title: Linda Carroll

text: She has worked as a couple's therapist for more than 30 years. In addition to being a licensed psychotherapist, she is certified in Imago Therapy, the couple's therapy developed by Dr. Harville Hendrix and Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt. She is also a master teacher in the Pairs Psychoeducation Process, a nationally recognized relationship education program for couples. Carroll studied Voice Dialogue with Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone, Holotropic Breathwork with Dr. Stanislav Grof, the Four-Fold with Angeles Arrien, the Diamond Heart Work of A.H. Almaas, and trained with The Couples Institute of Drs. Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson. She is also certified in the Hot Monogamy program, which helps couples create or re-create a passionate connection between them.


title: Linda Carroll

text: She teaches workshops and delivers keynote addresses throughout the United States and is a frequent speaker at Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Baja California, Mexico.


title: Linda Carroll

text: Born and raised in San Francisco, Linda Carroll now lives in Corvallis, Oregon, with her veterinarian husband, Tim Barraud. She is the mother of singer and musician Courtney Love, and the daughter of novelist Paula Fox.


title: Linda Carroll

text: Carroll was born on April 7, 1944 in San Francisco, California to writer Paula Fox, who was 20 years old at the time of her birth. Carroll was conceived of a short-lived relationship between Fox and an unnamed man. Fox lived under the roof of acting coach Stella Adler at the time, as did then unknown actor Marlon Brando. There have been persistent rumors that Brando was in fact Carroll's father, although neither Brando nor Fox ever commented on the matter. Carroll did not meet her birth mother until later in life. Carroll's maternal grandfather was screenwriter Paul Hervey Fox, and her grandmother, Elsie Fox (née de Sola) was a Cuban writer.


title: Linda Carroll

text: Fox gave Carroll up for adoption at birth. She was adopted by optician Emil "Jack" and Louella Risi, a Catholic family of part Italian descent, and raised in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. Later in life, she took the surname Carroll following the death of her friend, Judy Carroll. Linda graduated from high school in 1961.


title: Linda Carroll

text: She married writer and publisher Hank Harrison in 1963 in Reno, Nevada and gave birth to a daughter, Courtney Michelle Harrison on July 9, 1964. Within years of Courtney's birth, both Carroll's adoptive parents died. She divorced Harrison after eighteen months of marriage, alleging that he had given her the drug LSD, and brought her daughter Courtney with her to Marcola, Oregon. She had two other daughters, Nicole and Jaimee, with her second husband, Frank Rodríguez.


title: Linda Carroll

text: After finishing her bachelor's degree in Oregon in the 1970s, she moved to New Zealand. She returned to Oregon in the 1980s, received a masters in counseling, and began practicing as a therapist. Carroll and her veterinarian husband, Tim Barraud, began to teach a couples course based on the Imago work of Harville Hendrix, the PAIRS training of Dr. Lori Gordon, and their own insights, study, and practices.


title: Linda Carroll

text: As an adult, Carroll found that her birth mother is the novelist Paula Fox (her grandmother was screenwriter Elsie Fox).


title: Linda Carroll

text: In 2006, her memoir "Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love", was published by Doubleday. Love's agent called the book a work of "vicious and greedy fiction", and said, "We find it astonishing that any mother should write such a book. This is especially true in the case of Ms Carroll, who abandoned her daughter when she was a seven-year-old and whom Ms Love thus barely knows at all." Linda Carroll, however, contends in her memoir that she left Courtney with a friend for just two months at age nine while she was looking for a home in New Zealand and that Courtney remained with her until she emancipated herself at age 16. Linda Carroll has not spoken to her daughter in years and remains estranged.


title: Linda Carroll

text: "Far from a celebrity memoir, "Her Mother's Daughter"," "Booklist", the review journal of the American Library Association wrote, "Despite the suggestive subtitle, Carroll's memoir is far less tell-all than it is her personal recollections of growing up feeling alienated from her adoptive family, her peers, and her religion. ... A thoughtful memoir of one woman's coming-of-age in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s."


title: RNA world

text: The RNA world is a hypothetical stage in the evolutionary history of life on Earth, in which self-replicating RNA molecules proliferated before the evolution of DNA and proteins. The term also refers to the hypothesis that posits the existence of this stage.


title: RNA world

text: Alexander Rich first proposed the concept of the RNA world in 1962, and Walter Gilbert coined the term in 1986. Alternative chemical paths to life have been proposed, and RNA-based life may not have been the first life to exist. Even so, the evidence for an RNA world is strong enough that the hypothesis has gained wide acceptance. The concurrent formation of all four RNA building blocks further strengthened the hypothesis. Regardless of its plausibility in a prebiotic scenario, the RNA world can serve as a model system for studying the origin of life.


title: RNA world

text: Like DNA, RNA can store and replicate genetic information; like protein enzymes, RNA enzymes (ribozymes) can catalyze (start or accelerate) chemical reactions that are critical for life. One of the most critical components of cells, the ribosome, is composed primarily of RNA. Ribonucleotide moieties in many coenzymes, such as acetyl-CoA, NADH, FADH, and F420, may be surviving remnants of covalently bound coenzymes in an RNA world.


title: RNA world

text: Although RNA is fragile, some ancient RNAs may have evolved the ability to methylate other RNAs to protect them.


title: RNA world

text: If the RNA world existed, it was probably followed by an age characterized by the evolution of ribonucleoproteins (RNP world), which in turn ushered in the era of DNA and longer proteins. DNA has greater stability and durability than RNA; this may explain why it became the predominant information storage molecule. Protein enzymes may have come to replace RNA-based ribozymes as biocatalysts because their greater abundance and diversity of monomers makes them more versatile. As some co-factors contain both nucleotide and amino-acid characteristics, it may be that amino acids, peptides and finally proteins initially were co-factors for ribozymes.


title: RNA world

text: One of the challenges in studying abiogenesis is that the system of reproduction and metabolism utilized by all extant life involves three distinct types of interdependent macromolecules (DNA, RNA, and protein). This suggests that life could not have arisen in its current form, which has led researchers to hypothesize mechanisms whereby the current system might have arisen from a simpler precursor system. American molecular biologist Alexander Rich was the first to posit a coherent hypothesis on the origin of nucleotides as precursors of life. In an article he contributed to a volume issued in honor of Nobel-laureate physiologist Albert Szent-Györgyi, he explained that the primitive Earth's environment could have produced RNA molecules (polynucleotide monomers) that eventually acquired enzymatic and self-replicating functions.


title: RNA world

text: Further concept of RNA as a primordial molecule can be found in papers by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel, as well as in Carl Woese's 1967 book "The Genetic Code". Hans Kuhn in 1972 laid out a possible process by which the modern genetic system might have arisen from a nucleotide-based precursor, and this led Harold White in 1976 to observe that many of the cofactors essential for enzymatic function are either nucleotides or could have been derived from nucleotides. He proposed a scenario whereby the critical electrochemistry of enzymatic reactions would have necessitated retention of the specific nucleotide moieties of the original RNA-based enzymes carrying out the reactions, while the remaining structural elements of the enzymes were gradually replaced by protein, until all that remained of the original RNAs were these nucleotide cofactors, "fossils of nucleic acid enzymes". The phrase "RNA World" was first used by Nobel laureate Walter Gilbert in 1986, in a commentary on how recent observations of the catalytic properties of various forms of RNA fit with this hypothesis.


title: RNA world

text: The properties of RNA make the idea of the RNA world hypothesis conceptually plausible, though its general acceptance as an explanation for the origin of life requires further evidence. RNA is known to form efficient catalysts and its similarity to DNA makes clear its ability to store information. Opinions differ, however, as to whether RNA constituted the first autonomous self-replicating system or was a derivative of a still-earlier system. One version of the hypothesis is that a different type of nucleic acid, termed "pre-RNA", was the first one to emerge as a self-reproducing molecule, to be replaced by RNA only later. On the other hand, the discovery in 2009 that activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides can be synthesized under plausible prebiotic conditions suggests that it is premature to dismiss the RNA-first scenarios. Suggestions for 'simple' "pre-RNA" nucleic acids have included peptide nucleic acid (PNA), threose nucleic acid (TNA) or glycol nucleic acid (GNA). Despite their structural simplicity and possession of properties comparable with RNA, the chemically plausible generation of "simpler" nucleic acids under prebiotic conditions has yet to be demonstrated.


title: RNA world

text: RNA enzymes, or ribozymes, are found in today's DNA-based life and could be examples of living fossils. Ribozymes play vital roles, such as that of the ribosome. The large subunit of the ribosome includes an rRNA responsible for the peptide bond-forming peptidyl transferase activity of protein synthesis. Many other ribozyme activities exist; for example, the hammerhead ribozyme performs self-cleavage and an RNA polymerase ribozyme can synthesize a short RNA strand from a primed RNA template.


title: RNA world

text: RNA is a very similar molecule to DNA, with only two major chemical differences (the backbone of RNA uses ribose instead of deoxyribose and its nucleobases include uracil instead of thymine). The overall structure of RNA and DNA are immensely similar—one strand of DNA and one of RNA can bind to form a double helical structure. This makes the storage of information in RNA possible in a very similar way to the storage of information in DNA. However, RNA is less stable, being more prone to hydrolysis due to the presence of a hydroxyl group at the ribose 2' position.


title: RNA world

text: The major difference between RNA and DNA is the presence of a hydroxyl group at the 2'-position of the ribose sugar in RNA (illustration, right). This group makes the molecule less stable because, when not constrained in a double helix, the 2' hydroxyl can chemically attack the adjacent phosphodiester bond to cleave the phosphodiester backbone. The hydroxyl group also forces the ribose into the C3'-"endo" sugar conformation unlike the C2'-"endo" conformation of the deoxyribose sugar in DNA. This forces an RNA double helix to change from a B-DNA structure to one more closely resembling A-DNA.


