6—
The Memory of Nature
The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs.
—Heraclitus
Long before its lord was recognized to be Apollo, Delphi on the southern slopes of Mount Parnassus had been the site of a pre-Hellenic, chthonic deity. It is thus difficult to know whether Heraclitus, in the above quote, meant that mysterious underground forces or the god of light and reason speaks in signs. But it is easy enough to realize that it is the Apollonian voice that speaks in us when we consider questions such as this, which presume that there must be a clear-cut difference, rather than a necessary relationship, between opposites. Metamorphic mythologies, by contrast, usually show the whole world as a close texture of signs in which human desire and fate can be read—and into which specific human desires and fates are continually being written.
If a windflower arouses in us a vague yet undeniable response, a myth explains that we are in a sense recalling, and so feeling, the fate of Adonis whose blood blossomed in the anemone. Myths of metamorphosis are thus not only first drafts of a general evolutionary theory of life, they provide an explanation of why we feel anything for a flower, a shell, or a star. The apparent naiveté of myths conceals an unconscious recognition that the world is, as Baudelaire recognized, a vast system of correspondences wherein we discover aspects of our own mind. Just as the mind finds expression in a meadow, a seashore, or the sky, so too a flower, a shell, and a star find expression in the human mind. The mythic sign always reveals a human face.
Since Sir Francis Bacon and Descartes, modern science has defined itself in opposition to mythology, seeking to discipline and reduce the metaphoric nature of signs, and aspiring to achieve an unequivocal description of what the world is. Science thus has turned away from the mythic insight that all acts of perception are metamorphic. Where mythologies constantly narrate the desires, conflicts, deaths, births, and metamorphoses of men and women in a world of clouds, rivers, trees, birds, and seas, scientific narratives concern "movement," "development," "behavior," and "formation"; "matter," "organisms," "environments," and "species." This scientific scheme of generic entities is no less mythological, but it has become "reality"—which is to say, it has become unequivocal and inescapable, our modern fate.
Thus the molecular model of DNA first constructed at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory in 1953 has become, like the model of the atom constructed by Niels Bohr, one of the central emblems of modern science, as well as a charmed image of what a human being fundamentally is. The double helix and the atomic model based on the solar system, like devices taken from a medieval alchemical treatise, have both descriptive and symbolic aspects. A microcosm superimposed upon a macrocosm, the atomic model hints at nuclear apocalypse, while the double helix suggests the spiral staircase of evolution, the elegant and symmetrical attraction which transforms nonliving elements into the rudiments of life.
The archetypal character of these two scientific developments derives from an ancient tradition of interpreting and reducing nature to first principles, mythic emblems, and powerful formulae. E=mc2 , the atomic model, the double helix have entered into the iconography of the age because they draw upon these prescientific means of understanding nature by putting in its place a kind of charmed model or double. The making of models, the telling of stories, and the mathematical expression of the intrinsic relations between human numbers are all responses to this fundamental need to understand nature by reducing it to an image.
Of course scientists maintain that their actions, however brilliant and laborious, do nothing other than reveal or unveil
the structure of reality. Like a hero from myth going in quest of a fleece, a grail, or a ring that will bring life to his dying kingdom, the scientist is often imagined (by himself and others) as one whose intellectual and experimental activities recover only what has been lost or obscured by the ages and the contingencies of material form. As Heraclitus is reputed to have said, nature loves to hide. And genetic scientists like Jacques Monod and Richard Dawkins have, rather immodestly, claimed that the grand drama of human evolution, beginning with the first nucleic acids and recently culminating in man, arrives at its climax when scientists like themselves discover the nucleic acid—and thus the "secret of life."
In a myth, this recovery of a lost object or emblem would be followed by the return of vitality to the land: once the knight has returned with the grail, the Fisher-King's mysterious wound heals and the wasteland blooms. The genetic myth offers its own, characteristically technological, redemption: genetic engineering. Where earlier myths naively indicated that the recovery of a lost object, symbolic of our native inheritance from a universe which is whole and alive, could in itself redeem man's wasted life, Richard Dawkins explains that the discovery of the molecular component of the gene will allow people to engineer their own redemption. "Let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something which no other species has ever aspired to."[1] Like one of the early Gnostics, Dawkins believes that creation itself was the fall to which we are all heir. Salvation, then, may simply be a matter of cloning those traits which a fallen nature has failed to encourage.
