and in ways that, on average, make a notable difference to their distribution in today's workplace.

So we need to talk about sex.

Here's why the sexes differ. A sexual organism must divide its total reproductive investment into two—competing for mates and caring for offspring. Almost from the dawn of sexual reproduction, one sex specialized slightly more in competing for mates and the other slightly more in caring for offspring. This was because only one sex was able to inherit the mitochondria (the powerhouse of cells); so that sex started out with sex cells larger and more resource-rich than the other sex.

And thus began the great divide into fat, resource-laden eggs, already investing in "caring"—providing for offspring—and slim, streamlined sperm, already competing for that vital investment. Over evolutionary time, this divergence widened, proliferating and amplifying, in every sexually reproducing species that has ever existed. So the differences go far beyond reproductive plumbing. They are distinctive adaptations for the different life-strategies of competitors and carers.

Wherever ancestral males and females faced different adaptive problems, we should expect sex differences—encompassing bodies, brains and behaviour. And we should expect that, reflecting those differences, competitors and carers will have correspondingly different life-priorities. And that's why, from that initial asymmetry, the same characteristic differences between males and females have evolved across all sexually-reproducing animals, differences that pervade what constitutes being male or female.

As for different outcomes in the workplace, the causes are above all different interests and temperaments (and not women being "less clever" than men). Women on average have a strong preference for working with people—hence the nurses and teachers; and, compared to men, they care more about family and relationships and have broader interests and priorities—hence little appeal in becoming CEOs. Men have far more interest in "things"—hence the engineers; and they are vastly more competitive: more risk-taking, ambitious, status-seeking, single-minded, opportunistic—hence the CEOs. So men and women have, on average, different conceptions of what constitutes success (despite the gender quest to impose the same—male—conception on all).

And here's some intriguing evidence. "Gender" predicts that, as discrimination diminishes, males and females will increasingly converge. But a study of 55 nations found that it was in the most liberal, democratic, equality-driven countries that divergence was greatest. The less the sexism, the greater the sex differences. Difference, this suggests, is evidence not of oppression but of choice; not socialization, not patriarchy, not false consciousness, not even pink t-shirts or personal pronouns … but female choice."

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In yesterday's post, on Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Submission’, I finished with a quote from the book where François says this:

'I’ve never really been convinced that it was a good idea for women to get the vote, study the same things as men, go into the same professions, et cetera. I mean, we’re used to it now — but was it really a good idea?’

Houellebecq needs this throwaway apparently-misogynistic remark to ease the way for his narrator's later conversion to Islam - thereby opening the door to a well-paid lecturing job at the Sorbonne and three wives. (It's satire, but Islam's historically-regrettable attitude to women is entirely real).

Of course women should have the vote, as should the poor, the rich and the liberal intelligentsia.

Elites used to worry about mass democracy, for example that the great unwashed would simply vote themselves endless benefits financed by taxing the rich, resulting in economic collapse.

Things like that have happened, but the ruling classes are now on the case. Governments with such programmes don't end up actually pulling the levers of power, and if they do, they find those levers don't connect to anything. The bureaucracy has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.

Military force serves as the ultimate insurance policy.

Mass-participatory, bourgeois democracy has been made stable and safe, most of the time. François's half-hearted flirtation with Islam as a replacement ideology - vigorous, based on deep biological truths, giving meaning to life - is flawed through and through.

I'm sure it will never catch on.

Diary: foot problem + Game of Thrones + AlphaGo + genetics

I vaguely recall jamming my foot against the side of the bed while hoovering last week. By Easter Sunday the entire right foot was red, the skin taut and swollen over the toe joint and I was limping around in socks. The last few days have seen a slow improvement but I think it may be the weekend before I can claim to be back to normal. Some observations.

1. I haven't taken any pain medication, believing that pain is a signal which I do well to heed and analgesics probably mess up self-healing. I recognise I may be in a minority on this.


2. The body's response to damage seems to affect many aspects of its functioning, not just the topical region. I feel a bit tired and - strangely - a bit more relaxed, like I'm let off worrying about stuff. Interesting.