title: RNA world

text: RNA also uses a different set of bases than DNA—adenine, guanine, cytosine and uracil, instead of adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. Chemically, uracil is similar to thymine, differing only by a methyl group, and its production requires less energy. In terms of base pairing, this has no effect. Adenine readily binds uracil or thymine. Uracil is, however, one product of damage to cytosine that makes RNA particularly susceptible to mutations that can replace a GC base pair with a GU (wobble) or AU base pair.


title: RNA world

text: RNA is thought to have preceded DNA, because of their ordering in the biosynthetic pathways. The deoxyribonucleotides used to make DNA are made from ribonucleotides, the building blocks of RNA, by removing the 2'-hydroxyl group. As a consequence a cell must have the ability to make RNA before it can make DNA.


title: RNA world

text: The chemical properties of RNA make large RNA molecules inherently fragile, and they can easily be broken down into their constituent nucleotides through hydrolysis. These limitations do not make use of RNA as an information storage system impossible, simply energy intensive (to repair or replace damaged RNA molecules) and prone to mutation. While this makes it unsuitable for current 'DNA optimised' life, it may have been acceptable for more primitive life.


title: RNA world

text: Riboswitches have been found to act as regulators of gene expression, particularly in bacteria, but also in plants and archaea. Riboswitches alter their secondary structure in response to the binding of a metabolite. This change in structure can result in the formation or disruption of a terminator, truncating or permitting transcription respectively. Alternatively, riboswitches may bind or occlude the Shine–Dalgarno sequence, affecting translation. It has been suggested that these originated in an RNA-based world. In addition, RNA thermometers regulate gene expression in response to temperature changes.


title: RNA world

text: The RNA world hypothesis is supported by RNA's ability both to store, transmit, and duplicate genetic information, as DNA does, and to perform enzymatic reactions, like protein-based enzymes. Because it can carry out the types of tasks now performed by proteins and DNA, RNA is believed to have once been capable of supporting independent life on its own. Some viruses use RNA as their genetic material, rather than DNA. Further, while nucleotides were not found in experiments based on Miller-Urey experiment, their formation in prebiotically plausible conditions was reported in 2009; a purine base, adenine, is merely a pentamer of hydrogen cyanide, and it happens that this particular base is used as omnipresent energy vehicle in the cell: adenosine triphosphate is used everywhere in preference to guanosine triphosphate, cytidine triphosphate, uridine triphosphate or even deoxythymidine triphosphate, which could serve just as well but are practically never used except as building blocks for nucleic acid chains. Experiments with basic ribozymes, like Bacteriophage Qβ RNA, have shown that simple self-replicating RNA structures can withstand even strong selective pressures (e.g., opposite-chirality chain terminators).


title: RNA world

text: Since there were no known chemical pathways for the abiogenic synthesis of nucleotides from pyrimidine nucleobases cytosine and uracil under prebiotic conditions, it is thought by some that nucleic acids did not contain these nucleobases seen in life's nucleic acids. The nucleoside cytosine has a half-life in isolation of 19 days at and 17,000 years in freezing water, which some argue is too short on the geologic time scale for accumulation. Others have questioned whether ribose and other backbone sugars could be stable enough to be found in the original genetic material, and have raised the issue that all ribose molecules would have had to be the same enantiomer, as any nucleotide of the wrong chirality acts as a chain terminator.


title: RNA world

text: Pyrimidine ribonucleosides and their respective nucleotides have been prebiotically synthesised by a sequence of reactions that by-pass free sugars and assemble in a stepwise fashion by including nitrogenous and oxygenous chemistries. In a series of publications, John Sutherland and his team at the School of Chemistry, University of Manchester, have demonstrated high yielding routes to cytidine and uridine ribonucleotides built from small 2- and 3-carbon fragments such as glycolaldehyde, glyceraldehyde or glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate, cyanamide, and cyanoacetylene. One of the steps in this sequence allows the isolation of enantiopure ribose aminooxazoline if the enantiomeric excess of glyceraldehyde is 60% or greater, of possible interest toward biological homochirality. This can be viewed as a prebiotic purification step, where the said compound spontaneously crystallised out from a mixture of the other pentose aminooxazolines. Aminooxazolines can react with cyanoacetylene in a mild and highly efficient manner, controlled by inorganic phosphate, to give the cytidine ribonucleotides. Photoanomerization with UV light allows for inversion about the 1' anomeric centre to give the correct beta stereochemistry; one problem with this chemistry is the selective phosphorylation of alpha-cytidine at the 2' position. However, in 2009, they showed that the same simple building blocks allow access, via phosphate controlled nucleobase elaboration, to 2',3'-cyclic pyrimidine nucleotides directly, which are known to be able to polymerise into RNA. Organic chemist Donna Blackmond described this finding as "strong evidence" in favour of the RNA world. However, John Sutherland said that while his team's work suggests that nucleic acids played an early and central role in the origin of life, it did not necessarily support the RNA world hypothesis in the strict sense, which he described as a "restrictive, hypothetical arrangement".


title: RNA world

text: The Sutherland group's 2009 paper also highlighted the possibility for the photo-sanitization of the pyrimidine-2',3'-cyclic phosphates. A potential weakness of these routes is the generation of enantioenriched glyceraldehyde, or its 3-phosphate derivative (glyceraldehyde prefers to exist as its keto tautomer dihydroxyacetone).


title: RNA world

text: On August 8, 2011, a report, based on NASA studies with meteorites found on Earth, was published suggesting building blocks of RNA (adenine, guanine, and related organic molecules) may have been formed in outer space. In 2017, research using a numerical model suggested that a RNA world may have emerged in warm ponds on the early Earth, and that meteorites were a plausible and probable source of the RNA building blocks (ribose and nucleic acids) to these environments. On August 29, 2012, astronomers at Copenhagen University reported the detection of a specific sugar molecule, glycolaldehyde, in a distant star system. The molecule was found around the protostellar binary "IRAS 16293-2422", which is located 400 light years from Earth. Because glycolaldehyde is needed to form RNA, this finding suggests that complex organic molecules may form in stellar systems prior to the formation of planets, eventually arriving on young planets early in their formation. Nitriles, key molecular precursors of the RNA World scenario, are among the most abundant chemical families in the universe and have been found in molecular clouds in the center of the Milky Way, protostars of different masses, meteorites and comets, and also in the atmosphere of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.


title: RNA world

text: Nucleotides are the fundamental molecules that combine in series to form RNA. They consist of a nitrogenous base attached to a sugar-phosphate backbone. RNA is made of long stretches of specific nucleotides arranged so that their sequence of bases carries information. The RNA world hypothesis holds that in the primordial soup (or sandwich), there existed free-floating nucleotides. These nucleotides regularly formed bonds with one another, which often broke because the change in energy was so low. However, certain sequences of base pairs have catalytic properties that lower the energy of their chain being created, enabling them to stay together for longer periods of time. As each chain grew longer, it attracted more matching nucleotides faster, causing chains to now form faster than they were breaking down.


title: RNA world

text: These chains have been proposed by some as the first, primitive forms of life. In an RNA world, different sets of RNA strands would have had different replication outputs, which would have increased or decreased their frequency in the population, i.e. natural selection. As the fittest sets of RNA molecules expanded their numbers, novel catalytic properties added by mutation, which benefitted their persistence and expansion, could accumulate in the population. Such an autocatalytic set of ribozymes, capable of self replication in about an hour, has been identified. It was produced by molecular competition ("in vitro" evolution) of candidate enzyme mixtures.


title: RNA world

text: Competition between RNA may have favored the emergence of cooperation between different RNA chains, opening the way for the formation of the first protocell. Eventually, RNA chains developed with catalytic properties that help amino acids bind together (a process called peptide-bonding). These amino acids could then assist with RNA synthesis, giving those RNA chains that could serve as ribozymes the selective advantage. The ability to catalyze one step in protein synthesis, aminoacylation of RNA, has been demonstrated in a short (five-nucleotide) segment of RNA.


title: RNA world

text: In March 2015, NASA scientists reported that, for the first time, complex DNA and RNA organic compounds of life, including uracil, cytosine, and thymine, have been formed in the laboratory under conditions found only in outer space, using starting chemicals, like pyrimidine, found in meteorites. Pyrimidine, like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), may have been formed in red giant stars or in interstellar dust and gas clouds, according to the scientists.


title: RNA world

text: In 2018, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology identified three molecular candidates for the bases that might have formed an earliest version of proto-RNA: barbituric acid, melamine, and 2,4,6-triaminopyrimidine (TAP). These three molecules are simpler versions of the four bases in current RNA, which could have been present in larger amounts and could still be forward-compatible with them, but may have been discarded by evolution in exchange for more optimal base pairs. Specifically, TAP can form nucleotides with a large range of sugars. Both TAP and melamine base pair with barbituric acid. All three spontaneously form nucleotides with ribose.


title: RNA world

text: One of the challenges posed by the RNA world hypothesis is to discover the pathway by which an RNA-based system transitioned to one based on DNA. Geoffrey Diemer and Ken Stedman, at Portland State University in Oregon, may have found a solution. While conducting a survey of viruses in a hot acidic lake in Lassen Volcanic National Park, California, they uncovered evidence that a simple DNA virus had acquired a gene from a completely unrelated RNA-based virus. Virologist Luis Villareal of the University of California Irvine also suggests that viruses capable of converting an RNA-based gene into DNA and then incorporating it into a more complex DNA-based genome might have been common in the Virus world during the RNA to DNA transition some 4 billion years ago. This finding bolsters the argument for the transfer of information from the RNA world to the emerging DNA world before the emergence of the last universal common ancestor. From the research, the diversity of this virus world is still with us.


title: RNA world

text: Additional evidence supporting the concept of an RNA world has resulted from research on viroids, the first representatives of a novel domain of "subviral pathogens".


title: RNA world

text: Viroids infect plants, where most are pathogens, and consist of short stretches of highly complementary, circular, single-stranded and non-coding RNA without a protein coat. They are extremely small, ranging from 246 to 467 nucleobases, compared to the smallest known viruses capable of causing an infection, with genomes about 2,000 nucleobases in length.