Genetic engineering may be a novel technical response to nature, but it follows in a tradition that leads back to the Book of Genesis. Here, as in other things, modern science has adopted the Judeo-Christian assumption that nature is a representation, a manifestation of a fundamental word, code, model, or software. Since nature is essentially the representation of an informing principle, to "know" nature is also to
possess the means to control it. Here, as in the sexual aspect of imperialism, knowledge is a controlling, patriarchal force which must penetrate, inform, and reform a passive or feminine nature. Like missionaries who studied Chinese or Urdu in order to convert "natives" to Christianity, DNA researchers have from the beginning planned the improvement of nature. To understand nature, one has first to locate its fundamental and irreducible component, DNA (or the Word), and then work to transform it.
The God of Genesis brings order to the world through speech: from light to humanity, creation is but the unfolding of divine words. But within nature, another kind of ordering word is created: "'Let the earth produce fresh growth, let there be on the earth plants bearing seed, fruit-trees bearing fruit each with seed according to its kind.' So it was; the earth yielded fresh growth, plants bearing seed according to its kind" (1.9–12). The animal world is likewise enjoined to be "fruitful and multiply" according to the metaphor of the vegetable world. Seeds and generation carry forward the original creation by containing God's words. Within this context of metaphysical and physical creation, human beings are inserted:
"Let us make man in our image [tselem ] and likeness [demut ] to rule the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all wild animals on earth and all reptiles that crawl upon the earth." So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, and every living thing that moves upon the earth." And God said, "I give you all plants that bear seed everywhere on earth, and every tree bearing fruit which yields seed: they shall be yours for food."
(1.27–30)
Master of the world created by God's words, Adam is himself both "image" (Heb. tselem , a formal representation such as a statue or icon) and "likeness" (demut , a general resemblance) of God, both an analog and a digital representation.
The fall of Adam and Eve could be seen, then, as the cor-
ruption of this originative, divine speech: God's images, God's likenesses, somehow are drawn away from their own assigned place in creation by the enticing and false words of the serpent. The Fall means that these two images are thrown out of the garden of ideal resemblance into the sweating and imperfect realm of history. The first sin was, then, a crime against the word of God, but it is not until book 11 of Genesis that this becomes explicit and language itself falls:
Once upon a time all the world spoke a single language and used all the same words. As men journeyed in the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and bake them hard"; they used bricks for stone and bitumen for mortar. "Come," they said, "let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and make a name for ourselves; or we shall be dispersed over the earth."
(11. 1–5)
Like Adam and Eve, the citizens of Babel aspire beyond their fallen state and hope that a city and a tower will inscribe their identity in so visible a fashion that their name will not be lost. But the Lord God, hearing this blasphemy, decides to punish his creatures yet again for their impertinence by confusing their language and scattering them across the earth.
If we are to understand, even at the most naive level, God's actions in this episode, we must admit that He is worried that human beings have not yet become aware that there can be but one modular, paradigmatic—one divine —language in creation. When the Judaic version of divine relations began to penetrate the European world after the triumph of Christ, it was this lesson that led to the construction of medieval Scholasticism in Latin: only by maintaining the language of pagan Rome could the Church remain Catholic and its doctrines and theology consistent.
Thus even before the coming of modern science and mathematics, the presumption that the world could be known according to the terms of a word, a command, and a law was firmly established in Europe. When Isaac Newton began to transcribe the distant God of Genesis into the watchmaker who
made the world and abandoned it, he substituted "Laws" concerning the mechanics and dynamics of nature for the Scriptures. It was in this spirit that Alexander Pope composed his epitaph intended for Sir Isaac Newton and compared him to the light God created on the first day. "Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night / God said, 'Let Newton be!' and all was light." Mathematics was entrusted with the new laws of nature, and it in turn was entrusted to a new clerisy of mathematicians and physicists. Leibniz, having invented calculus (as did Newton), foresaw the shortcomings of mathematics for all but technical problems and proposed the creation of a language of Chinese-like ideograms that could become a universal language. "We have the option of fixing significations, at least in some learned language, and of agreeing on them, so as to pull down this Tower of Babel" which the European disciplines had become.[2] Such a "Universal Symbolism" was never achieved and in its place the language of mathematics became the de facto universal symbolism of the European sciences.