3. Doctor Google was reassuring. The alternative suggestion of gout was excluded - no causal pathway from over-indulgence in Easter eggs.

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A Game of Thrones (book vol 1) is highly addictive, once you've printed off the family trees of the various noble houses. It reminds me how natural the ties of family, personal loyalty and honour are, and how alien the cool, depersonalised, transactional styles of modern urban capitalism. No wonder American politicians and business people engaged with negotiators from traditional societies talk past each other in mutual incomprehension.

What would the noble protagonists of GoT make of "The Martian", which we saw on DVD Saturday evening?

The hero is some kind of insolent, wise-cracking, artisan-monkey who refuses to die quietly on Mars as he should. His liege-lord commander shows weakness by beating herself up over leaving him (she did her duty: so problem?).

The world actually cares about this minion, and the powers-that-be indulge their idiotic sentimentality. Could never happen.

Thank the Gods it's only far-fetched speculative fiction.

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I thought this was a good article about AlphaGo - assessing its significance now the dust has settled a bit.

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This from Professor Greely, Director at the Center for Law and the Biosciences, Stanford University, as set out in his book, 'The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction'.

“In 20 to 40 years, when a couple wants a baby, he’ll provide sperm and she’ll provide a punch of skin,” Prof Greenly told The Times.

"He said the female skin sample will be used to create stem cells, which can in turn be used to create eggs.

"These eggs can then be fertilised with the sperm cells, resulting in a selection of embryos.

"Prof Greenly predicts these embryos will be studied for any signs of malady.

“The prospective parents will be told, ‘These five have really serious diseases, you don’t want them’.

"Of the other 95, they will be given the pluses and minuses,” he said.

"He said that after weighing up the prospective advantages and disadvantages of the healthier embryos, the parents will choose one to be implanted into the woman, which will become their child.

“Parents will get the embryos grouped by categories,” Prof Greenly said.

“One category will be very severe, untreatable, nasty diseases. This will affect one to two per cent of embryos.

“Another category will be other diseases.

“The third is cosmetics: hair, eyes, shape, whether the hair goes white early. We don’t know much about this yet, but we will.

“A fourth category is behavioural. I think here information will be limited. We won’t be able to say, ‘This child is in the top one per cent of intelligence’. We probably will be able to say, ‘This child has a 60 per cent chance of being in the top half’.”

He's being judiciously careful here. In 20 years time we'll be able to read off from the genome both IQ and personality type more accurately than current psychometric testing can.

The trouble with love-dolls; consciousness & zombies

This stuff is getting so mainstream.

Love Dolls at $50,000 a throw

The Times had an article in the Saturday Magazine about Matt McMullen's company, Realdoll (only click on this link if you're happy with hyper-realistic female nudity).

I was most interested in the following observation.

"McMullen has attempted to introduce robotic enhancements along the way. They’ve seldom worked, though. He has tried internal heating, to get past that cold, sticky feel of the rubber. “We had three different versions of a heater, but we haven’t released any of them. Either it’s not completely safe, or it didn’t get warm enough, or it got too hot.”

He even got his dolls to gyrate at one time – a step into the animatronic arena. He installed a motor in the chest cavity. There were various speeds and sequences. “I won’t say she’s fully twerking, but that kind of thing,” he says. “But the downside is the noise factor. You hear this rrr-rrr, rrr-rrr.” He sounds like an old windscreen wiper. “It’s just not a turn-on.”

And it's not just the noise.

“It would be great to give the face 45 points of articulation, and all these subtle points of expression,” says McMullen. “But it’s prohibitively expensive and it’s prone to breaking down, which just becomes an ordeal. Those robots at trade shows that interact with people? That’s because there’s a team there. When the cable breaks on the left eye blink, a man just opens up the back of the head and re-attaches it. But when it’s in your house and one eye’s stuck shut? Not a happy customer.”

You know, high-reliability silent engineering is not rocket science. Someone out there knows how to do this stuff. Mr McMullen. You are so undercapitalised!