title: RNA world

text: Based on their characteristic properties, in 1989 plant biologist Theodor Diener argued that viroids are more plausible living relics of the RNA world than introns and other RNAs considered candidates at the time. Diener's hypothesis would be expanded by the research group of Ricardo Flores, and gained a broader audience when in 2014, a New York Times science writer published a popularized version of the proposal.


title: RNA world

text: The characteristics of viroids highlighted as consistent with an RNA world were their small size, high guanine and cytosine content, circular structure, structural periodicity, the lack of protein-coding ability and, in some cases, ribozyme-mediated replication. One aspect critics of the hypothesis have focused on is that the exclusive hosts of all known viroids, angiosperms, did not evolve until billions of years after the RNA world was replaced, making viroids more likely to have arisen through later evolutionary mechanisms unrelated to the RNA world than to have survived via a cryptic host over that extended period. Whether they are relics of that world or of more recent origin, their function as autonomous naked RNA is seen as analogous to that envisioned for an RNA world.


title: RNA world

text: Eigen "et al". and Woese proposed that the genomes of early protocells were composed of single-stranded RNA, and that individual genes corresponded to separate RNA segments, rather than being linked end-to-end as in present-day DNA genomes. A protocell that was haploid (one copy of each RNA gene) would be vulnerable to damage, since a single lesion in any RNA segment would be potentially lethal to the protocell (e.g. by blocking replication or inhibiting the function of an essential gene).


title: RNA world

text: Vulnerability to damage could be reduced by maintaining two or more copies of each RNA segment in each protocell, i.e. by maintaining diploidy or polyploidy. Genome redundancy would allow a damaged RNA segment to be replaced by an additional replication of its homolog. However, for such a simple organism, the proportion of available resources tied up in the genetic material would be a large fraction of the total resource budget. Under limited resource conditions, the protocell reproductive rate would likely be inversely related to ploidy number. The protocell's fitness would be reduced by the costs of redundancy. Consequently, coping with damaged RNA genes while minimizing the costs of redundancy would likely have been a fundamental problem for early protocells.


title: RNA world

text: A cost-benefit analysis was carried out in which the costs of maintaining redundancy were balanced against the costs of genome damage. This analysis led to the conclusion that, under a wide range of circumstances, the selected strategy would be for each protocell to be haploid, but to periodically fuse with another haploid protocell to form a transient diploid. The retention of the haploid state maximizes the growth rate. The periodic fusions permit mutual reactivation of otherwise lethally damaged protocells. If at least one damage-free copy of each RNA gene is present in the transient diploid, viable progeny can be formed. For two, rather than one, viable daughter cells to be produced would require an extra replication of the intact RNA gene homologous to any RNA gene that had been damaged prior to the division of the fused protocell. The cycle of haploid reproduction, with occasional fusion to a transient diploid state, followed by splitting to the haploid state, can be considered to be the sexual cycle in its most primitive form. In the absence of this sexual cycle, haploid protocells with damage in an essential RNA gene would simply die.


title: RNA world

text: This model for the early sexual cycle is hypothetical, but it is very similar to the known sexual behavior of the segmented RNA viruses, which are among the simplest organisms known. Influenza virus, whose genome consists of 8 physically separated single-stranded RNA segments, is an example of this type of virus. In segmented RNA viruses, "mating" can occur when a host cell is infected by at least two virus particles. If these viruses each contain an RNA segment with a lethal damage, multiple infection can lead to reactivation providing that at least one undamaged copy of each virus gene is present in the infected cell. This phenomenon is known as "multiplicity reactivation". Multiplicity reactivation has been reported to occur in influenza virus infections after induction of RNA damage by UV-irradiation, and ionizing radiation.


title: RNA world

text: Patrick Forterre has been working on a novel hypothesis, called "three viruses, three domains": that viruses were instrumental in the transition from RNA to DNA and the evolution of Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryota. He believes the last universal common ancestor was RNA-based and evolved RNA viruses. Some of the viruses evolved into DNA viruses to protect their genes from attack. Through the process of viral infection into hosts the three domains of life evolved.


title: RNA world

text: Another interesting proposal is the idea that RNA synthesis might have been driven by temperature gradients, in the process of thermosynthesis.


title: RNA world

text: Steven Benner has argued that chemical conditions on the planet Mars, such as the presence of boron, molybdenum, and oxygen, may have been better for initially producing RNA molecules than those on Earth. If so, life-suitable molecules, originating on Mars, may have later migrated to Earth via mechanisms of panspermia or similar process.


title: RNA world

text: The hypothesized existence of an RNA world does not exclude a "Pre-RNA world", where a metabolic system based on a different nucleic acid is proposed to pre-date RNA. A candidate nucleic acid is peptide nucleic acid (PNA), which uses simple peptide bonds to link nucleobases. PNA is more stable than RNA, but its ability to be generated under prebiological conditions has yet to be demonstrated experimentally.


title: RNA world

text: Threose nucleic acid (TNA) has also been proposed as a starting point, as has glycol nucleic acid (GNA), and like PNA, also lack experimental evidence for their respective abiogenesis.


title: RNA world

text: An alternative—or complementary—theory of RNA origin is proposed in the PAH world hypothesis, whereby polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) mediate the synthesis of RNA molecules. PAHs are the most common and abundant of the known polyatomic molecules in the visible Universe, and are a likely constituent of the primordial sea. PAHs and fullerenes (also implicated in the origin of life) have been detected in nebulae.


title: RNA world

text: The iron-sulfur world theory proposes that simple metabolic processes developed before genetic materials did, and these energy-producing cycles catalyzed the production of genes.


title: RNA world

text: Some of the difficulties of producing the precursors on earth are bypassed by another alternative or complementary theory for their origin, panspermia. It discusses the possibility that the earliest life on this planet was carried here from somewhere else in the galaxy, possibly on meteorites similar to the Murchison meteorite. Sugar molecules, including ribose, have been found in meteorites. Panspermia does not invalidate the concept of an RNA world, but posits that this world or its precursors originated not on Earth but rather another, probably older, planet.


title: RNA world

text: The relative chemical complexity of the nucleotide and the unlikelihood of it spontaneously arising, along with the limited number of combinations possible among four base forms, as well as the need for RNA polymers of some length before seeing enzymatic activity, have led some to reject the RNA world hypothesis in favor of a metabolism-first hypothesis, where the chemistry underlying cellular function arose first, along with the ability to replicate and facilitate this metabolism.


title: RNA world

text: Another proposal is that the dual-molecule system we see today, where a nucleotide-based molecule is needed to synthesize protein, and a peptide-based (protein) molecule is needed to make nucleic acid polymers, represents the original form of life. This theory is called RNA-peptide coevolution, or the Peptide-RNA world, and offers a possible explanation for the rapid evolution of high-quality replication in RNA (since proteins are catalysts), with the disadvantage of having to postulate the coincident formation of two complex molecules, an enzyme (from peptides) and a RNA (from nucleotides). In this Peptide-RNA World scenario, RNA would have contained the instructions for life, while peptides (simple protein enzymes) would have accelerated key chemical reactions to carry out those instructions. The study leaves open the question of exactly how those primitive systems managed to replicate themselves — something neither the RNA World hypothesis nor the Peptide-RNA World theory can yet explain, unless polymerases (enzymes that rapidly assemble the RNA molecule) played a role.


title: RNA world

text: A research project completed in March 2015 by the Sutherland group found that a network of reactions beginning with hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen sulfide, in streams of water irradiated by UV light, could produce the chemical components of proteins and lipids, alongside those of RNA. The researchers used the term "cyanosulfidic" to describe this network of reactions. In November 2017, a team at the Scripps Research Institute identified reactions involving the compound diamidophosphate which could have linked the chemical components into short peptide and lipid chains as well as short RNA-like chains of nucleotides.


title: RNA world

text: The RNA world hypothesis, if true, has important implications for the definition of life. For most of the time that followed Franklin, Watson and Crick's elucidation of DNA structure in 1953, life was largely defined in terms of DNA and proteins: DNA and proteins seemed the dominant macromolecules in the living cell, with RNA only aiding in creating proteins from the DNA blueprint.


title: RNA world

text: The RNA world hypothesis places RNA at center-stage when life originated. The RNA world hypothesis is supported by the observations that ribosomes are ribozymes: the catalytic site is composed of RNA, and proteins hold no major structural role and are of peripheral functional importance. This was confirmed with the deciphering of the 3-dimensional structure of the ribosome in 2001. Specifically, peptide bond formation, the reaction that binds amino acids together into proteins, is now known to be catalyzed by an adenine residue in the rRNA.


title: RNA world

text: RNAs are known to play roles in other cellular catalytic processes, specifically in the targeting of enzymes to specific RNA sequences. In eukaryotes, the processing of pre-mRNA and RNA editing take place at sites determined by the base pairing between the target RNA and RNA constituents of small nuclear ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs). Such enzyme targeting is also responsible for gene down regulation through RNA interference (RNAi), where an enzyme-associated guide RNA targets specific mRNA for selective destruction. Likewise, in eukaryotes the maintenance of telomeres involves copying of an RNA template that is a constituent part of the telomerase ribonucleoprotein enzyme. Another cellular organelle, the vault, includes a ribonucleoprotein component, although the function of this organelle remains to be elucidated.


title: Bloodlands

text: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a book by Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder that was first published by Basic Books on 28 October 2010. It is about mass murders committed during World War II in territories controlled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.


title: Bloodlands

text: In this book, Snyder examines the political, cultural, and ideological context tied to a specific region of Central and Eastern Europe, where Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany committed mass murders of an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust. Snyder's thesis is that the "bloodlands", a region that now comprises Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), northeastern Romania, and the westernmost fringes of Russia, is the area that Stalin and Hitler's regimes, despite their conflicting goals, interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed many times worse than had they acted independently.