Contemporary with the beginnings of modern science in the Renaissance was another, and less successful, search for the original or fundamental language of nature. Jacob Boehme claimed that a lingua adamica could be recovered through what might be defined as etymological alchemy. Within all languages a devoted adept could, with the aid of interpretative devices and mystical insight, discover the original Hebrew spoken by Adam when he named the animals. The truth of Genesis could be found even in the language of the pagans, and in this way their own mythological and religious scriptures preserved the ore of divine truth.[3]
The mystical and scholarly quests for a lingua adamica were motivated by the basic mythic assumption that truth and wholeness are the fundamental qualities of life and that man's salvation requires that he recognize his divine birthright. The scientific and mathematical researches which led to modern physics and molecular biology assumed only that the truth of nature was to be found in the most irreducible of elements and the most irreducible expressions of those elements. Despite their enormous successes, nuclear physicists produced a
strangely contradictory commentary on the scientific project which began with Newton: their technical achievements were obvious enough, but their intellectual and philosophic results did not tally at all with the materialist presumptions of science. Instead of advancing the classical idea of the cumulative nature of knowledge, the inventors of quantum physics questioned the epistemological foundations of science.
These events meant that the research into the molecular structure of DNA would carry on the highest—which is to say the most reductive—aspirations of science. Long before James D. Watson and Francis Crick had completed their famous model, it was already determined that the genetic material in cells must contain the "secret" or "code" or "language" of life.[4] Rejecting the idea that all human forms are encapsulated within the sexual element of their predecessors, Charles Darwin had posited the existence of "gemmules" whose combination provided the collective traits of the self-dividing embryo. The shift from the model of reproduction by analog to reproduction by digitalized bytes of information would have obvious appeal in the age of computers. Later students of the new science which Willam Bateson named "Genetics" worked on the potential structure of such "gemmules."[5] August Weissmann referred to "germ plasm," which performed the required reproductive function, but he insisted that each cell would require its own unique plasm if its development were to be properly guided.[6] By the 1940s scientists had decided that DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) was the prime carrier of genetic information. One of them, Oswald Avery, foresaw even then the possibility of controlling and modifying this molecule as a means of altering the development of organisms.[7]
In other words, before anything like actual empirical evidence for the "gene" in the guise of gemmules, germ plasm, chromosomes, or DNA had been gathered, scientists had determined what it must do and also what could be done with it. Perhaps the most significant of these actions was simply to define it, since a gene is a length of the DNA molecule associated, more or less, with a certain observable trait. In contrast with palpable and definitive cellular bodies, the gene is, then, an artifact which naturalizes socialized categories of classifi-
cation. The DNA molecule which formed the basis of the gene was constituted as the language of life even before its structure had been discovered. Not only was it thought to carry inherited characteristics, it was assumed to possess the information which guides the development of the embryo and the growth and functioning of the body. Evident in this speculation was a strangely reflexive logic. Once scientists had determined what the DNA must be and what it must do, they began to imagine how it could be changed to do something else—before even its rudimentary structure was known. Such thinking muted any doubts that DNA performed these functions. Scientific presumption was masked by praise for the "beauty" of the self-replicating molecule and the "miracle" that "life" could so competently employ the programming logic of the new sciences of computing, information, and artificial intelligence.
James D. Watson's best-selling account of his work with Francis Crick, The Double Helix , reveals how understanding the structure of DNA was as good as understanding "life itself." "Then DNA was a mystery, up for grabs, and no one was sure who would get it and whether he would deserve it if it proved as exciting as we semisecretly believed." Besides being a "mystery," DNA was also variously, Watson writes, a "Rosetta stone for unravelling the true secret of life," a "key" to understanding how parental traits are inherited, "the secret of the gene," "the key to the secret of life," and "the most golden of all molecules." Drawing on the traditions of Egyptology, cryptography, and conquest, Watson wonders who will "crack DNA," advises a colleague that "DNA could fall," and worries how to "win the DNA structure."
The interpretation of the meaning of DNA, quite apart from the complex and ingenious discovery of its structure, was guided by the melodramatic logic which required that the "mystery" of DNA would become, once it was described, the "key" to life. The more the molecule was styled a "secret" (held by whom? entrusted by whom? and for what purpose?) the more its structure would mean.[8] It was rather like believing that learning how bricks (or proteins) were produced was the same as knowing the art of architecture.
