| Cosmic Serpent ♦ Excerpts |
| “Those who love wisdom must investigate many things.” – Heraclitus |
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This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald "a Copernican revolution for the life sciences," leads the reader through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge.
In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology, and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it.
The Cosmic Serpent is doubly themed.
- One theme is that of the symbol of the creator serpent (or twin serpents) as the source of knowledge and of all life itself.
- The other theme is that of DNA which in our modern western world-view is the source of all life and all organic information.
- These two threads are wound about in a spiraling narrative like the double helix of the DNA molecule or the twin serpents found in the timeless myths of cultures the world over.
The Cosmic Serpent is a major breakthrough for not only the field of entheogens but for all science and perhaps religion too. Originally published in French as Serpent Cosmique, this book presents the journey of a western scientist who ventures past the primitive superstitions of modern anthropology and takes part in a millennia-long scientific research program of Amazonian shamanism; wherein he learns of their seers’ profound communication with other species via experiential access to DNA.
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Introduction Chapter 1 ♦ Forest Television Chapter 2 ♦ Anthropologists and Shamans Chapter 3 ♦ The Mother of The Mother of Tobacco is A Snake Chapter 4 ♦ Enigma in Rio Chapter 5 ♦ Defocalizing Chapter 6 ♦ Seeing Correspondences Chapter 7 ♦ Myths and Molecules Chapter 8 ♦ Through The Eyes of An Ant Chapter 9 ♦ Receptors and Transmitters Chapter 10 ♦ Biology's Blind Spot Chapter 11 ♦ "What Took You So Long?" Bibliography | Index |
The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby takes a serious look at how neurogenetic consciousness informs awareness, knowledge, symbolism and culture. His comparison of the ancient cosmic serpent myths to the genetic situation in every living cell reveals the immortal biomolecular wizard behind the curtain of everyday life. His anthropological study, ayahuasca experience and scientific speculations weave a tale of shamans who bring their consciousness down to molecular levels with sophisticated neurotransmitter potions in order to perceive information contained in the coherent visible light emitted by DNA.
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Some excerpts from this important book:
Some biologists describe DNA as an "ancient high biotechnology," containing "over a hundred trillion times as much information by volume as our most sophisticated information storage devices." Could one still speak of technology in these circumstances? Yes, because there is no other word to qualify this duplicable, information-storing molecule. DNA is only ten atoms wide and as such constitutes a sort of ultimate technology: It is organic and so miniturized that it approaches the limits of material existence.
Shamans, meanwhile, claim that the vital principle that animates all living creatures comes from the cosmos and is minded.
As ayahuasquero Pablo Amaringo says: "A plant may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that is conscious, that sees everything, which is the soul of the plant, its essence, what makes it alive." According to Amaringo these spirits are veritable beings, and humans are also filled with them: "Even the hair, the eyes, the ears are full of beings. You see all this when ayahuasca is strong."
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In their visions, shamans take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to information related to DNA, which they call "animate essences" or "spirits."
- This is where they see double helixes, twisted ladders, and chromosome shapes.
- This is how shamanic cultures have known for millennia that the vital principle is the same for all living beings, and is shaped like two entwined serpents (or a vine, a rope, ladder...).
DNA is the source of their astonishing botanical and medicinal knowledge, which can be attained only in defocalized and "nonrational" states of consciousness, though its results are empirically verifiable.
The myths of these cultures are filled with biological imagery, and the shamans metaphoric explanations correspond quite precisely to the descriptions that biologists are starting to provide.
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DNA and the cell-based life it codes for are an extremely sophisticated technology that far surpasses our present-day understanding and that was initially developed elsewhere than on earth—which it radically transformed on its arrival some four billion years ago.
If one stretches out the DNA contained in the nucleus of a human cell, one obtains a two-yard long thread that is only ten atoms wide (and the two ribbons that make up this filament wrap around each other several hundred million times). This thread is a billion times longer than its own width. Relatively speaking, it is as if your little finger stretched from Paris to Los Angeles.
A thread of DNA is much smaller than the visible light humans perceive. Even the most powerful optical microscopes can not reveal it, because DNA is approximately 120 times narrower than the smallest wavelength of visible light.
The nucleus of a cell is equivalent in volume to 2-millionths of a pinhead. The two-yard thread of DNA packs into this minute volume by coiling up endlessly on itself, thereby reconciling extreme length and infinitesimal smallness, like mythical serpents.
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In the early 1980s, thanks to the development of a sophisticated measurement device, a team of scientists demonstrated that the cells of all living beings emit photons at a rate of up to approximately 100 units per second and per square centimeter of surface area. They also showed that DNA was the source of this photon emission.
The wavelength at which DNA emits these photons corresponds exactly to the narrow band of visible light: "Its spectral distribution ranges at least from infrared (at about 900 nanometers) to ultraviolet (up to about 200 nanometers)"...DNA emits photons with such regularity that researchers compare the phenomenon to an "ultra-weak laser." (see History of Biophotonics)
Inside the nucleus, DNA coils and uncoils, writhes and wriggles. Scientists often compare the form and movements of this long molecule to those of a snake.