title: Bloodlands

text: Snyder draws similarities between the two totalitarian regimes and the enabling interactions that reinforced the destruction and suffering that were inflicted upon noncombatants. According to Snyder, Nazi Germany was responsible for twice as many deaths as the Soviet Union.


title: Bloodlands

text: The book was awarded numerous prizes, including the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, and stirred up a great deal of debate among historians. Reviews ranged from highly critical to "rapturous".


title: Bloodlands

text: The Central and Eastern European regions that Snyder terms "the bloodlands" is the area where Hitler's vision of racial supremacy and "Lebensraum," resulting in the Final Solution and other Nazi atrocities, met, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in cooperation, with Stalin's vision of a communist ideology that resulted in the deliberate starvation, imprisonment, and murder of innocent men, women and children in Gulags and elsewhere.


title: Bloodlands

text: The combined efforts of the two regimes resulted in the deaths of an estimated 14 million noncombatants in the Eastern Europe "Bloodlands"; Snyder documents that Nazi Germany was responsible for about two thirds of the total number of deaths. At least 5.4 million died in what has become known as the Holocaust, but many more died in more obscure circumstances.


title: Bloodlands

text: Snyder seeks to show that interaction between the Nazi and Soviet regimes is crucial to telling the story of this bloodshed. He posits that early Soviet support for the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupation was followed by an unwillingness to aid the uprising because the Soviets were willing to have the Nazis eliminate potential sources of resistance to a later Soviet occupation. Snyder states that this is an example of interaction that may have led to many more deaths than might have been the case if each regime had been acting independently.


title: Bloodlands

text: According to Jacob Mikanowski, one of the book's overarching goals is to argue that "it's wrong to focus on the camps when so much of the Holocaust was committed out in the open." To this end, Snyder documents that many Jews were killed by mass shootings in villages or the countryside, in addition to those deaths suffered in the death camps. As commented by Anne Applebaum, "[t]he vast majority of Hitler's victims, Jewish and otherwise, never saw a concentration camp." Similarly, all of the Soviet victims discussed were killed outside the Gulag concentration camp system; within the camps, an estimated million people died. More Soviet prisoners of war died every day in Nazi camps during the Autumn of 1941 than the total number of Western Allied POWs in the entire war; over 3 million Soviet POWs died in the Nazi camps. The fate of the German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union was little better, as more than half a million died in terrible conditions in the Soviet camps.


title: Bloodlands

text: Snyder focuses on three periods, summarized by Richard Rhodes as "deliberate mass starvation and shootings in the Soviet Union in the period from 1933 to 1938; mass shootings in occupied Poland more or less equally by Soviet and German killers in 1939 to 1941; deliberate starvation of 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war and mass shooting and gassing of more than 5 million Jews by the Germans between 1941 and 1945." He re-examines numerous points of the war and postwar years such as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, the rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust, and the Soviet persecution of the Polish Underground State, cursed soldiers, and their own prisoners of war after the war.


title: Bloodlands

text: The chapter covering the early 1930s famine in the Ukraine under the Soviet Union (often termed the Holodomor, a term Snyder avoids) goes into considerable detail. Snyder recounts that in an unofficial orphanage in a village in the Kharkiv region, the children were so hungry they resorted to cannibalism. One child ate parts of himself while he was being cannibalised. 3.3 millions died during the Ukrainian starvation of 1933. Under his Hunger Plan, Hitler starved 4.2 million persons in the Soviet Union largely Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians.


title: Bloodlands

text: The book seeks to point out similarities between the two regimes, with Snyder stating: "Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative Utopia, a group to be blamed when its realisation proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory."


title: Bloodlands

text: Snyder also describes how the two regimes often collaborated and aided one another, at least until the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union such as the Gestapo–NKVD Conferences. They collaborated in the killings of Poles such as Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles and Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–1946); between the two of them, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union killed about 200,000 Polish citizens in the period 1939–1941.


title: Bloodlands

text: About this, Applebaum wrote: "The Nazi and Soviet regimes were sometimes allies, as in the joint occupation of Poland [from 1939–1941]. They sometimes held compatible goals as foes: as when Stalin chose not to aid the rebels in Warsaw in 1944 [during the Warsaw uprising], thereby allowing the Germans to kill people who would later have resisted communist rule ... . Often the Germans and the Soviets goaded each other into escalations that cost more lives than the policies of either state by itself would have." Snyder stated that after the Western Allies had allied themselves with Stalin against Hitler, they did not have the will to fight the second totalitarian regime when the war ended. As American and British soldiers never entered Eastern Europe, the tragedy of those lands did not become well known to the American or British populace and led to the view of Western betrayal.


title: Bloodlands

text: Snyder put the total death toll in the "Bloodlands" at 14 million victims of both Stalin and Hitler, including Jewish civilians transported to German camps in occupied Poland during World War II, Polish intelligentsia killed in war crimes such as in the Katyn massacre, disarmed military personnel in occupied countries and prisoners of war. Snyder pointed out that "I am not counting soldiers who died on the fields of battle", saying that this "is not a complete reckoning of all the death that Soviet and German power brought to the region."


title: Bloodlands

text: Snyder identifies those victims killed as a result of "deliberate policies of mass murder" by governments, such as executions, deliberate famine and death camps. Snyder said that he "generally excludes from the count" deaths due to exertion, disease, or malnutrition in concentration camps; deportations, forced labor, evacuations; people who died of hunger as a result of wartime shortfalls, and civilians killed by bombings or other acts of war. The geographic area covered by the "Bloodlands" is limited to Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, and western Russian regions occupied by Germany. Regarding the figures, Snyder stated that his reckoning is "on the conservative side."


title: Bloodlands

text: In February 2011, the "Ottawa Citizen" summarized the number of victims, stating that "Bloodlands" is "a chilling and instructive story of how 14 million unarmed men, women and children were murdered. The death toll includes two familiar victim groups – 5.7 million Jews in the Holocaust and 3.3 million Ukrainians during the 1932–1933 famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin – along with lesser-known victims that include three million Soviet prisoners of war who were deliberately starved to death."


title: Bloodlands

text: In November 2012, historian Dariusz Stola wrote: "His restrictive definition of murderous policies raises doubts. His estimate of fourteen million dead only takes into account people killed within the framework of deliberate policies of mass murder. As a consequence, he is excluding, among others, all those who died as a result of abuse, of diseases or of malnutrition in concentration camps or during the deportations, or even while fleeing form the armies (even when these armies were deliberately pushing people into having to flee)."


title: Bloodlands

text: "Bloodlands" stirred up a great deal of debate among historians, with reviews ranging from highly critical to "rapturous". In assessing these reviews, Jacques Sémelin wrote: "While observers on the whole all join in paying tribute to Snyder's "tour de force", they nevertheless don't hold back from subjecting him to several incisive criticisms." Sémelin stated that several historians have criticized the chronological construction of events, the arbitrary geographical delimitation, Snyder's numbers on victims and violence, and a lack of focus on interactions between different actors. Despite these points, Sémelin stated that "Bloodlands" is one of those books that "change the way we look at a period in history."


title: Bloodlands

text: The book received favourable reviews in popular press outlets like "BBC History", "The Seattle Times", and "The New York Observer", and has been described as "an impeccably researched history of mass killings in the eastern part of mid-20th-century Europe" by Robert Gerwarth in the "Irish Times".


title: Bloodlands

text: The book received praise from an array of experts in the field. Tony Judt called "Bloodlands" "the most important book to appear on this subject for decades." Other positive reviews include those from Wendy Lower, who wrote that it was a "masterful synthesis", John Connelly, who called it "morally informed scholarship of the highest calibre", and Christopher Browning, who described it as "stunning", while Dennis Showalter stated that "Snyder has written several first-rate books ... And "Bloodlands" takes his work to a new level."


title: Bloodlands

text: Mark Roseman wrote that "the book's core achievement is ... to tell the story of Nazi and Soviet violence in a way that renders that savage chapter anew, and enduringly changes what we see." "Bloodlands" also received harsh criticism from other historians of the period, and specialists on Nazism and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union.


title: Bloodlands

text: In a "blistering review" on 4 November 2010 for the "London Review of Books", Richard J. Evans wrote that because of a lack of causal argument, "Snyder's book is of no use." Evans wrote that "[i]t seems to me that he is simply equating Nazi genocide with the mass murders carried out in the Soviet Union under Stalin. ... There is nothing wrong with comparing. It's the equation that I find highly troubling." Evans later conceded that Snyder's own critical review of Evans' "The Third Reich at War," published the year before in "The New York Review of Books", was "one of the many reasons Snyder's book made [him] so cross."


title: Bloodlands

text: In a summer 2011 article for the "Slavic Review", Omer Bartov wrote that while "Bloodlands" presents an "admirable synthesis", it nonetheless "presents no new evidence and makes no new arguments", and stating that the book is "permeated by a consistent pro-Polish bias", eliding darker aspects of Polish–Jewish relations, and that Snyder's emphasis on German and Soviet occupation policies glosses over interethnic violence, commenting: "By equating partisans and occupiers, Soviet and Nazi occupation, Wehrmacht and Red Army criminality, and evading interethnic violence, Snyder drains the war of much of its moral content and inadvertently adopts the apologists' argument that where everyone is a criminal no one can be blamed."


title: Bloodlands

text: In a January 2012 review in the "Sarmatian Review", Raymond Gawronski described "Bloodlands" as "a book that must be read and digested, a very significant book that knits together what otherwise are discordant chunks of history, many of which are totally unknown in our culture", adding that "Snyder's sensitivity to the various peoples involved, their own motivations, situations, histories, relations, is remarkable and highly praiseworthy. His reflections on subsequent inflation of numbers by nationalist groups is sober and needed." For Gawronski, "Snyder walks a tightrope of deepening concern for the Jewish Holocaust and a most moving presentation while situating it within the suffering of other surrounding communities: I believe he accomplishes this very difficult task well."