The classic article written by Watson and Crick in 1953 to
announce their discovery was free of the melodramatic imagery of gene sleuthing from Watson's later "personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA." Erwin Chargaff, one of the authorities cited in its notes, describes it this way:
The tone was certainly unusual: somehow oracular and imperious, almost decalogous. Difficulties, such as the even now [1973] not well-understood manner of unwinding the huge bihelical structures under the conditions of the living cell, were brushed aside, in a Mr. Fix-It spirit that was later to become so evident in our scientific literature. . . . I could see that this was the dawn of something new: a sort of normative biology that commanded nature to behave in accordance with the models.[9]
Chargaff saw in the article not only the dawn of a new age of model-building (which in the decades after World War II would also include structuralist linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, as well as the systemic or cybernetic theories of computing, biology, and society), but also the return of the idea of the scientist as patriarchal law-giver, a prerogative which modern physicists had to give up when they explored the subatomic realm.
In this spirit, molecular biology took up the standard of fundamental science by presuming that to understand the structure of what was thought to be fundamental was equivalent to understanding the whole. Thus Watson recalls the moment when he proposed the basic tenet of what is commonly called the "Central Dogma" of genetic microbiology: "On the wall above my desk I taped up a paper sheet saying DNA > RNA > protein. The arrows did not signify chemical transformations, but instead expressed the transfer of genetic information from the sequences of nucleotides in DNA molecules to the sequences of amino acids in proteins."[10] The Central Dogma maintains that this sequence is irreversible and that DNA is the source of all "information" leading to the construction of proteins—and thus to "life itself." The Mosaic nature of this thinking extended from the tone of the articles of Watson and Crick to the dictatorial role of DNA within the cell. A rather odd identification was established between this most golden of molecules and this most golden of new sciences:
molecular biology, it appeared, needed DNA almost as much as "life" did.
From such an advantageous position, molecular biologists began in subsequent decades to enjoy the authority which accrues to those who have sounded the mystery of life. Jacques Monod was able to draw something like an entire philosophy from his work with DNA and RNA. Where structuralists in other fields of French intellectual life turned their backs on existentialism, seeing it as an overly personal and unnecessary set of inferences, Monod directly linked his work on nucleic acids with perennial philosophic questions, even to the point of citing Camus's "The Myth of Sisyphus" as an epigraph. From his vantage point of scientific expertise, Monod explained the ramifications of molecular biology for the entire "project" of human evolution:
The origin and lineage of the whole biosphere are reflected in the ontogenesis of a functional protein. And the ultimate source of the project that living beings present, pursue, and accomplish is revealed in this message—in this neat, exact, but essentially indecipherable text formed by primary structure. Indecipherable, since before expressing the physiologically necessary function which it performs spontaneously, it discloses nothing in its structure other than the pure chance of its origin. But for us, this truly is the more profound meaning of this message which comes to us from the most distant reaches of time.[11]
Monod confuses the categories of his chosen field of study, molecular biology, with "the origin and lineage of the whole biosphere" and "the ultimate source of the project that living beings represent." Identifying what are considered the most elementary physical properties with philosophical or metaphysical principles such as "origin" and "source," Monod translates the technical study of acids, proteins, and enzymes into philosophic reflection. Monod is thus encouraged to claim that the "message" of molecular structure is both indecipherable and completely legible, because he has taken its opacity as an emblem for a world based on chance. Just in this way banal existentialism transforms the supposed "absurdity" of
existence, the "meaninglessness" of life, into a metaphysical revelation: "If he accepts this message in its full significance, man must at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings or his crimes." Once Monod has tied humanity and the whole of life to the "functional protein" at its "origin" in order to establish the authority of his philosophic reflections, he cuts that line. Not only does "man" lose his rapport with the living world, but Monod cuts himself loose from his own authority.
By contrast, Richard Dawkins's cheerful exposition of "selfish genes" would appear part of the brave new world of genetic transformations. Dawkins believes that his discipline has "solved" the "mystery" of man's existence. "We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator-molecules called DNA—but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of mechanisms to exploit."[12] The "mystery" of life proves not to have been very mysterious after all: it happens to be very much like advanced industrial culture. For Dawkins, there is no fundamental difference between a gene and a human being.
