The Cosmic Serpent (20 page)

Biologists thought they had found the truth, and they did not hesitate to call it “dogma.” Strangely, their newfound conviction was hardly troubled by the discovery in the 1960s of a genetic code that is the same for all living beings and that bears striking similarities to human coding systems, or languages. To transmit information, the genetic code uses elements (A, G, C, and T) that are meaningless individually, but that form units of significance when combined, in the same way that letters make up words. The genetic code contains 64 three-letter “words,” all of which have meaning, including two punctuation marks.

As linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out, such coding systems were considered up until the discovery of the genetic code as “exclusively human phenomena”
⁴
—that is, phenomena that require the presence of an intelligence to exist.

 

WHEN I STARTED READING the literature of molecular biology, I was stunned by certain descriptions. Admittedly, I was on the lookout for anything unusual, as my investigation had led me to consider that DNA and its cellular machinery truly were an extremely sophisticated technology of cosmic origin. But as I pored over thousands of pages of biological texts, I discovered a world of science fiction that seemed to confirm my hypothesis. Proteins and enzymes were described as “miniature robots,” ribosomes were “molecular computers,” cells were “factories,” DNA itself was a “text,” a “program,” a “language,” or “data.” One only had to do a literal reading of contemporary biology to reach shattering conclusions; yet most authors display a total lack of astonishment and seem to consider that life is merely “a normal physicochemical phenomenon.”
⁵

One of the facts that troubled me most was the astronomical length of the DNA contained in a human body: 125 billion miles. There, I thought, is the Ashaninca's sky-rope: It is inside us and is certainly long enough to connect earth and heaven. What did biologists make of this cosmic number? Most of them did not even mention it, and those who did talked of a “useless but amusing fact.”

I was also troubled by the certitude exhibited by most biologists in the face of the profoundly mysterious reality they were describing. After all, the spectacular accomplishments of molecular biology during the second half of the twentieth century had led to more questions than answers. This is an old problem: Knowledge calls for more knowledge, or, as Jean Piaget wrote, “The most developed science remains a continual becoming.”
⁶
Yet few biological texts discuss the unknown.

Take proteins, for instance. These long chains of amino acids, strung together in the order specified by DNA, accomplish almost all the essential tasks in cells. They catch molecules and build them into cellular structures or take them apart to extract their energy. They carry atoms to precise places inside or outside the cell. They act as pumps or motors. They form receptors that trap highly specific molecules or antennae that conduct electrical charges. Like versatile marionettes, or jacks-of-all-trades, they twist, fold, and stretch into the shape their task requires. What is known, precisely, about these “self-assembling machines”? According to Alwyn Scott, a mathematician with an interest in molecular biology: “Biologists' understanding of how proteins function is a lot like your and my understanding of how a car works. We know you put in gas, and the gas is burned to make things turn, but the details are all pretty vague.”
⁷

Enzymes are large proteins that accelerate cellular activities. They act with disarming speed and selectivity. One enzyme in human blood, carbonic anhydrase, can assemble single-handedly over a half million molecules of carbonic acid per second. The enzymes which both repair the double helix in case of damage and correct any errors in the DNA replication process make only one mistake every ten billion letters. Enzymes read the DNA text, transcribe it into RNA, edit out the non-coding passages, splice together the final message, construct the machines that read the instructions and build . . . other enzymes. What is known, precisely, about these “molecular automata”? According to biologists Chris Calladine and Horace Drew: “These enzymes are extremely efficient in doing their job, yet no one knows exactly how they work.”
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Shamans say the correct way to talk about spirits is in metaphors. Biologists confirm this notion by using a precise array of anthropocentric and technological metaphors to describe DNA, proteins, and enzymes. DNA is a
text,
or a
program,
or
data,
containing
information,
which is
read
and
transcribed
into
messenger
-RNAs. The latter feed into ribosomes, which are
molecular computers
that
translate
the
instructions
according to the genetic
code
. They
build
the rest of the cell's
machinery,
namely the proteins and enzymes, which are
miniaturized robots
that construct and maintain the cell.

Over the course of my readings, I constantly wondered how nature could be devoid of intention if it truly corresponded to the descriptions biologists made of it.

One only had to consider the “dance of the chromosomes” to see DNA
move
in a deliberate way. During cell division, chromosomes double themselves and assemble by pairs. The two sets of chromosomes then line up along the middle of the cell and migrate toward their respective pole, each member of each pair always going in the direction opposite to its companion's. How could this “amazing, stately pavane”
⁹
occur without some form of intention?

In biology, this question is simply not asked. DNA is “just a chemical,”
¹⁰
deoxyribonucleic acid, to be precise. Biologists describe it as both a molecule and a language, making it the informational substance of life, but they do not consider it to be conscious, or alive, because chemicals are inert by definition.

How, I wondered, could biology presuppose that DNA is not conscious, if it does not even understand the human brain, which is the seat of our own consciousness and which is built according to the instructions in our DNA? How could nature not be conscious if our own consciousness is produced by nature?
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As I patrolled the texts of biology, I discovered that the natural world was teeming with examples of behaviors that seem to require
forethought
. Some crows manufacture tools with standardized hooks and toothed probes to help in their search for insects hidden in holes. Some chimpanzees, when infected with intestinal parasites, eat bitter, foul-tasting plants, which they otherwise avoid and which contain biologically active compounds that kill intestinal parasites. Some species of ants, with brains the size of a grain of sugar, raise herds of aphids which they milk for their sweet secretions and which they keep in barns. Other ants have been cultivating mushrooms as their exclusive food for fifty million years.
¹²
It is difficult to understand how these insects could do this without a form of consciousness. Yet scientific observers deny them this faculty, like Jacques Monod, who considers the behavior of bees to be “automatic”: “We know the hive is ‘artificial' in so far as it represents the product of the activity of the bees. But we have good reasons for thinking that this activity is strictly automatic—immediate, but not consciously planned.”
¹³

Indeed, the “postulate of objectivity” prevents its practitioners from recognizing any intentionality in nature or, rather, it nullifies their claim to science if they do so.