title: Bloodlands

text: "Contemporary European History" published a special forum on the book in May 2012, featuring reviews by Jörg Baberowski, Dan Diner, Thomas Kühne, and Mark Mazower as well as an introduction and response by Snyder. Kühne stated that "Snyder is not the first to think about what Hitler and Stalin had in common and how their murderous politics related to each other. The more provocative historians were in doing so and the more they thereby questioned the uniqueness, or the peculiarity, of the Holocaust, the more their work was met with resistance or even disgust, most prominently and controversially the German Ernst Nolte in the 1980s. Snyder's move to link Soviet and Nazi crimes is as politically tricky today as it was then." Kühne added:


title: Bloodlands

text: In the same special issue, Mazower rejected the idea of reducing Snyder's argument to that of Nolte, stating:


title: Bloodlands

text: Baberowski, a leading contemporary proponent of Nolte's views on the Holocaust, criticized Snyder for not going far enough to connect the genocide of European Jews to "the excesses of Stalin's dictatorship." Diner expressed regret that Snyder did not discuss the legacy of Polish–Russian hostility and of the Polish–Soviet War, which would have given context for Soviet crimes in Katyn and Stalin's decision not to intervene during the Warsaw Uprising against the German occupier in 1944.


title: Bloodlands

text: A June 2012 review in "The Journal of Modern History" by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius stated that "[b]y examining the conjuncture, clashes, and perverse interrelations of extreme ideological regimes in these 'bloodlands', Snyder presents a clearly argued, eloquently crafted and unflinching reckoning up of the human tragedy, on a scale vast beyond imagining", and posited that the book "deserves a large and engaged audience."


title: Bloodlands

text: A November 2012 review by Christian Ingrao expressed dissatisfaction with the book's "chronological starting point", positing that Snyder could have started his analysis in 1914 by integrating into it the violence committed during World War I and even to the failed 1905 Russian Revolution, when peasants revolted in ways which shook both Russia and Ukraine.


title: Bloodlands

text: In a December 2012 review for "Cahiers du Monde russe", Amir Weiner stated that Snyder is not an expert either on Soviet or Nazi history, and wrote: "Long on promises and short on delivery, replete with equations that are often baseless and at times tasteless, "Bloodlands" ends up as a bloody nose to history."


title: Bloodlands

text: A December 2016 article in "Reviews in History" by Tom Lawson evaluated Snyder's scholarly success in hindsight. It stated that the bloodlands concept was influential in its attempt to assert the wider contexts for Nazi violence, genocide, and imperialism, without reducing it to antisemitism in Germany. Lawson commented that on its own terms ""Bloodlands" was at best partially successful", but its substantive influence can be seen in the more recent "steady stream of scholars attempting to assert the wider contexts for Nazi violence – in terms of the history of imperialism; the wider history of genocide or of inter-ethnic tensions beyond simply a history of German antisemitism. As such while Snyder did not provide many of the answers in "Bloodlands", he did begin to ask the questions."


title: Bloodlands

text: In an April 2017 article in "Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine", Jean Solchany wrote that the proposed concept of the Bloodlands "does not lead to a productive spatial decentering but, on the contrary, offers a dated and simplified reading of German and Soviet history based on a comparative stance that exaggerates similarities and a hypothetical interactionist paradigm."


title: Bloodlands

text: Earlier in 2012, Michman wrote that ""Bloodlands" has not convinced me that there was a territory of 'bloodlands' which provides a historical explanation for murder, least of all for the Holocaust."


title: Bloodlands

text: In a September–October 2010 public debate in "The Guardian", Efraim Zuroff criticized what he described as the book's suggestion of a moral equivalence between Soviet mass murders and the Nazi Holocaust, and accused Snyder of providing a scholarly basis for the double genocide theory by emphasizing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.


title: Bloodlands

text: Dovid Katz commented that Snyder, while a "truly great historian", had stumbled into "a meticulously laid trap" set up by Baltic nationalists –– appearing to provide fodder for their excuse-making surrounding local participation in the Holocaust –– but that he had also included "almost as if by a higher inspired intuition, the key to unlock the very trap he may on a rare occasion be failing to avoid." In Snyder's response, he stated: "I coincide with Zuroff and Katz on the centrality of the Holocaust, but we must not overlook how Stalin enabled Hitler's crimes."


title: Bloodlands

text: Writing in the "Financial Times" in November 2010, Guy Walters stated that he found the book disturbing, commenting: "Some may find Snyder's staking-out of the area of the bloodlands too arbitrary for their tastes, and might accuse him of creating a questionable geographical delineation. Agree with it or not, in a sense it does not matter, because Snyder presents material that is undeniably fresh – what's more, it comes from sources in languages with which very few western academics are familiar. The success of "Bloodlands" really lies in its effective presentation of cold, hard scholarship, which is in abundance."


title: Bloodlands

text: For Applebaum, "Snyder's book has a lot of information that people who know these subjects know very well. But what it does that is different and wholly original is show the ways that Hitler and Stalin echoed one another, at times working together and other times fighting one another. The way in which they egged each other on, acting as two facets of what was really the same phenomenon."


title: Bloodlands

text: Writing for "Jacobin" in September 2014, Daniel Lazare described Snyder's "Bloodlands" as simplistic shoehorning of mass death in Eastern Europe into the crimes of Hitler and Stalin plus side-effects, and stated that the interactive one-upmanship of Nazi–Soviet crimes proposed by Snyder has the whiff of Ernst Nolte. Lazare also called attention to Snyder's suggestion that it was the Home Army's fear of communism that made it hesitant to help the Jewish Combat Organization, which also included communists, in the Warsaw Ghetto.


title: Bloodlands

text: "Bloodlands" won a number of awards, including the Cundill Prize Recognition of Excellence, Le Prix du livre d'Histoire de l'Europe 2013, Moczarski Prize in History, Literature Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, Phi Beta Kappa Society Emerson Book Award, Gustav Ranis International History Prize, Prakhina Foundation International Book Prize (honorable mention), Jean-Charles Velge Prize, Tadeusz Walendowski Book Prize, and Wacław Jędrzejewicz History Medal, and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize (ASEEES), the Austrian Scholarly Book of the Year, the NDR Kultur Sachbuchpreis 2011, and the Jury commendation Bristol Festival of Ideas. The book was also awarded the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.


title: Bloodlands

text: "Bloodlands" was named a book of the year for 2010 by "The Atlantic", "The Daily Telegraph", "The Economist", the "Financial Times", "The Independent", "The Jewish Daily Forward", "The New Republic", "New Statesman", "Reason", and "The Seattle Times".


title: Serpent seed

text: The doctrine of the serpent seed, also known as the dual-seed or the two-seedline doctrine, is a controversial and fringe Christian religious belief which explains the biblical account of the fall of man by stating that the Serpent mated with Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the offspring of their union was Cain. This event resulted in the creation of two races of people: the wicked descendants of the Serpent who were destined for damnation, and the righteous descendants of Adam who were destined to have eternal life. The doctrine frames human history as a conflict between these two races in which the descendants of Adam will eventually triumph over the descendants of the Serpent.


title: Serpent seed

text: Elements of the teaching appears in the early Gnostic writings of Valentinus (100–160) and the Gospel of Philip (). Mainstream Christian teachers rejected the serpent seed doctrine as heresy during the gnostic period. Irenaeus (), an Early Church Father, described the gnostic doctrine that the original sin was adultery between Eve and the serpent and explicitly rejected it as heresy in his book "Against Heresies". In the middle ages, the concept also appeared in Jewish literature, including the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan.


title: Serpent seed

text: During the 19th century, the serpent seed doctrine was revived by American religious leaders who wanted to promote white supremacy. The modern versions of the serpent seed doctrine were developed within the teachings of British Israelism by C. A. L. Totten (1851–1908) and Russel Kelso Carter (1849–1928). Daniel Parker (1781–1844) was also responsible for reviving and promoting the doctrine among Primitive Baptists. Teachers of Christian Identity Theology, which branched off from British Israelism, preached the doctrine during the early twentieth century and promoted it within the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, the American Nazi Party and other white supremacist organizations. The belief's adherents commonly use it to justify antisemitism and racism by claiming that Jews or members of non-white races are the descendants of Cain and the Serpent, who they variably interpret to be Satan or an intelligent non-human creature which lived before Adam and Eve.


title: Serpent seed

text: The serpent seed teaching comes in several different forms. William M. Branham (1909–1965), Arnold Murray (1929–2014), Wesley A. Swift (1913–1970), and Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) played important roles in spreading different versions of the doctrine among members of their respective groups throughout the 20th century. Around the world, there are millions of adherents of the serpent seed doctrine within Branhamism and the Unification Church. In 2000, there were an estimated 50,000 adherents of it within Christian Identity. The Anti-Defamation League and various Christian apologetics organizations have denounced racist versions of the serpent seed teaching by claiming that they are incompatible with the teachings of traditional Christianity, and they have accused their promoters of exacerbating racial divisions by spreading hate.


title: Serpent seed

text: Various nuanced forms of the serpent seed doctrine have been developed over the centuries. In its most prominent modern form, it explains the biblical account of the fall of man by stating that the serpent mated with Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the offspring of their union was Cain. It claims that Eve had relations with Adam a second time, and Abel and his younger brother Seth were the two offspring who were produced by that union. Both of these events resulted in the creation of two races of people, the first event produced the wicked descendants of the Serpent who were destined for damnation, and the second event produced the righteous descendants of Adam who were destined to have eternal life. The doctrine frames human history as a conflict between these two races in which the descendants of Adam will eventually triumph over the descendants of Cain and the Serpent.


title: Serpent seed

text: The doctrine is frequently used to demonize Jews and people who are members of non-white races and justify their mistreatment, abuse, enslavement or elimination by labeling them Satanic and sub-human. Variations of the doctrine claim that the Serpent's descendants have no souls because they are partially descended from animals and are therefore predestined for damnation. Some groups are markedly militant on the subject because of their millennial teachings, and as a result, they believe that at the end of days, a final battle will be fought in which the pure race will triumph over the impure race.