I wrote something about this at sciencefiction.com a while back.

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Peter Watts, author of Blindsight and Echopraxia, takes some credit for his promotion of the idea that consciousness is a disposable epiphenomenon. Sufficiently-adapted space aliens should be the zombies of those Philosophy 'other minds' lectures, having the appearance of personalities but no inner lives.

His post is an interesting read but the idea that other people possess only the simulacrum of consciousness has a very long pedigree. I even recall (possibly mistakenly) encountering the concept from my Philosophy course at the University of Warwick back in 1970.

Could it be right? Don't think so. We're social animals spending our lives negotiating, having to give a sufficient, convincing and compelling account of ourselves to others. Our brain's social layers (those evolutionarily-modern cortical & limbic modules) fight with the selfish concerns of our reptilian hind-brains. Somewhere out of this endless internal battle comes consciousness. It's hard to see how social flexibility could do without it.

But ... our advanced machines need not be so conflicted. If those aliens were designed artifacts then consciousness might be a conflict-resolution function superfluous to their requirements.

The Google fembot

The Times reported yesterday on Google's guiding principles.

Google rules

Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, while holding true to their unofficial slogan “don’t be evil”. They wrote this list of “ten things we know to be true” when Google was just a few years old.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow. 
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well. 
3. Fast is better than slow. 
4. Democracy on the web works. 
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer. 
6. You can make money without doing evil. 
7. There’s always more information out there. 
8. The need for information crosses all borders. 
9. You can be serious without a suit. 
10. Great just isn't good enough. 

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Once upon a time in the near-to-middle future, Peter was eating his organic, wholemeal muesli when his glance fell upon his wife, leaning over the sink. A soupçon of lust briefly possessed him - and in that moment a Google fembot appeared, slipping through the kitchen door (how did it - she - know?)

A Google fembot

A furtive Peter followed where she beckoned and his breakfast fantasies were sated. His long-suffering partner did her best to ignore the whole sorry proceedings, a part of her breathing a sigh of relief.

Walking down his drive to the Google car, which had appeared as if by magic as he left the house, Peter pondered on the fembot's last silky words, breathed in his ear as she prepared to vanish.

"I can recommend an excellent book on HyperJava for you. Would you like me to order it?"

How had she known?

In his cubicle at the regional Googleplex, Peter was code-hacking when his team leader breezed by. She smiled as she passed, leaving a trail of perfume, pheromones and charisma. Peter felt an unwanted stirring in his loins but before he could suppress it, a beautiful fembot shimmied across wearing little more than a tee-shirt. Peter had no real alternative; it was corporate policy that all extraneous impulses must be purged - nothing must be allowed to get in the way of concentration.

An exhausted Peter stumbled back to his terminal. The fembot's last words echoed in his head as he sat down and wondered - what on earth would he do ... with his spare copy of HyperJava?

Death and sex

Selection, artificial and natural - a wonderful concept.

Those serious-minded jihadis out in the Caliphate raise psychopathy to new levels. I expect the prospects of joining them in their exciting campaign of mutilation, amputation, beheading, FGM and crucifixion will likely prove more attractive to UK psychopaths than the average religiously-observant regular guy who has a bit of empathy. And so the pit is dug deeper.

A completely different example of selection. Nature used to select women with an interest in sex (hard to believe, perhaps, but how could it be otherwise?).

These days, in advanced countries with contraception, selection is for women who actively like children (or are too unconscientious or unmotivated to use birth control). Interesting to speculate on the psychological and social consequences in future generations.

Gay genes or gay pathogens?

What are we to make of this? (Hannah Devlin, The Times, Feb 14th 2014).

"Scientists have found the strongest evidence yet for the existence of genes that increase the chance of a man being gay. The study, which involved more than 400 gay brothers, identified two small areas on the male genome that appear to be linked to sexuality.

Michael Bailey, from the Northwestern University in Chicago, who carried out the research, said: “Sexual orientation has nothing to do with choice. Our findings suggest there may be genes at play and we found evidence for two sets that affect whether a man is gay or straight.”