It is not at all surprising that this mystery should have been solved by Darwin and Wallace during the first half-century after the appearance of capitalist culture. Dawkins, it should be mentioned, is sensitive to this point, and chastizes those who confuse describing a phenomenon with endorsing it. Dawkins may protest that he is simply and objectively representing the activities of genes, but he also admits, necessarily, that his calling genes "selfish" is in effect a "thought experiment," a metaphor to illustrate the difficult-to-explain relationship between blind chance and iron necessity, the world of a "blind watchmaker." By his account, then, the selfish and competitive gene is a figure of speech, but one for which he has not had far to search. Once the complexities of the subject have been conveniently interpreted in this manner, confirmation of the thesis is no less difficult to find: one has only to drive a car in urban traffic to recognize its supposed truth.
Scientists talk about "doing science," because they recognize that science is, strictly speaking, a highly controlled activity in which certain results are obtained. Interpreting such findings cannot, however, become a subject for scientific reflection. Those findings can either encourage other experiments which may in turn influence the way other experiments are conducted, or they may lead to certain technical products. The advantage of technical applications is obvious: if one can produce a marketable product, thinking about it is not necessary. Thinking about the findings is left to those willing to illustrate and make accessible difficult procedures and often unarticulated assumptions, or to the eminent and reflective elder scientist who has given up active research. In both cases, it is no longer "science." This is not to say that hard-working scientists who do not indulge in such activities can avoid these problems: it is simply easier to act as if they do not exist.
Watson, Monod, and Dawkins all share the basically Judeo-Christian-Cartesian notion that nature is an enormous artifact governed by some privileged and internalized program: the God of Genesis, the res cogitans of Descartes, the code of Watson, the message of Monod, and the gene of Dawkins are all part of the same heritage. And in the sociobiology imagined by E. O. Wilson, even original sin, in the guise of various antisocial genes, has been revived. Despite the dramatic emergence of modern science from the domination of the Church, there are fewer differences in the way each envisions nature than one might think. Jean Baudrillard, the French social theorist and critic of structuralism, has pointed out the ways in which the conceptualization and reception of DNA was governed by such a tradition. Commenting on Monod's Chance and Necessity , he observes
a nature distorted by fantasy like she always was, metaphysical sanctuary no longer of origin and substance, but this time of the code; the code must have an "objective" basis. What could be better for that purpose than the molecule and genetics? Monod is the strict theologian of this molecular transcendence, Edgar Morin the rapt disciple (A.D.N. [French, Acide deoxyribonucleide , DNA] + Adonai!).[13]
The chance pun in French between Adonai, or Lord, and ADN
succinctly, even necessarily, explains the authority and appeal of this Central Dogma of genetics: a general explanatory principle unburdened by metaphysics. As Dawkins happily admits, "DNA works in mysterious ways."
By referring to the code or the "language of life," geneticists have the benefit of a metaphysical explanation without paying for it in "scientific credibility." In doing so, they have recommenced the labors of the alchemists, the mystic philologists, and the physicists: the repair of Babel. But unlike their predecessors, they have sought not merely to uncover the Ursprache of nature but to change both language and nature to suit their own designs. As the God of Genesis foresaw, "henceforth nothing they have in mind to do will be beyond their reach." In the spirit of the builders of Babel, they plan to mount to a kind of technological paradise of rectified organic designs on the sinuous ladder of DNA.
T. S. Kuhn maintains that, when a scientific paradigm becomes accepted, a period of arduous labor follows during which its assumptions produce a vast body of literature in support of the paradigm. Kuhn calls such work "normal science" because it is basically devoted to "puzzle-solving" or demonstrating the validity of the paradigm when applied to new areas of research. Gradually, however, data may be produced which seems to depart from the most commonly-held views. Such anomalous findings, when they appear frequently, may lead a scientific community into a period of crisis out of which a new paradigm may well emerge.
The crisis in the neo-Darwinian paradigm is less evident than it might be because so much of the research is focused on modifying the functions of DNA rather than modifying conceptual models. But these flaws have become more and more evident in the last decade. In a 1988 article for Scientific American , Joan Argetsinger Steitz shows how certain small nuclear ribonucleoproteins (SNURPS) help to edit out meaningless strips of DNA (introns).[14] "The picture of snRNP's working in concert in the spliceosomes suggest nothing if not a well-oiled machine," she writes, offering one of the least-examined of scientific metaphors. Focused completely on the technical
description of how SNURPS and spliceosomes work to delete introns and splice exons, Steitz's article relies heavily on passive voice descriptions of how the molecule "is edited"; how DNA sequences "are described"; how the primary transcript "is littered with segments of genetic nonsense"; how most of the RNA "becomes degraded"; and how certain parts of the pre-mRNA "were targeted for degradation." DNA, once an organic equivalent of the Logos, can be "more intron than exon."