title: Serpent seed

text: The identity of the serpent varies between groups. Some groups claim that the serpent is Satan himself, while other groups claim that the serpent is an animal which is either apelike or human-like. Some groups incorporate Pre-Adamite views which state that the serpent was a non-human creature whose creation predated the creation of Adam.


title: Serpent seed

text: The identity of the serpent's seed also varies between groups. Aryan Nations, an American anti-semitic, neo-Nazi and white supremacist group, claims that the descendants of the serpent are all people who are not of northern European descent. Other Christian Identity groups claim that the descendants of the serpent are either Jews or Africans. William Branham connected the serpent's descendants with Ham (the biblical progenitor of the African peoples), several Jewish figures, the highly educated, and society's criminals. Arnold Murray connected the descendants of the Serpent with the "Kenites", a group of people which he believed had infiltrated some part of Jewish society. In the Unification Church, the bloodline of all humanity is believed to be contaminated as a result of Eve's relations with the serpent. However, married couples can change their heritages by performing the Holy Marriage Blessing Ceremony which enables them to become the adopted children of their new Adam: Sun Myung Moon.


title: Serpent seed

text: Mainstream Christianity rejects the serpent seed view. Many different Christian groups offer systematic rebuttals of the doctrine. For example, the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry points to Genesis 4:1 in order to refute the doctrine. Because the biblical record explicitly names Adam as the father of Cain, the teaching of the serpent seed is considered incompatible with the Protestant teaching of Biblical infallibility.


title: Serpent seed

text: Critics argue that the doctrine foments division and fuels racism, which makes it an unhealthy belief which is incompatible with Christianity because the belief itself leads to sin. One Christian apologetics group states, "Although an idea should not be criticized when it is wrongly applied, it is appropriate to condemn an idea when it logically leads to sin. A philosophy that teaches that some races or people are universally satanic, like the serpent seed doctrine, is one such philosophy." Also writing on the topic, Rev. John Brisby stated, "The Serpent's Seed doctrine is the hallmark of most radical hate groups today. Whether it involves neo-Nazis, right-wing militias, or one of the many other white supremacist groups, most of them share this doctrine in common. How do they justify their hatred towards Jews, non-whites, and others? They believe that these people are not real people at all!"


title: Serpent seed

text: Other criticisms of the doctrine point out the theological repercussions of blurring traditional Christianity's interpretation of the doctrine of original sin. The serpent seed doctrine characterizes original sin as a feature of genetic inheritance rather than a spiritual condition. Mainstream Christianity teaches the belief that all individuals are the spiritual children of Satan because they were born in a state of original sin. Through the act of Christian conversion, individuals can become children of God through adoption. The serpent seed doctrine undermines the basic teachings of Christian conversion by teaching the belief that only individuals who are descended from Adam are the inherent children of God, a belief which classifies them as the only people who do not need to convert to Christianity, while the Serpent's seedline is irredeemable.


title: Serpent seed

text: Valentinus (100–160) promoted a doctrine which is similar to the serpent seed doctrine because it states that Eve mated with the serpent and produced Cain. In his teaching, the serpent was the manifestation of an aeon named Sophia who seduced Eve. The teachings of Valentinus were compiled in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip () where the idea that Eve mated with the serpent, or Satan, and produced Cain, finds its earliest expression. A similar account is recorded in the Gnostic Apocryphon of John which was authored by the Sethians ().


title: Serpent seed

text: Irenaeus recorded a portion of the teaching and denounced it as heresy in his book "Against Heresies". Explaining and commenting on the teachings of Valentinus, Irenaeus states:


title: Serpent seed

text: The teaching also appeared in medieval Judaica. In his 1957 book "Cain: Son of the Serpent", David Max Eichhorn traces the belief that Cain was the son of the union between the serpent and Eve back to early Jewish Midrashic texts which were composed between 800 CE and 1200 CE. Eichhorn identified rabbis who wrote about the topic, including a 9th-century book titled "Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer" and the Zohar. In their version, Adam's first wife was Lilith and his second wife was Eve. Lilith became possessed by the spirit of God's wife and rebelled against Adam and became the mother of all demons. Eve was subsequently seduced by the serpent and became the mother a race of evil men.


title: Serpent seed

text: A later folk-version of the serpent seed doctrine was somewhat widespread in European Christianity during the Middle Ages and it ascribed the ancestry of legendary monsters such as Grendel to Cain.


title: Serpent seed

text: The Aramaic Targum Pseudo-Jonathan contains passages referencing the serpent seed concept. The targum was referenced by Rabbi Menahem Recanati (1250–1310) in his Perush 'Al ha-Torah. The age of the writing is disputed. A 2006 analysis by Beverly Mortensen dates Targum Pseudo-Jonathan to the 4th century and regards it as a manual for kohanim. Gavin McDowell's analyses suggested the document was created in the early 1200s because it includes excerpts from writings from the 1100s.


title: Serpent seed

text: So Adam knew his wife Eve/Hava, who desired the Angel (Samael), aka "The Serpent, Satan & The Destroyer" in Judaism & Talmudic Lore. And then she bore Kain. In one account Samael is also believed to be the father of Cain, as well as the partner of Lilith. The relationship between Samael and Lilith is depicted in the Sigil of Baphomet, the official insignia of the Church of Satan.


title: Serpent seed

text: British Israelism reintroduced a version of serpent seed beginning in the mid 1800s. A small circle of ministers in the United Kingdom first began to develop what they called "seedline" doctrine in the 1790s. The seedline teaching stated that two races of people lived upon the earth: a righteous pure seedline of people and an unrighteous impure seedline of people. The early teachings of the seedline doctrine did not offer an origin story for the two groups. The original form of British Israelism taught the belief that the Anglo-Saxons were descended from the lost tribes of Israel and were therefore part of the pure seedline.


title: Serpent seed

text: British Israelism traces its roots to Richard Brothers (1759–1824) who was one of the earliest promoters of the theology and published a tract on the topic in 1794. John Wilson (1788–1870), and Edward Hine (1825–1891) followed Brothers in promoting the doctrine in the mid-1800s and each of them also published books on the topic and acquired a large following within various Christian denominations. Elements of their teachings gradually became popular among members of the Church of England. Each of them published books on the topic and they also acquired a growing number of followers within various Christian denominations. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the earliest versions of the teaching did not seem to be racially motivated, but that began to change as the theology was introduced in the United States. The theology arrived in the United States through British Israelite evangelists in the mid-19th century. Rev. Joseph Williams (1826–1882), who immigrated from the UK to the USA, was probably the first such evangelist. He lectured on the subject in Boston from 1874 until his death in 1882. His teachings on the subject were published in two periodicals, "The Trio" and "The Trumpet of Israel". Rev. Joseph Wild (1834–1908) immigrated from England to Brooklyn during the 1880s. He became the preeminent American promoter of British Israelism. He published multiple books on the subject and influence many white Americans with his teachings.


title: Serpent seed

text: Daniel Parker (1781–1844) was an early American leader of the Primitive Baptist Church in the Southern United States and founder of numerous churches in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, and Texas. As an elder, Parker led a group which separated from that church and formed the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists. Parker integrated the serpent seed doctrine into Calvinist Predestination. He connected the elect with the pure seedline, and he connected the non-elect with the serpent seedline. Parker published his beliefs in a tract which he entitled "Views on the Two Seeds" while he was living in Vincennes, Indiana in 1826. Parker's seedline doctrine identified the serpent as the father of Cain and the originator of the wicked impure seedline. Parkers initially developed and promoted the serpent seedline doctrine as a key argument in his opposition to foreign Christian missionaries. Parker believed that the non-white races who were the targets of foreign missions were people who were descended from the wicked seed of the serpent. He stated that since "God would save His own children, and since the children of Satan were predestined to eternal punishment, any kind of mission plan would seem ridiculous." Parker was labeled a heretic for teaching the doctrine by mainstream Baptists. The influences on Parker's beliefs are unknown, so he may have arrived at his version of the serpent seedline doctrine independently, or he may have been influenced by early British Israel teachings. Parker's teachings coincided with the promotion of the earliest form of Polygenism in the United States by the Kentuckian Charles Caldwell, who believed non-white races could not have descended from Adam. Although it was not widely accepted, Parker's teaching became well known among Calvinistic Baptists in Kentucky. "Two-Seed Predestinarian Baptists always remained a small group. The U.S. religious census of 1906 recorded 781 members. In 1938 there were 98 members."


title: Serpent seed

text: In the 1890s, C. A. L. Totten (1851–1908), a former professor of military science at Yale University, began to promote British Israelism. Totten began to promote the belief that Anglo-Saxons were destined by God to rule the world. Also during the 1890s, British Israelism began to develop into a formal organization which took on racial overtones. In 1886, the growing group formed the Anglo-Israel Association and in 1919, this group renamed itself the British-Israel-World Federation. The primary aim of this group was the promotion of archeological expeditions which it wished to undertake in order to discover pieces of evidence which would validate its beliefs. The group remained small, but it gained a broader base of international appeal when it began to accept all people of Germanic descent as part of the righteous seed-line of the lost tribes of Israel. By the 1930s, the movement had grown to include over 50 branches in the United States which were all under the leadership of William J. Cameron, but the British Israel movement largely faded from view both during and after World War II.


title: Serpent seed

text: Most modern versions of the serpent seed teaching can be traced to Totten and the seedline teachings which he promoted during the early 20th century. Totten published several books and integrated British Israel theology into Adventist theology. According to Professor Jon F. Schamber, Totten's works "inspired dozens of evangelists and religious writers, including Rev. John H. Allen, a founding minister in the Church of God (Holiness); Charles Fox Parham (1873–1929), the founder of the Pentecostal Apostolic Faith Movement; Victor Morris Tyler, a wealthy industrialist and an editor of the "Our Race Quarterly"; Rev. Reuben H. Sawyer, a clergyman in the Christian Church and a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan; and Alan A. Beauchamp, a publisher and an editor of the "Watchman of Israel"."