There...is the source of knowledge: DNA, living in water and emitting photons, like an aquatic dragon spitting fire.
Pregnant by an Anaconda by Pablo Amaringo from the Gallery of Usko-Ayar art |
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Could you sum up your book "The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge"?
Research indicates that shamans access an intelligence, which they say is nature's, and which gives them information that has stunning correspondences with molecular biology.
Your hypothesis of a hidden intelligence contained within the DNA of all living things is interesting. What is this intelligence?
Intelligence comes from the Latin inter-legere, to choose between.
- There seems to be a capacity to make choices operating inside each cell in our body, down to the level of individual proteins and enzymes.
- DNA itself is a kind of "text" that functions through a coding
- system called "genetic code," which is strikingly similar to codes used by human beings.
- Some enzymes edit the RNA transcript of the DNA text and add new letters to it; any error made during this editing can be fatal to the entire organism; so these enzymes are consistently making the right choices; if they don't, something often goes wrong leading to cancer and other diseases.
- Cells send one another signals, in the form of proteins and molecules.
- These signals mean: divide, or don't divide, move, or don't move, kill yourself, or stay alive.
- Any one cell is listening to hundreds of signals at the same time, and has to integrate them and decide what to do.
- How this intelligence operates is the question.
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DNA has essentially maintained its structure for 3.5 billion years. What role does DNA play in our evolution?
DNA is a single molecule with a double helix structure;
- It is two complementary versions of the same "text" wrapped around each other;
- This allows it to unwind and make copies of itself: twins!
- This twinning mechanism is at the heart of life since it began. Without it, one cell could not become two, and life would not exist.
- And, from one generation to the next, the DNA text can also be modified, so it allows both constancy and transformation.
- This means that beings can be the same and not the same.
One of the mysteries is what drives the changes in the DNA text in evolution.
- DNA has apparently been around for billions of years in its current form in virtually all forms of life.
- The old theory — random accumulation of errors combined with natural selection — does not fully explain the data currently generated by genome sequencing.
- The question is wide open.
The structure of DNA as we know it is made up of letters and thus has a specific text and language. You could say our bodies are made up of language, yet we assume that speech arises from the mind. How do we access this hidden language?
By studying it. There are several roads to knowledge, including science and shamanism.
The symbol of the Cosmic Serpent, the snake, is a central theme in your story, and in your research you discover that the snake forms a major part of the symbology across most of the world’s traditions and religions. Why is there such a consistent system of natural symbols in the world? Is the world inherently symbolic?
This is the observation that led me to investigate the cosmic serpent.
- I found the symbol in shamanism all over the world. Why? That's a good question.
- My hypothesis is that it is connected to the double helix of DNA inside virtually all living beings.
- And DNA itself is a symbolic Saussurian code.
- So, yes, in at least one important way, the living world is inherently symbolic. We are made of living language.
You write of how the ideology of "rational" science, deterministic thought, is and has been quite limiting in its approach to new and alternative scientific theories; it is assumed that "mystery is the enemy." In your book you describe how you had to suspend your judgement, to "defocalize," and in this way gain a deeper insight. Why do you think we are often limited in our rational, linear thought and why are so few willing and able to cross these boundaries?
I don't believe we are. People spend hours each day thinking non-rationally.
- Our emotional brain treats all the information we receive before our neo-cortex does.
- Scientists are forever making discoveries as they daydream, take a bath, go for a run, lay in bed, and so on.
 Vision of the Snakes By Pablo Amaringo | Gallery of Usko-Ayar Art |
What are the correspondences between the Peruvian shamans’ findings and microbiology?
Both shamans and molecular biologists agree that there is a hidden unity under the surface of life's diversity;
- Both associate this unity with the double helix shape (or two entwined serpents, a twisted ladder, a spiral staircase, two vines wrapped around each other);
- Both consider that one must deal with this level of reality in order to heal.
- One can fill a book with correspondences between shamanism and molecular biology.
Do you think there is not only an intelligence based in our DNA but a consciousness as well?
I think we should attend to the words we use. "Consciousness" carries different baggage than "intelligence."
- Many would define human consciousness as different from, say, animal consciousness, because humans are conscious of being conscious.
- But how do we know that dolphins don't think about being dolphins?
- I do not know whether there is a "consciousness" inside our cells; for now, the question seems out of reach; we have a hard enough time understanding our own consciousness — though we use it most of the time.
- I propose the concept of "intelligence" to describe what proteins and cells do, simply because it makes the data more comprehensible.
- This concept will require at least a decade or two for biologists to consider and test.
- Then, we might be able to move along and consider the idea of a "cellular consciousness."
 Alchemical vision of chromosomal DNA? |
The implications of some of your findings in The Cosmic Serpent could be quite large. How do you feel about the book and what it says? Why did you write the book?
I wrote the book because I felt that certain things needed saying.
- Writing a book is like sending out a message in a bottle: sometimes one gets replies.
