On a daily basis, readers flock to Naked Villainy hoping that your humble Smallholder will post another entry in his continuing series on the art of cattle breeding.

It has recently come to my attention that all of my work in finding a perfect mate for Bonnie has been in vain. The existing characteristics of the father don’t matter:

Like Galileo, I have been stubbornly resisting the literal truth of the Bible. Luckily, William Bennetta has performed the role of the Inquisition and set me straight:

“The central doctrine of biblical genetics is that the colors and patterns shown by animals are determined by what the animals’ parents happen to see while they are mating. This notion is set forth in chapter 30 of the Book of Genesis, in a tale about the patriarch Jacob. First, Jacob makes a deal by which he will get, as his wages, all the brown sheep and all the spotted or speckled goats that may be born into flocks owned by Laban. Then he undertakes to ensure that Laban’s strongest animals will produce an abundance of brown, spotted or speckled offspring:

And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chestnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods.
And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink.

And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled and spotted.

And Jacob did separate the lambs, and set the faces of the flocks the ringstraked, and all the brown in the flock of Laban; and he put his own flocks by themselves, and put them not unto Laban’s cattle.

And it came to pass, whensoever the stronger cattle did conceive, that Jacob laid the rods before the eyes of the cattle in the gutters, that they might conceive among the ods.

But when the cattle were feeble, he put them not in; so the feebler were Laban’s, and the stronger Jacob’s.

In promoting biblical genetics as a substitute for scientific genetics, fundamentalists could note that biblical genetics offers big advantages. First, it is cozy: Even if it doesn’t agree with what we see in nature, it agrees with a sort of ignorant intuition. Next, biblical genetics is simple: It involves no mathematics, and it require us to master only three unfamiliar terms — pilled, strakes and ringstraked. Best of all, it is easy to apply. Individuals schooled in biblical genetics would not have to analyze pedigrees, conduct tedious selective-breeding projects, search for the mechanisms of inherited diseases, or learn delicate genetic-engineering techniques. They would just have to set up some properly pilled rods.

To persons who imagine that they can learn about nature by rejecting evidence and reason in favor of ancient tribal tales, biblical genetics will certainly look like great stuff. I commend it to the fundamentalists’ attention. “