An essay in universal history

16. DNA, DARWINISM AND THE NEW AGE

In the first half of the twentieth century, the major scientific discoveries had been made in the physical sciences and mathematics. In the second half, it was the turn of the biological sciences. For, as Eric Hobsbawm writes, “within ten years of the Second World War, the life sciences were revolutionized by the astonishing advances of molecular biology, which revealed the universal mechanism of inheritance, the ‘genetic code’.

“The revolution in molecular biology was not unexpected. After 1914 it could be taken for granted that life had to be, and could be, explained in terms of physics and chemistry and not in terms of some essence peculiar to living beings. Indeed, biochemical models of the possible origin of life on earth, starting with sunlight, methane, ammonia and water, were first suggested in the 1920s (largely with anti-religious intentions) in Soviet Russia and Britain, and put the subject on the serious scientific agenda. Hostility to religion, by the way, continued to animate researchers in this field: both Crick and Linus Pauling are cases in point. The major thrust of biological research had for decades been biochemical, and increasingly physical, since the recognition that protein molecules could be crystallized, and therefore analysed crystallographically. It was known that one substance, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) played a central, possibly the central role in heredity: it seemed to be the basic component of the gene, the unit of inheritance. The problem of how the gene ‘cause(d) the synthesis of another structure like itself, in which even the mutations of the original gene are copied’, i.e. how heredity operated, was already under serious investigation in the later 1930s. After the war it was clear that, in Crick’s words, ‘great things were just around the corner’. The brilliance of Crick and Watson’s discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA [in 1953] and of the way it explained ‘gene copying’ by an elegant chemico-mechanical model is not diminished by the fact that several workers were converging on the same result in the early 1950s.
“The DNA revolution, ‘the greatest single discovery in biology’ (J.D. Bernal), which dominated the life-sciences in the second half of the century, was essentially about genetics and, since twentieth-century Darwinism is exclusively genetics, about evolution. Both these are notoriously touchy subjects, both because scientific models are themselves frequently ideological in such fields – we remember Darwin’s debt to Malthus – and because they frequently feed back into politics (‘social Darwinism’). The concept of ‘race’ illustrates this interplay. The memory of Nazi racial policies made it virtually unthinkable for liberal intellectuals (which included most scientists) to operate with his concept. Indeed, many doubted that it was legitimate even to enquire systematically into the genetically determined differences between human groups, for fear that the results might provide encouragement for racist opinions. More generally, in the Western countries the post-fascist ideology of democracy and equality revived the old debates of ‘nature v. nurture’, or heredity v. environment. Plainly the human individual was shaped both by heredity and environment, by genes and culture. Yet conservatives were only too willing to accept of society of irremovable, i.e. genetically determined inequalities, while the Left, committed to equality, naturally held that all inequalities could be removed by social action: they were at bottom environmentally determined. The controversy flared up over the question of human intelligence, which (because of its implications for selective or universal schooling) was highly political. It raised far wider issues than those or race, though it bore on these also. How wide they were, emerged with the revival of the feminist movement, several of whose ideologists came close to claiming that all mental differences between men and women wer essentially culture-determined, i.e. environmental. Indeed, the fashionable substitution of the term ‘gender’ for ‘sex’ implied the belief that ‘woman’ was not so much a biological category as a social role. A scientist who tried to investigate such sensitive subjects knew himself to be in a political minefield. Even those who entered it deliberately, like E.O. Wilson of Harvard (b. 1929), the champion of ‘socio-biology’, shied away from plain speech…”²¹⁶
However, the discovery of DNA had a far deeper and more fundamental effect than merely eliciting these debates on the relative roles of genes and environment in various human conditions and situations. Although this has not been recognized by most scientists to this day, the discovery of DNA undermined the theoretical basis of Darwinism itself. For it revealed an information-based mechanism for the transmission of the genome that could not possibly have come into existence by chance, but must have been created by an intelligent designer – in other words, God. Information is a concept that makes no sense without a mind possessing it. And the amount of information contained in just the simplest reproducible cell points to an infinite Mind…
As Raymond G. Halvorson writes: “The human body contains some 100 million cells, with the DNA divided into forty-six chromosomes. The total length of the entire DNA in one call is about three feet. The total DNA content in a human body is estimated to span the solar system. In terms of an analogy, human DNA is like a very large encyclopedia of forty-six volumes, with each one have 20,000 pages. Every one of the 100 million cells in a human body contains this entire library.
“As scientists began to decode the human genome they found it to be approximately three billion DNA base pairs long. ‘One of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century,’ says Dr. Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, ‘was that DNA actually stores information – the detailed instructions for assembling proteins – in the form a a four-character digital code.’
