Artistic Genius at Self-promotion
Jonathon Keats Leads First Worldwide Effort to Reconcile Science and Religion in the 21st Century
Announces Foundation of International Association for Divine Taxonomy
Official Launch Event at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco on September 29th
Refreshments to be Served
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- San Francisco conceptual artist Jonathon Keats announces a major simultaneous breakthrough in the fields of science and religion, expected to end the conflict, often violent, between reason and faith, that has plagued society for more than five centuries. Over the past eighteen months, with the assistance of researchers at leading institutions including UC Berkeley, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and the Smithsonian, Keats has developed a novel method of genetic engineering that may soon allow scientists to place God on the tree of life alongside every other species, including slime molds, fungi, and humans. In so doing, Keats hopes to confer scientific legitimacy on religious belief, and to give science the tools to grapple with the one being that, until now, has eluded its grasp.
Keats acknowledges that genetically engineering God may prove controversial, but says he has no choice. "It would have been much easier to sequence a sample of divine DNA, and to compare it to the genomes of known species like Homo sapiens and E. coli," he explains. "But no laboratory I've contacted has sample genetic material from God. After many conversations with zoologists, botanists, and ecologists, I concluded that I'd have to start from scratch."
Or, not quite. Keats realized that if he could make an educated guess as to where God fit on the tree of life -- based on the field descriptions of widely noted observers such as Moses and Jesus and Mohammed -- he could use a method of genetic engineering called continuous in vitro evolution to mutate other species into God. "Continuous in vitro evolution is sort of a biotech- lab fast-track for natural selection," Keats says. "You can make one species evolve into another by growing it in conditions precisely calibrated to favor adaptation."
After looking at a broad range of species, Keats came to believe that God is genetically most closely related to blue-green algae (or cyanobacteria, as it's known scientifically). Numerous considerations led to this hypothesis, not least of which was that cyanobacteria is the first organism found in the fossil record. If God came first, Keats reasoned, said deity would be most closely related to whichever species came second.
Keats acquired a clonal strain of the cyanobacterium Fremyella diplosiphon from the University of San Francisco, where biochemist John Cobley, Ph.D. was pursuing unrelated research on the organism. Then it was a simple matter of mutating it. "I figured that God thrives on worship. So I prepared four petri dishes, and then, for seven days and nights, exposed three of them to pre-recorded prayer, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, while the fourth served as a control." (His control group was raised exclusively on talk radio.)
"I never expected such early success," Keats admits. "I'd decided to use omnipresence as an initial measure of godliness, since it's scientifically quantifiable. By that measure, divinity becomes statistical: You can see if a species is evolving to become more godlike simply by looking for abnormal population growth. With this organism, that's precisely what we got." Specifically, the cyanobacteria exposed to the Christian prayer known as the Kyrie significantly outgrew both the talk-radio control group and the two other test groups.
But Keats wasn't done. With this compelling research as his basis, he decided to found an International Association for Divine Taxonomy (modeled on the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature in London), which would be responsible for overseeing additional investigation. Interest was immediate, and serious, resulting in a seven-member academic advisory board, as well as a second pilot study.
"A lot of people were pointing out that, according to the Bible, God created man in His image," says Keats, "and kept asking me why I was only looking at cyanobacteria. So I decided to do the same experiment on another 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."
With the help of UC Berkeley geneticist Thomas W. Cline, Ph. D., Keats subjected four groups of laboratory-raised fruit flies to continuous in vitro evolution -- and, once again, found abnormal population growth -- a hefty twelve percent higher than for the control -- in the bottles exposed to the Kyrie. According to Keats, these results demonstrated, once again, the effectiveness of continuous in vitro evolution for purposes of mutating known species into God, and further demonstrated that, for those scientific purposes, the Kyrie is an especially effective prayer.
What these two studies cannot establish with any degree of certainty is whether God is more closely related genetically to blue-green algae or to fruit flies. However, Keats argues that the problem is strictly technical: "The methodology used in my cyanobacteria study doesn't permit precise quantification of results, preventing statistically significant comparison to the fruit fly figures." For this reason, he plans to undertake a second, quantifiable, cyanobacteria study, under public scrutiny, at Modernism, beginning on September 29th.
At that event, scheduled to take place between 5:30 and 8:00 PM, people will be invited to watch a short-subject documentary on the International Association for Divine Taxonomy by San Francisco film-maker Paul Lundahl, and also to join the organization. An associate membership will cost five dollars, while a forty-dollar full membership will include a hardbound copy of "The Annals of the International Association for Divine Taxonomy," a limited- edition artist's book that fully documents the first two historical pilot studies. The artist will be on hand to answer questions, and type names on membership cards.
While Keats has never before undertaken scientific research of any sort, his latest project is typical of the artist in at least one crucial respect: Like his popular "Brain Trust" (exhibited at Modernism last year), it's based on what he calls a "found process," in which standard routines, emphatically misapplied, serve as a method for making art. In "Brain Trust," Keats copyrighted his mind in the interest of attaining immortality, and offered futures contracts on his brain to fund the operation. He's previously also fingerprinted patrons to make their self-portraits (at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery in early 2002), and petitioned Berkeley to pass a basic law of logic -- A=A -- a work commissioned by the city's annual Arts Festival. Widely covered in the media, his events have caused considerable consternation through no fault of his own. For more information, please see sample media coverage at the following URLs:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3217423.stm
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,60757,00.html
http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2003/scene_marapr03_slater.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/08/13/BA200448.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/04/16/DD58324.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/10/31/DD25908.DTL
Modernism is located at 685 Market Street in San Francisco. The phone
number is 415/541-0461. Gallery hours are 10:00 am to 5:30 p.m., Tuesday
through Saturday. Modernism will be closed for the second two weeks of
August, but media enquiries can be addressed to the artist directly at
415/673-9052.
SOURCE Modernism