Grammar is rarely used to question the conclusions of scientists, but certainly these phrases make one thing clear: scientists allude to a hidden or occult principle in such passive voice constructions. The initial and heroic talk of authoritative "codes" and "keys" has been overtaken by the imagery of "proofreading," "editing," and "deletion." The question, of course, is what agency is involved in this editing. It is like trying to imagine who or what sees what the eye focuses, the retina codes, and the brain uncodes.
In other articles from 1988 two separate teams provided evidence, since contested, that there may be some truth to the old Larmarckian heresy that organisms can pass on acquired characteristics. In the journal Cell , Janet Shaw, Jean Feagin, Larry Simpson, and Kenneth Stuart describe something inside the cell that appears to alter the genetic information, sometimes by as much as sixty percent.[15] And John Cairns, Julie Overbaugh, and Stephan Miller in Nature report data showing that certain bacteria appear to direct their own mutations in order to adapt to their environment.[16] Reviewing the conflicts between what they call "reductionists" and "romantics," Cairns et al seem reluctant to join those "romantics" who see the evolution "as just another manifestation of the mysteriousness of living things." But they also write, "when we come to consider what mechanism might be the basis for the forms of mutation described in this paper we find that molecular biology has, in the interim, deserted the reductionist. Now, almost anything seems possible."
One begins to wonder if DNA—as a principle of general biological explanation—is not only an emblem of scientific hu-
bris, but simply a myth, similar to the philosopher's stone, the lingua adamica , and the doctrine which held that God had inscribed his signature in the living world. If one reads carefully one may notice a certain tentativeness when its champions speak of the way in which DNA guides, not only the formation of amino acids which compose protein, but the development of a body in the womb and its subsequent growth outside of it. Monod writes, with some bravado, "It is perfectly true that embryonic development is in appearance one of the most miraculous phenomena in the whole of biology. It is also true that these phenomena, admirably described by embryologists, continue in large part (for technical reasons) to elude genetic and biochemical analysis, which alone could lead to an understanding of them."[17] Given the fact that geneticists only have some knowledge of how DNA directs the formation of certain proteins and have been able through engineering to alter the nature of such productions, these are bold claims. The formation of proteins is one thing; directing the formation of a complete, living child is another. Dawkins is no less sanguine, but is less generous to his fellow scientists: "[DNA] indirectly supervises the manufacture of a different kind of molecule—protein. Exactly how this eventually leads to the development of a body is a story which will take decades, perhaps centuries, for embryologists to work out. But it is a fact that it does."[18] In a field where neither money nor time is in short supply, defenders may allow centuries to work out the technicalities which stand between monitoring and interfering with protein production and a complete biochemical understanding of epigenesis. The Human Genome Project organized by James Watson, even if it manages to provide a complete map of the genetic composition, would only provide, like a concordance to the works of Homer or Virgil, the elements for such an understanding.
According to Erwin Chargaff, the pervasiveness of the first heady but persistent claims for DNA is intimately connected with the narrowness of its scientific foundation. Chargaff believes that too often the single bacterium Escherichia coli "impersonates nature" in the conclusions drawn by researchers
for the simple reason that it is amenable to manipulation and observation. Because of the fragmentation of biology and the virtual abandonment of botany, the science of life has become the premise and pretext for the production of data and the transformation of bacteria into microscopic factories. Chargaff concludes, "In the tower of forlornness which the House of Science has become in my time, the inhabitants all speak the same language but do not understand each other."
Given the fact that the Central Dogma and its attendant assumptions and technical projects carry the highest aspirations of mechanistic, dualistic science, much more is at stake than a theory of heredity and epigenesis. One could say that a basic Western mission, the domestication of nature through the repair of Babel, is involved. For behind much of the scientific talk about the world as a collection of machines constructed by "selfish genes" is a deeply ingrained doubt, perhaps even a dread or fear, of a world that human beings have dedicated their long history either to modifying or forgetting.