title: Serpent seed

text: Rev. Russel Kelso Carter (1849–1928) was a prominent Church of God (Holiness) minister and a follower of Totten. He became the first preacher of British Israelism to offer a theory on the origin of the serpent's seedline. Carter theorized that Cain was the literal Son of the serpent in his book "The Tree of Knowledge" which he published in 1894. Carter believed that "the tremendous pull of the sexual appetite, aroused by the excited state of the woman" caused humanity's fall in the Garden of Eden. He believed that Satan used the seduction of Eve to destroy God's pure race "at its fountainhead". Carter stopped short of speculating on who the descendants of Cain might be, but he connected the righteous seedline with the Anglo-Saxons. Carter's teachings on the subject were subsequently integrated into the overall teachings of British Israelism and they proved to be particularly appealing to members of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists who spread the teaching during the 20th century.


title: Serpent seed

text: Carter's theory was very similar to the theory which was first proposed by Daniel Parker, who may have been an influence on him. Carter may have also been influenced by the pre-Adamite and Polygenist theories which were being promoted in the United States during the 19th century. In 1875, A. Lester Hoyle wrote a book titled "The Pre-Adamite, or who tempted Eve?" In his book, he claimed that multiple creations of races had occurred, but he claimed that only the white race, of which Adam was the father, had been made in God's image and likeness. Hoyle also suggested that Cain was the "mongrel offspring" of Eve's seduction by "an enticing Mongolian" with whom she had repeated trysts, thus laying the foundation for the white supremacist bio-theology which states that miscegenation is "an abomination". Blending contemporary evolutionary thinking with pre-Adamism, the Vanderbilt University theistic evolutionist and geologist Alexander Winchell argued in his 1878 tract, "Adamites and Preadamites", for the pre-Adamic origins of the human race, that Negroes were too racially inferior to be the descendants of the Biblical Adam.


title: Serpent seed

text: According to Professor Jon Schamber, Rev. Philip E. J. Monson began to separate from traditional British Israelism and develop Christian Identity Theology. During the 1920s, Monson published "Satan's Seat: The Enemy of Our Race" in which he adopted Carter's theory on the origin of the impure seedline and combined it with anti-Catholicism. Monson connected the work of the impure seedline to the activities of the Catholic Church and the Pope. Monson's ideas were popular among white supremacist organizations in the United States. Rev. Wesley A. Swift (1913–1970), a minister and a former recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, and a follower of Monson, accepted the serpent seed doctrine and Christian Identity Theology and was instrumental in promoting the teachings among white supremacists in the United States.


title: Serpent seed

text: Swift was a minister at the Angelus Temple, a church frequently visited by William Branham. Swift later separated and started a new church, Church of Jesus Christ - Christian, which was later renamed Aryan Nations by Swift's successor, Richard Girnt Butler. Swift ordained several ministers who helped him to spread the theology. His lieutenants who helped him to spread the serpent seed teaching included two Nazis, Oren Potito and Neuman Britton, and the prominent KKK leader Connie Lynch. Swift and his fellow white supremacists began to promote the doctrine even more heavily during the desegregation period of the 1950s and 1960s. According to Swift, the descendants of the serpent were "in violation of Divine law when they started to mutate species and mix races." The serpent seed teaching was used to justify racial segregation and the prohibition of interracial marriage.


title: Serpent seed

text: It was also during the desegregation period when William Branham (1909–1965) and Arnold Murray (1929–2014) first began to promote their versions of the serpent seed doctrine. Branham was the most successful promoter of the serpent seed doctrine, and his version of it was subsequently accepted by millions of his followers. During the desegregation era, a militant form of the doctrine was espoused, especially by Christian Identity groups, because its millennial teachings state that the pure race will wage a final battle with the evil descendants of the serpent in order to destroy them.


title: Serpent seed

text: Butler continued to promote the serpent seed doctrine throughout his life, and it continued to be prominently featured at annual Aryan Nations World Congress meetings into the 1980s and 1990s. Butler's teachings on the subject influenced the Christian Defense League, the American Nazi Party, the "Christian Vanguard", David Duke and modern KKK organizations.


title: Serpent seed

text: William M. Branham (1909–1965), a prominent American Pentecostal minister in the 1940s and 1950s who had links to the KKK, also promoted the serpent seed doctrine. Branham taught the belief that the serpent had sexual intercourse with Eve and their offspring was Cain. Branham also taught the belief that Cain's modern descendants were masquerading as educated people and scientists, along with the belief that Cain's descendants were "a big religious bunch of illegitimate bastard children" who comprised the majority of society's criminals. He believed that the serpent was the missing link between the chimpanzee and man, and he also speculated that the serpent was possibly a human-like giant. Branham believed that the serpent was transformed into a reptile after it was cursed by God.


title: Serpent seed

text: According to Steven Hassan, "Branham’s sermons lay the foundation to believe that black people are the inferior race." Branham used the term "hybrid" to describe anything he believed to be tainted by the serpent. Branham accused Eve of producing a "hybrid" race, and he provided a way to trace the hybrid line of the Serpent's Seed to Africans and Jews through Ham the biblical progenitor of the African peoples, King Ahab, Judas Iscariot, Roman Catholics, and the future Antichrist.


title: Serpent seed

text: Michael Barkun wrote that Branham was the most significant proponent of the racial teaching outside of the Christian Identity movement and directly influenced their theology. Branham's teachings on serpent seed was particularly significant to the development of Identity’s view of the Jews as the seed of the Devil through Cain. Branham's 1958 introduction of serpent seed teaching coincided with Wesley Swift's introduction of demonic origin of the Jews through the serpent the same year.


title: Serpent seed

text: Branham related a story in which he privately discussed the belief that blacks were descended from apes as early as 1929. Branham publicly hinted his belief in the serpent seed doctrine as early as 1953. He first began to teach serpent seed in 1958 at the height of racial unrest in the United States. Prof. Douglas Weaver believed that Branham may have become acquainted with the serpent seed doctrine through his Baptist roots. Branham was baptized and ordained at a First Pentecostal Baptist Church which was pastored by Roy Davis, a founding member and later Imperial Wizard of the second Ku Klux Klan. Branham may also have made contact with Kentucky churches which espoused Daniel Parker's two-seed doctrine. Professor Jon Schambers also reviewed Branham's serpent seed teachings and the role which he played in spreading the doctrine. Schambers also connected Branham's serpent seed doctrine to Russel Carter's teachings which were integrated into Christian Identity Theology and Daniel Parker's Two-Seed Theology. The CBC connected William Branham to the Ku Klux Klan during a 2017 investigation. Branham's embrace of the serpent seed doctrine alienated most of the members of his Pentecostal audience. According to Pearry Green, adherents of the broader Pentecostal movement consider Branham's version of the serpent seed doctrine repugnant and in their point of view, it was the "filthy doctrine ... that ruined his ministry." No other mainstream Christian group held a similar view; Branham was widely criticized for spreading the doctrine, but his followers view the doctrine as one of his greatest revelations.


title: Serpent seed

text: There are millions of adherents of William Branham's serpent seed teachings. Voice of God Recordings reported that about two million people subscribe to Branham's teachings through the William Branham Evangelical Association. His followers continue to promote the doctrine and as a result, they have made international news for their racial views in connection to the teaching. According to Weaver, Branham's followers are very proud of his serpent seed teaching, believing it to be "his most original revelation". Many of his followers are unaware of the doctrine's true origin. When confronted with the accusations of racism, some of his followers have denied the teaching of serpent seed has any connection to white supremacy or racism. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "Not all Branham churches are racist or embrace the anti-race-mixing position," "but the theology clearly invites racism."


title: Serpent seed

text: In 2014, Pastor Donny Reagan made news in the United States for promoting Branham's racial teachings. Several news outlets labeled Reagan as the "most racist pastor in America." Kacou Philippe, a leader of Branham's followers in Africa, was arrested in 2017 for hate speech and sentenced to one year prison after preaching in multiple African nations that blacks should be submissive towards whites. Philippe insisted decolonization of Africa was a sin, and that Africans could only prosper when in servitude to Europeans.


title: Serpent seed

text: Televangelist Arnold Murray (1929–2014), founder of The Shepherd's Chapel and a prominent televangelist, taught the serpent seed doctrine. He accepted the belief that the Jews (Kingdom of Judah) were descended from Adam through Seth, as the Bible describes. However, he held the view that the Kenites were the offspring of Cain. He also believed that they infiltrated the northern Kingdom of Israel. Murray's teachings are disputed by Protestant apologetics ministries CARM and the CRI.


title: Serpent seed

text: According to Southern Poverty Law, Murray was ordained a minister in 1958 by Roy Gillaspie and Kenneth Goff, two members of the KKK and early preachers of Christian Identity. Until at least 1978, Murray served as a leader in Gillaspie's Church of Jesus Christ organization, which had been founded by Wesley Swift. Murray was also connected to Goff's Soldiers of the Cross Training Institute where Christian Identity was taught. Dan Gayman, the most prominent Christian Identity Leader in the 1980s, attended the institute.


title: Serpent seed

text: Explaining his beliefs in a 1979 Shepherd's Bible, Murray explained that the Kenites were serpent's offspring who "slipped in among the Jewish people in Jerusalem and claim to be God's chosen people, when in fact they are of Lucifer." Connecting the Kennites to the modern Jewish people, Murray explained that "in 1967 … Jerusalem fell to the Kenites during the 6 day war". In another sermon, Murray said that the Kenites "are responsible for the slaying of Christ." Although his teachings portrayed Jews as descendants of Lucifer, Murray insisted that his beliefs were not anti-semitic.