“David Coppedge, a systems administrator for the Cassini Mission to Saturn and Titan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA, made the following observation: ‘Life on the molecular level is incredibly complex. A symphony of proteins, enzymes and DNA work in harmony to permit rapid and precisely controlled chemical reactions. At least 239 proteins are required for the simplest conceivable living cell. The change of getting even one of these proteins, even under ideal conditions, is less than one in 10-161 (10 followed by 161 zeros). To get the simplest reproducible cell is one in 10-40,000. Anything less likely than 1 in 10-50 is virtually impossible, anywhere in the whole universe.’…
“Coppedge calculated the probability that the 200 trillion molecules arranged in perfect order within the walls of a cell would take trillions and trillions of years to generate spontaneously. That is well beyond the actual age of the earth. The immense complexity of a single cell precludes all possibility of life ever happening by chance…”²¹⁷
Darwinism already faced colossal difficulties. With the discovery of DNA, it became a statistical impossibility. Unfortunately, however, the world continued as if nothing had happened: Darwinism, impossible though it had been shown to be, remained the corner-stone, not only of biological science, but of the whole modern world-view, which now entered a less violent, but even more radical phase of its development...
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The democratic victor powers in 1945 - the United States, Britain and France - were both more tolerant of traditional religion and less inclined to mix religion with politics than the totalitarian powers, both Nazi and Soviet, had been. Indeed, in hindsight we can now see that the fundamental contrast and antagonism was not between Fascism and Communism, as leftists tend to believe, but between these two aspects of the totalitarian revolution, on the one hand, and western democracy, on the other. For as Tony Judt writes, the ravages of Hitler and Stalin may be seen as complementing each other in their destruction of pre-war bourgeois civilization: “Hitler’s war amounted, de facto, to a major European revolution, transforming Central and Eastern Europe and preparing the way for the ‘Socialist’ regimes of the postwar years which built upon the radical change Hitler had brought about – notably the destruction of the intelligentsia and urban middle class of the region, first through the murder of the Jews and then as a result of the postwar expulsion of Germans from the liberated Slav lands.”²¹⁸
But it did not end there; for in the second half of the twentieth century the democracies carried on the antichristian revolution – known as “the New World Order” - with hardly less success than the anti-democratic totalitarian regimes of the first half, albeit in less violent ways. This should remind us that Fascism, Communism and Democracy all owe their origins to the first anti-Christian revolution, the French revolution of 1789…
The critical transitional period began in 1953, when, on the one hand, the violent, masculine phase of the revolution passed its peak with Stalin’s death, and on the other hand the seductive, feminine phase began with the discovery of the contraceptive pill… 1953 was also the year of the discovery of DNA. Theoretically, this made possible the abolition of disease and old age, even the changing of human nature itself through manipulation of the human genome. Thus the Nihilist dreams of Nechaev and Nietzsche, which became nightmarish reality in the era of Stalin and Hitler, have given way to more peaceful visions of life without God (at least in any form recognizable to traditional monotheism). Thus our ideals now are not salvation or the Kingdom of heaven but education and clean water, human rights and robots (including, human rights for robots!²¹⁹), cloning and gene therapy.
The aim of this continuation of the revolution by non-violent means – its “positive”, “creative” phase, as opposed to its “negative”, “destructive” phase up to 1945 – is the same as before: to reconcile a renewed (or recreated or replaced-by-robots) mankind to a completely this-worldly faith and hope. The first, violent, nihilist phase of the revolution was necessary in order to root out the old, other-worldly faith. In Lenin’s famous phrase, “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” But now mankind can proceed to a new age of universal prosperity and happiness from which all sorrow and pain will have fled away and in which, consequently, the “opium” of traditional religion will no longer be necessary, being replaced by more this-worldly (but still “spiritual”) opiates...
In October, 1949 Aldous Huxley, prophet of the “Brave New World” of this “creative” phase of the revolution, wrote to his former pupil George Orwell, denouncer of “Old World” totalitarianism, after the publication of his novel 1984: “It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.
“Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.
“Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.
“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.”²²⁰
“The new age,” wrote Fr. Seraphim Rose in the 1960s, “which many call a ‘post-Christian’ age, is at the same time the age ‘beyond Nihilism’ – a phrase that expresses at once a fact and a hope. The fact this phrase expresses is that Nihilism, being negative in essence even if positive in aspiration, owing its whole energy to its passion to destroy Christian Truth, comes to the end of its program in the production of a mechanized ‘new earth’ and a dehumanized ‘new man’: Christian influence over man and over society having been effectively obliterated, Nihilism must retire and give way to another, more ‘constructive’ movement capable of acting from autonomous and positive motives. This movement… takes up the Revolution at the point where Nihilism leaves off and attempts to bring the movement which Nihilism began to its logical conclusion.”²²¹