In the study, presented yesterday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Chicago, scientists took blood from 409 gay brothers and heterosexual members of their family. On average, siblings share 50 per cent of their DNA, but ought to have a higher chance of sharing any genes involved in determining sexuality.

In the 1990s the American geneticist Dean Hamer identified an area that appeared to influence male sexuality on the X chromosome, which men inherit from their mothers. The results, however, have remained controversial.

The latest research confirmed that this region on the X chromosome, known as Xq28, is more likely to be shared by the gay pairs of brothers than by the brothers and their other siblings. The study also identified a second genetic region, on Chromosome 8, which also appeared to predict whether a man would be homosexual.

While the pairs of brothers shared gene variants in these regions, however, there were not individual genes that stood out across all the participants in the study.

The findings suggested that overall a man’s sexuality depends about 30 to 40 per cent on genetic factors, while the rest depends on environmental factors, such as the hormones a baby is exposed to in the womb."

Putting aside discredited "nurturist" theories of homosexuality, a leading non-genetic explanation is the pathogen theory advocated by Paul W. Ewald, a biology professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and Gregory Cochran, an independent physicist in Albuquerque, New Mexico (outlined in this article by Caleb Crain). Their argument against "gay genes" is that these are so detrimental to reproductive fitness that they would have been removed from the population through natural selection. However, Hannah Devlin's Times article has this to say:

"Previously, homosexuality has been viewed as a “Darwinian paradox” because if male homosexuality were genetic, and gay men reproduced less than heterosexuals, the trait should eventually disappear from the population over time. This has led some critics to dismiss the genetic argument.

"However, there is now some evidence that genes linked to male homosexuality could increase fertility in women. One study by Italian scientists found that female relatives of gay men tended to have more children than those of straight men."

Ewald and Cochran rejected this argument as explained at the end of the Caleb Crain article:

" ... perhaps homosexuality is an unintended side effect of a gene for something else—a side effect more marked in one gender than the other. That might explain why more men than women are exclusively homosexual. Hamer, the discoverer of the Xq28 link, favors this explanation. “Suppose you had a gene that tended to make men gay, but the same gene in women made them more reproductive,” Hamer suggests. He proceeds to give examples. “If you had a gene that made people more attractive and intelligent, it might make men gay, but it might make women more likely to reproduce. Or suppose you had a gene that made people attracted to men. If you gave it to a guy, he would probably be gay, but if you gave it to a woman, she would simply be . . . well, let’s say, ‘exceptionally attracted to men.’ ”

"But Cochran and Ewald doubt this explanation, too. Evolution tends to balance out any gender inequity as severe as Hamer describes. After a while, some mutation would come along that jiggered our hormones to reduce the gene’s fitness cost to men, while retaining its benefit for women. “In the long run,” Cochran says, “sex-antagonistic genes are tamed.”

The argument for a sex ratio of 1:1 male-female (which means reproductively-capable males and females) was one of the first great triumphs of quantitative population genetics, going back to Ronald Fisher in 1930. Here's the argument as presented by W. D. Hamilton.

1. Suppose male births are less common than female.
2. A newborn male then has better mating prospects than a newborn female, and therefore can expect to have more offspring.
3. Therefore parents genetically disposed to produce males tend to have more than average numbers of grandchildren born to them.
4. Therefore the genes for male-producing tendencies spread, and male births become more common.
5. As the 1:1 sex ratio is approached, the advantage associated with producing males dies away.
6. The same reasoning holds if females are substituted for males throughout. Therefore 1:1 is the equilibrium ratio.

In modern language, the 1:1 ratio is the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS). In a population of individuals playing the ESS (i.e. producing equal numbers of sons and daughters), any other strategy (e.g. 51% sons and 49% daughters) would have lower fitness, and hence would be selected against.

What would resolve this debate would be to know more about the genes hanging around the Xq28 region and on chromosome 8 and what they do. Then some modelling of the evolutionary dynamics. Without a quantitative analysis this debate will run and run, even without all the social agendas swirling around.