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers remind us in Order Out of Chaos (1983) that the mechanistic mode of life conceals a fundamental attitude toward the world:
The words we still use today—machine, mechanical, engineer—have a similar meaning. They do not refer to rational knowledge but to cunning and expediency. The idea was not to learn about natural processes in order to utilize them more effectively, but to deceive nature, to "machinate" against it—that is to work wonders and create effects extraneous to the "natural order" of things.[19]
One of the classical formulations of the machine model was made by Jacques Loeb in The Mechanistic Conception of Life (1912). For Loeb, the mechanistic model was preferable to what he considered the metaphysical prejudices of those who spoke of a transcendent "harmony," or Zielstrebigkeit , which is necessary for all the elements of an organism to live. To speak of "wholeness" or "harmony" or "purposiveness" is, for Loeb, a "play on words . . . only an unclear expression for the fact that a species is only able to live . . . if it is provided with the automatic mechanism for self-preservation and reproduction"
[my emphasis].[20] So powerful was the force of industrial culture that Loeb could dismiss "harmony" as a "metaphysical" term and employ "automatic mechanism" without the slightest sense that his own phrasing was no less a play on words. Ubiquitous as machines and automata had become by the twentieth century, they could serve as "natural" instances of transcendental modeling. Thus Monod urges us to recognize that "the cell is indeed a machine ," presumably because by analyzing it according to such a model certain communal data can be reached, and certain wonders and "effects" achieved. Nature will be seduced into revealing her "secrets" and performing tricks. For Dawkins, the living world is nothing but DNA and the mechanical ruses it has invented for its survival. Monod, like Dawkins, sees the world as essentially "artificial," a representation, not of consciousness or mind, but of what appears to be its most elemental components. Seen in this light, molecular biology, as it has been popularized by Dawkins and others, represents an attempt to scientifically naturalize certain features of contemporary culture.
Monod's existentialist and Dawkins's free-market visions of nature may appear to be the stoic and brave acceptance of an indifferent and alien world. But they may simply be the most recent superstitions separating us from the world. For what the project of a nature revised and redeemed by technology promises (where perpetual health and even immortality are the products of modified viruses, bacteria, plants, animals, and human beings) is a mechanical and theatrical simulation of life—when the scientific Word will have finally become (a kind of) flesh.
Rupert Sheldrake of Cambridge University turned his back on this style of biology to study life outside the laboratory. He left England for India and worked at the Research Institute in Hyderabad, concentrating on the physiology of tropical legume plants. Following his return to England he published A New Science of Life (1981) which challenged the basic tenets of the Central Dogma. Sheldrake wrote that the power of DNA as an exemplary principle has been vastly exaggerated. The assumption that DNA and the respective genes which it com-
poses guide the formation of the embryo and the growth of the body, the functioning of the body and even the mind, as well as carrying the particular characteristic of the parents is, he argues, unwarranted. The dogma was accepted credulously by the scientific and popular press because it confirmed the basic presupposition that life, like a machine, was the manifestation of an internal blueprint.[21]
The scientific press in Britain was outraged. Nature called the book "the best canditate for burning there has been for many years."[22] For by turning against the dominant model of nature as machine and trying to understand it as organic and natural, alien to the order of the machine, Sheldrake had offered a heretical explanation and opened the door to a host of supposedly metaphysical theories associated with animism, vitalism, and mysticism. But as Sheldrake argues, projection is hardly the question: it is a matter of which projection is acceptable to a mechanistic society and which is seen as fanciful and bizarre. "Ironically, the mechanistic approach itself seems to be more anthropomorphic than the animistic. It projects one particular kind of human activity, the construction and use of machines, onto the whole of nature. The mechanistic theory derives its plausibility precisely from the fact that machines do have purposive designs whose source is in living minds."
Sheldrake does not, however, simply object to this model on aesthetic or cultural grounds. He claims that DNA, even according to the mechanistic presumptions of its champions, is in itself not sufficient to explain the many tasks assigned to it. As Weismann insisted long before DNA was discovered, the germ plasm found in each cell would have to be different from cells in other parts of the body. But the identical strands of DNA are found in every cell of the body and produce identical proteins. And yet out of these proteins quite different forms arise: cells in the brain, leg, and foot develop from the same DNA program. Even dogmatists have come to recognize that the DNA molecule is not a complete and integral message that is simply transcribed by messenger RNA which in turn directs the formation of proteins, and so the form of the living body. And research has shown, as Sheldrake writes in his The Pres-
ence of the Past (1988), that "the total amount of DNA that is inherited seems to bear very little relationship to the complexity of the organism . . . the cells of lily plants contain thirty times more DNA than human cells." Moreover, the differences between the DNA in certain species of fruitflies are much greater than the differences between the genetic makeup of chimpanzees and human beings. Defenders of the Central Dogma could preserve their thesis by claiming that each cell only employs the information appropriate to it. In doing so, however, they would be creating the need for another source of guidance or information in the cell: a selector which would direct editing and transcription of the DNA. This would be the mysterious agency to which the passive voice piously defers.