 

DURING THIS INVESTIGATION, I became familiar with certain limits of the rational gaze: It tends to fragment reality and to exclude complementarity and the association of contraries from its field of vision. I also discovered one of its more pernicious effects: The rational approach tends to minimize what it does not understand.

Anthropology is an ideal training ground for learning this. The first anthropologists went out beyond the limits of the rational world and saw
primitives
and
inferior
societies. When they met shamans, they thought they were
mentally ill
.

The rational approach starts from the idea that everything is explainable and that mystery is in some sense the enemy. This means that it prefers pejorative, and even wrong, answers to admitting its own lack of understanding.

The molecular biology that considers that 97 percent of the DNA in our body is “junk” reveals not only its degree of ignorance, but the extent to which it is prepared to belittle the unknown. Some recent hypotheses suggest that “junk DNA” might have certain functions after all.
¹⁴
But this does not hide the pejorative reflex: We don't understand, so we shoot first, then ask questions. This is cowboy science, and it is not as objective as it claims. Neutrality, or simple honesty, would have consisted in saying “for the moment, we do not know.” It would have been just as easy to call it
mystery
DNA, for instance.

The problem is not having presuppositions, but failing to make them explicit. If biology said about the intentionality that nature seems to manifest at all levels, “we see it sometimes, but cannot discuss it without ceasing to do science according to our own criteria,” things would at least be clear. But biology tends to project its presuppositions onto the reality it observes, claiming that nature itself is devoid of intention.

This is perhaps one of the most important things I learned during this investigation: We see what we believe, and not just the contrary; and to change what we see, it is sometimes necessary to change what we believe.

 

AT FIRST I THOUGHT I was the only one to realize that biology had limits similar to those of scientific anthropology and that it, too, was a “self-flattering imposture,” which treats the living as if it were inert. Then I discovered that there were all sorts of people within the scientific community who were already discussing biology's fundamental contradictions.

During the 1980s, it became possible to determine the exact sequence of amino acids in given proteins. This revealed a new level of complexity in living beings. A single nicotinic receptor, forming a highly specific lock coupled to an equally selective channel, is made of five juxtaposed protein chains that contain a total of 2,500 amino acids lined up in the right order. Despite the improbability of the chance emergence of such a structure, even nematodes, which are among the most simple multicellular invertebrates, have nicotinic receptors.
¹⁵

Confronted by this kind of complexity, some researchers no longer content themselves with the usual explanation. Robert Wesson writes in his book
Beyond natural selection:
“No simple theory can cope with the enormous complexity revealed by modern genetics.”
¹⁶

Other researchers have pointed out the improbability of the mechanism that is supposed to be the source of variation—namely, the accumulation of errors in the genetic text. It seems obvious that “a message would quickly lose all meaning if its contents changed continuously in an anarchic fashion.”
¹⁷
How, then, could such a process lead to the prodigies of the natural world, of which we are a part?

Another fundamental problem contradicts the theory of chance-driven natural selection. According to the theory, species should evolve slowly and gradually, since evolution is caused by the accumulation and selection of random errors in the genetic text. However, the fossil record reveals a completely different scenario. J. Madeleine Nash writes in her review of recent research in paleontology: “Until about 600 million years ago, there were no organisms more complex than bacteria, multicelled algae and single-celled plankton.... Then, 543 million years ago, in the early Cambrian, within the span of no more than 10 million years, creatures with teeth and tentacles and claws and jaws materialized with the suddenness of apparitions. In a burst of creativity like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole of the animal kingdom.... Since 1987, discoveries of major fossil beds in Greenland, in China, in Siberia, and now in Namibia have shown that the period of biological innovation occurred at virtually the same instant in geological time all around the world.... Now, . . . virtually everyone agrees that the Cambrian started almost exactly 543 million years ago and, even more startling, that all but one of the phyla in the fossil record appeared within the first 5 to 10 million years.”
¹⁸

Throughout the fossil record, species seem to appear suddenly, fully formed and equipped with all sorts of specialized organs, then remain stable for millions of years. For instance, there is no intermediate form between the terrestrial ancestor of the whale and the first fossils of this marine mammal. Like their current descendants, the latter have nostrils situated atop their heads, a modified respiratory system, new organs like a dorsal fin, and nipples surrounded by a cap to keep out seawater and equipped with a pump for underwater suckling.
¹⁹
The whale represents the rule, rather than the exception. According to biologist Ernst Mayr, an authority on the matter of evolution, there is “no clear evidence for any change of a species into a different genus or for the gradual origin of an evolutionary novelty.”
²⁰

A similar problem exists at the cellular level. Microbiologist James Shapiro writes: “In fact, there are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations. It is remarkable that Darwinism is accepted as a satisfactory explanation for such a vast subject—evolution—with so little rigorous examination of how well its basic theses work in illuminating specific instances of biological adaptation or diversity.”
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