chromosomes

36:2.11The num­ber ten—the dec­i­mal sys­tem—is in­her­ent in the phys­i­cal uni­verse but not in the spir­i­tual. The do­main of life is char­ac­ter­ized by three, seven, and twelve or by mul­ti­ples and com­bi­na­tions of these ba­sic num­bers. There are three pri­mal and es­sen­tially dif­fer­ent life plans, af­ter the or­der of the three Par­a­dise Sources and Cen­ters, and in the uni­verse of Neb­a­don these three ba­sic forms of life are seg­re­gated on three dif­fer­ent types of plan­ets. There were, orig­i­nally, twelve dis­tinct and di­vine con­cepts of trans­mis­si­ble life. This num­ber twelve, with its sub­di­vi­sions and mul­ti­ples, runs through­out all ba­sic life pat­terns of all seven super­uni­verses. There are also seven ar­chi­tec­tural types of life de­sign, fun­da­men­tal ar­range­ments of the re­pro­duc­ing con­fig­u­ra­tions of liv­ing mat­ter. The Or­von­ton life pat­terns are con­fig­ured as twelve in­her­i­tance car­ri­ers. The dif­fer­ing or­ders of will crea­tures are con­fig­ured as 12, 24, 48, 96, 192, 384, and 768. On Uran­tia there are forty-eight units of pat­tern con­trol—trait de­ter­min­ers—in the sex cells of hu­man re­pro­duc­tion.

36:2.16World Num­ber Three is de­voted to the con­ser­va­tion of life. Here var­i­ous modes of life pro­tec­tion and preser­va­tion are stud­ied and de­vel­oped by the as­sis­tants and cus­to­di­ans of the Life Car­rier corps. The life plans for ev­ery new world al­ways pro­vide for the early es­tab­lish­ment of the life-con­ser­va­tion com­mis­sion, con­sist­ing of cus­to­dian spe­cial­ists in the ex­pert ma­nip­u­la­tion of the ba­sic life pat­terns. On Uran­tia there were twenty-four such cus­to­dian com­mis­sion­ers, two for each fun­da­men­tal or par­ent pat­tern of the ar­chi­tec­tural or­ga­ni­za­tion of the life ma­te­rial. On plan­ets such as yours the high­est form of life is re­pro­duced by a life-car­ry­ing bun­dle which pos­sesses twenty-four pat­tern units. (And since the in­tel­lec­tual life grows out of, and upon the foun­da­tion of, the phys­i­cal, there come into ex­is­tence the four and twenty ba­sic or­ders of psy­chic or­ga­ni­za­tion.)

77:2.2The phys­i­cal mem­bers of the Prince’s staff had been con­sti­tuted sex crea­tures for the pur­pose of par­tic­i­pat­ing in the plan of pro­cre­at­ing off­spring em­body­ing the com­bined qual­i­ties of their spe­cial or­der united with those of the se­lected stock of the An­don tribes, and all of this was in an­tic­i­pa­tion of the sub­se­quent ap­pear­ance of Adam. The Life Car­ri­ers had planned a new type of mor­tal em­brac­ing the union of the con­joint off­spring of the Prince’s staff with the first-gen­er­a­tion off­spring of Adam and Eve. They had thus pro­jected a plan en­vi­sion­ing a new or­der of plan­e­tary crea­tures whom they hoped would be­come the teacher-rulers of hu­man so­ci­ety. Such be­ings were de­signed for so­cial sov­er­eignty, not civil sov­er­eignty. But since this project al­most com­pletely mis­car­ried, we shall never know what an aris­toc­racy of be­nign lead­er­ship and match­less cul­ture Uran­tia was thus de­prived of. For when the cor­po­real staff later re­pro­duced, it was sub­se­quent to the re­bel­lion and af­ter they had been de­prived of their con­nec­tion with the life cur­rents of the sys­tem.

77:2.5These mu­tant traits ap­pear­ing in the first Nod­ite gen­er­a­tion re­sulted from cer­tain changes which had been wrought in the con­fig­u­ra­tion and in the chem­i­cal con­stituents of the in­her­i­tance fac­tors of the An­donic germ plasm. These changes were caused by the pres­ence in the bod­ies of the staff mem­bers of the pow­er­ful life-main­te­nance cir­cuits of the Sa­ta­nia sys­tem. These life cir­cuits caused the chro­mo­somes of the spe­cial­ized Uran­tia pat­tern to re­or­ga­nize more af­ter the pat­terns of the stan­dard­ized Sa­ta­nia spe­cial­iza­tion of the or­dained Neb­a­don life man­i­fes­ta­tion. The tech­nique of this germ plasm meta­mor­pho­sis by the ac­tion of the sys­tem life cur­rents is not un­like those pro­ce­dures whereby Uran­tia sci­en­tists mod­ify the germ plasm of plants and an­i­mals by the use of X rays.