Sheldrake advances his critique of the Central Dogma as a preface to one of the most audacious scientific hypotheses in modern times. Drawing on the antimechanistic critiques of Samuel Butler, Henri Bergson, and others, he proposes that the development of organic form is not ultimately governed from within by genetic information, but from without via what he calls "morphic resonance" and "formative causation." In essence, Sheldrake claims that organic form is an effect of all the previous organisms that have existed and that continue to direct the formation of living forms. A eucalyptus, a leopard, a human being are formed and shaped by resonances from their ancestors: each is an effect of memory. Far from the superstitious and occult properties which such a proposition suggests, Sheldrake's "resonance" is derived from C. H. Waddington's postulation of "individuation fields" and René Thom's translation of these fields into mathematical topologies. From a more comprehensive perspective, however, Sheldrake is drawing on the ancient tradition of "the great memory," postulated by Plato, Samuel Butler, and Yeats and joining it with modern organistic, holistic, and cybernetic thinking associated with Whitehead, Ludwig von Bertalannfy, and Gregory Bateson.
Organic form is guided, Sheldrake proposes, by the formal and behavioral influence of "past organisms of the same species through direct connections across space and time." DNA
may "tune" these fields in the manner that a television receiver accepts and illustrates an electronic message. In this manner only can DNA be said to guide the production of protein and the growth of the body. Parental traits are not contained by genetic material, rather the genetic material receives and implements this resonance in a particular way. All living forms are enfolded within the memory of nature and within a past which is also present. In place of the information model of DNA, Sheldrake has substituted a much finer, but no less material medium, comparable to electromagnetic fields. The condescension or contempt of his critics notwithstanding, the idea of "formative fields' is no less occult than the orthodox view that a living form is the elaboration of the living "language" in a single molecule.
As evidence for the ways in which influence can be discovered even in the literature of modern science, Sheldrake cites experiments conducted by William McDougal at Harvard University in 1920 in which rats taught certain tasks seemed to pass on these acquired skills to their progeny. McDougal interpreted the results with reference to Lamarck's much-maligned belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Subsequent tests on McDougall's findings by F. A. E. Crew at Edinburgh not only failed to refute the unacceptable findings, they exacerbated the anomaly: Crewe's rats learned even faster. Adding these data to anecdotal reports by animal trainers and breeders claiming that new generations of animals learned certain tasks more quickly than their ancestors, Sheldrake supposes that morphic resonance may be an explanation. The same kind of influence could be a solution to the question of why certain crystals formed for the first time in a laboratory seem to quicken the rate at which other crystals, separated by vast distances, form the same structure. A certain cumulative effect seems to become manifest within a species once its initial difficulty is overcome. It is this same principle, Sheldrake suggests, which guides the development of the embryo and the growth of the body.[23]
Thus the neo-Darwinist orthodoxy engages in a minute analysis of genetic structure, assuming implicitly that there is
a kind of passive agency which sorts through and reads the language of DNA, while Sheldrake—with only circumstantial evidence—has named this agency. In both cases, nature has not spoken directly, as Heraclitus warned, but through signs. Monod reads, as it were, the determinate particle of our natural fate, just as Sheldrake sees an ongoing wave communicating between epochs and individuality and consciousness. And of course all of our cultural values persuade us that Monod and his colleagues are scientists and so are more or less right, and that Sheldrake is indulging his imagination, reviving old myths, and is most probably wrong.
And yet this mythological complexion scarcely distinguishes Sheldrake's hypothesis from Monod's existentialism. As long as geneticists ignore their implicit reliance upon an unspoken and unnameable agency, operating in the mysterious realm of the passive voice, which reads, targets, deletes, and edits organic "messages," they may as well admit that they need Sheldrake's morphic resonance, Samuel Butler's unconscious memory, or what Yeats once referred to as the "memory of nature." Still, one must respect their stoic resort to this least mythologized of metaphysical principles and to their search for refuge in the subterfuges of syntax, taking for comfort Heraclitus's axiom that nature loves to hide.