title: Serpent seed

text: Adherents of the white supremacist theology which is known as two-seedline Christian Identity do not believe that the Jews are the chosen people of God because in their view, only white people are the descendants of Adam and hence the chosen people of God. According to their belief, members of all other races are descended from Cain and are thus descended from Satan, especially Jews and Blacks. This belief was popularized by Wesley A. Swift (Church of Jesus Christ–Christian), Conrad Gaard, Dan Gayman (Church of Israel) and William Potter Gale among others. The opposing faction is called One-Seedline Christian Identity because its adherents hold the view that all people are descended from Adam, but they believe that only Aryans (meaning Northern Europeans) are God's chosen people. Christian Identity followers "believe that they are in or are about to enter into the time of the Tribulation, a great battle between good and evil in which they will take part."


title: Serpent seed

text: Groups which adhere to Christian Identity theology include Aryan Nations, the Christian Defense League, and the Ku Klux Klan. In 2000, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimated that there were 50,000 adherents of Christian Identity theology in the United States.


title: Serpent seed

text: The Unification Church has taught a version of the serpent seed doctrine since at least 1961. Sun Myung Moon taught that the Fall of Man occurred when Eve was sexually seduced by Satan, and since then, the human bloodline has been contaminated. Moon believed that both Cain and Abel were physically descended from Adam and Eve, but taught that "Cain is in the position of Satan's son". Moon referred to secular society and religious people outside of the Unification Church as "Cain people". Members of the Unification Church believe that through their Holy Marriage Blessing Ceremony, married couples are removed from the lineage of Adam and Eve and grafted into God's sinless lineage as the adopted children of their new Adam: Sun Myung Moon. The first of these ceremonies occurred in 1961.


title: Serpent seed

text: In "World Scripture" the Unification Church uses excerpts from the "Koran", the "Midrash Rabbah", the "Bahir", the "Stromata" and Sigmund Freud to support their interpretation. Moon attended many different Christian churches during the 1930s and 1940s in both Korea and Japan, and was exposed to British missionaries and Pentecostals. He may have been exposed to seedline teachings during this period.


title: Serpent seed

text: P'ikareum is a related ritual which is performed by members of several Korean new religious movements, in which a female devotee has sex with the male leader (who claims to be the messiah) in order to purify her descendants from inherited sin. The purpose of this ritual is to undo the original sin, which (as in the classic serpent seed doctrine) was believed to have been committed when Eve had sex with the serpent. British religious scholar George Chryssides also noted that there were cases in which the messianic leader was a female and the neophyte was a male. The person who is so initiated will then have intercourse with his or her spouse, and the purity which is acquired from the messianic leader will be transmitted to both the spouse and the spouse's progeny. The most notable Korean new religious movement to have faced allegations of performing p'ikareum is the early Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon; however, Chryssides notes that, aside from the use of language which involves the purifying of sinful bloodlines, there is no actual evidence that this ritual occurs within the Unification movement.


title: Serpent seed

text: Ideas which are similar to the serpent seed doctrine have also been embraced by some believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory. An example of this is the case of Matthew Taylor Coleman, a California surfing instructor who said that he killed his two young children with a spear fishing gun because he believed that they had inherited “serpent DNA” from their mother and would eventually turn into monsters.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: The Wrecking Crew is a 1968 American spy comedy film directed by Phil Karlson and starring Dean Martin as Matt Helm, along with Elke Sommer, Sharon Tate, Nancy Kwan, Nigel Green, and Tina Louise. It is the fourth and final film in the Matt Helm series, and is loosely based on the 1960 novel of the same name by Donald Hamilton. The film opened in Canada in December 1968 before premiering in the United States in February 1969.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: It was Tate's last film released before her death in 1969. It was also the Hollywood film debut for two future action movie stars: Bruce Lee, who worked behind the scenes as an action choreographer, and Chuck Norris, who made his film debut in a small role.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: Matt Helm is assigned by his secret agency, ICE, to bring down an evil count named Contini, who is trying to collapse the world economy by stealing a billion dollars in gold. Helm travels to Copenhagen, where he is given a guide, Freya Carlson, a beautiful but bumbling woman from a Danish tourism bureau.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: A pair of Contini's accomplices, the seductive Linka Karensky and Wen Yurang, each attempt to foil Helm's plans. The former is killed in an ambush intended for Helm, the latter in an explosion. On each occasion, Freya's clumsy attempts to assist Matt are helpful, but not particularly appreciated.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: McDonald, his chief at ICE, turns up to aid Helm, but is wounded in action. McDonald confides to Helm that the seemingly inept Freya is actually a top-secret British agent herself, using a clever guise. They go to Contini's chateau for a showdown, and Helm creates chaos and destruction with a variety of unique gadgets. Contini escapes with the gold on a train bound for Luxembourg, but Helm and Freya are able to catch up to him in a minihelicopter. Freya is almost killed by Contini, but Helm rescues her, then kills Contini by throwing him through a trap door onto the railroad tracks. Successful and alone at last, Helm finally has an opportunity to thank an appreciative Freya as only he can.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: The film featured a number of wrestlers, boxers, and karate experts in small or uncredited roles, including Wilhelm von Homburg, Pepper Martin, Joe Gray, Joe Lewis, Ed Parker and – in his first screen role – Chuck Norris (background player in the House of 7 Joys scene). Bruce Lee does not appear in the film, but receives a production credit as "Karate advisor" (action choreographer) for the fight scenes.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: The film is the first in the series to not be written or co-written by regular screenwriter Herbert Baker, who was working on Irving Allen's more serious spy film "Hammerhead". The screenplay was written by former police reporter and crime novel author William P. McGivern.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: Helm's chief at ICE, MacDonald, is played by John Larch in this film, replacing James Gregory, who played the role in the other three films. Gregory said in an interview in "Filmfax" magazine that he was sent a reduced amount for his fee in the film. He was told that the film was reducing its budget, and Gregory refused to take the lower fee.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: "The Wrecking Crew" is the only film in the series not to feature Helm's secretary, Lovey Kravesit, played by Beverly Adams, who was also appearing in "Hammerhead". It is also the only movie in the series not to feature the villainous group BIG O.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: Principal photography took place in California, with locations including Palm Springs, Idyllwild, and the Walt Disney Ranch.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: Hugo Montenegro who wrote the score for "The Ambushers" returned to compose the score. Mack David and Frank DeVol wrote the theme song played over the opening and end credits, "House of Seven Joys", which was the working title of the film.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: The film ends with the announcement of a fifth Matt Helm film, "The Ravagers" (which would have been based upon Hamilton's 1964 novel of the same title). However, Martin declined to return for another film in despair over the murder of Tate six months after the film's release. When Martin refused to make "The Ravagers," Columbia held up Martin's share of the profits on the second Matt Helm film, "Murderers' Row". The project was then cancelled.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: Several years later, a "Matt Helm" TV series featuring Tony Franciosa was attempted, with Helm now a private detective.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: "The Wrecking Crew" was Sharon Tate's last film released before her death in 1969. It was also the Hollywood film debut for two future action movie stars: Bruce Lee, who worked behind the scenes as an action choreographer, and Chuck Norris, who made his film debut in a small role.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: In 2019, the film is referenced and briefly seen in Quentin Tarantino's film "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood", in which Tate (played by Margot Robbie) is shown enjoying the film at the Fox Bruin Theater.


title: The Wrecking Crew (1968 film)

text: The first name of Nancy Kwan's character is Yurang. The real Yu Rang was a chinese assassin during the Spring and Autumn period.


title: LGBT culture in the Philippines

text: The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people in the Philippines have a distinctive culture in society and also have limited legal rights. Gays and lesbians are more so tolerated than accepted in Filipino society. Despite recent events that have promoted the rights, general acceptance, and empowerment of the Filipino LGBT community, discrimination remains. Homosexuals in the Philippines are known as ""bakla"", though there exist other terms to describe them. According to the 2002 Young Adult Fertility and Sexuality Survey, 11 percent of sexually active Filipinos between the ages of 15 and 24 have had sex with someone of the same sex. According to Filipino poet and critic Lilia Quindoza Santiago, Filipino culture may have a more flexible concept of gender; "kasarian" (Tagalog for "gender") is defined in less binary terms than the English word; "kasarian" means "kind, species, or genus".


title: LGBT culture in the Philippines

text: Gender crossing practices go back to the history of pre-colonial communities in the Philippines. The babaylans are typically female spiritual leaders, priests or shamans, in native communities, whose position can also be taken by males who crossed genders, and were called "asog", among many names. Effeminate people, together with the weak, were handled gently during raids. According to J. Neil C. Garcia, the feminized men were similar to women in almost all aspects, except for childbearing.


title: LGBT culture in the Philippines

text: Movements to promote the acceptance of the gays in Philippine society include, but are not limited to the establishment of the Home of the Golden Gays by Justo Justo, the 1980 Women's Movement which focused on the lesbian struggle of Filipinas, the formation of The Lesbian Collective which was the first formal lesbian organization in the country, the organization of the first LGBT Pride March in Asia and the Pacific on 26 June 1994 by Pro-Gay Philippines and Metropolitan Community Church Manila. The 1994 Pride March was organized in connection to the 25th commemoration of Stonewall Uprising in New York in 1969. Notable organizers were Murphy Red and Rev. Fr. Richard Mickley, then an MCC clergy and now retired. There are however, other individuals and groups who believes that the first pride march in the Philippines was in 1996. Beyond this, there have been numerous efforts to spread awareness of the LGBT. The community has become generally accepted in society, and have continued to initiate efforts that move for the greater acceptance, protection, and empowerment of its members.


title: LGBT culture in the Philippines

text: Prior to colonization, the Philippines was a polytheistic nation with several tribes worshipping different deities. Those mythologies included transgender gods like Lakapati (or Ikapati), the goddess of fertility and good harvest, who was described as an androgynous, intersex, or transgender goddess. Lakapati is a hermaphrodite and a major fertility deity in the Tagalog mythology. Her prowess on fertility covers not only human and divine fertility, but also the fertility of all other things such as wildlife, crops, trees, and plants. She is also the goddess of cultivated land. A prayer dedicated to Lakapati was recited by children when sowing seeds: "Lakapati, pakanin mo yaring alipin mo; huwag mong gutumin (Lakapati, feed this thy slave; let him not hunger)".