- Judging from the responses, a surprising number of people have got the message loud and clear.
How can shamanism complement modern science?
Most definitions of "science" revolve around the testing of hypotheses.
- Claude Levi-Strauss showed in his book The Savage Mind that human beings have been carefully observing nature and endlessly testing hypotheses for at least ten thousand years.
- This is how animals and plants were domesticated.
- Civilization rests on millennia of Neolithic science.
- I think the science of shamans can complement modern science by helping make sense of the data it generates.
- Shamanism is like a reverse camera relative to modern science.
 Actual photo of chromosomal DNA. |
The shamans were very spiritual people. Has any of this affected you? What is spiritual in your life?
I don't use the word "spiritual" to think about my life.
- I spend my time promoting land titling projects and bilingual education for indigenous people, and thinking about how to move knowledge forward and how to open up understanding between people;
- I also spend time with my children, and with children in my community (as a soccer coach);
- And I look after the plants in my garden, without using pesticides and so on.
- But I do this because I think it needs doing, and because it's all I can do, but not because it's "spiritual."
- The message I got from shamans was: do what you can for those around you (including plants and animals), but don't make a big deal of it.
At the Earth Summit, everybody was talking about the ecological knowledge of indigenous people, but certainly no one was talking about the hallucinatory origin of some of it, as claimed by the indigenous people themselves.
- Admittedly, most anthropologists and ethnobotanists did not know about it, but even those who did said nothing, presumably because there is no way to do so and be taken seriously.
- Colleagues might ask,
- “You mean Indians claim they get molecularly verifiable information from their hallucinations?
You don't take them literally, do you?”
[10] - [11][10] For examples of texts that illustrate the value of the botanical knowledge of Amazonian peoples with multiple references to curare, Pilocarpus jaborandi, and tikiuba, see
[11] See Luna (1986, p. 57). |
What could one answer?
It is true that not all of the world's indigenous people use hallucinogenic plants.
- Even in the Amazon, there are forms of shamanism based on techniques other than the ingestion of hallucinogens;
- But in Western Amazonia, which includes the Peruvian, Ecuadorian, and Colombian part of the basin, it is hard to find a culture that does not use an entire panoply of psychoactive plants.
- According to one inventory, there are seventy-two ayahuasca-using cultures in Western Amazonia.[11]
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The dilemma posed by the hallucinatory
knowledge of indigenous people. ■ On the one hand, its results are empirically confirmed and used by the pharmaceutical industry; ■ On the other hand, its origin cannot be discussed scientifically because it contradicts the axioms of Western knowledge. |
Richard Evans Schultes, the foremost ethnobotanist of the twentieth century, writes about the healers of a region in Colombia that he considers to be one of the centers of Western Amazonian shamanism:
- “The medicine men of the Kamsá and Inga tribes of the Valley of Sibundoy, have an unusually extensive knowledge of medicinal and toxic plants. … One of the most renowned is Salvador Chindoy, who insists that his knowledge of the medicinal value of plants has been taught to him by the plants themselves through the hallucinations he has experienced in his long lifetime as a medicine man.” [12]
Schultes does not say anything further about the hallucinatory origin of the botanical expertise of Amazonian people, because there is nothing one can say without contradicting two fundamental principles of Western knowledge.
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[12] - [14][12] Schultes and Raffauf (1992, p. 58).
[13] Slade and Bentall (1988) write:
Hare (1973) writes:
Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines hallucination as follows:
[14] According to Renck (1989), who reviewed the scientific literature on the matter, and who bases himself on Tavolga's work, there are six levels of communication:
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It was in Rio that I realized the extent of the dilemma posed by the hallucinatory knowledge of indigenous people.
- On the one hand, its results are empirically confirmed and used by the pharmaceutical industry;
- On the other hand, its origin cannot be discussed scientifically because it contradicts the axioms of Western knowledge.
When I understood that the enigma of plant communication was a blind spot for science, I felt the call to conduct an in-depth investigation of the subject.
- Furthermore, I had been carrying the mystery of plant communication around since my stay with the Ashaninca, and I knew that explorations of contradictions in science often yield fruitful results.
- Finally, it seemed to me that the establishment of a serious dialogue with indigenous people on ecology and botany required that this question be addressed.
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Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning
co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was suggesting that the molecule of life was of extraterrestrial origin |
After the meeting, toward the end of the afternoon, I went over to my colleagues house.
- He had generously allowed me to look through his books in his absence.
I entered his office, a big room with an entire wall occupied by bookshelves, turned on the light, and started browsing.
- The biology section contained, among others, The double helix by James Watson, the co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the structure of DNA.
- I flipped through this book, looking at the pictures with interest, and put it aside.
I pulled it out and looked at its cover — and could not believe my eyes.A little further along on the same shelf, I came upon a book by Francis Crick entitled Life itself: Its origin and nature.
- It showed an image of the earth, seen from space, with a rather indistinct object coming from the cosmos and landing on it.
Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was suggesting that the molecule of life was of extraterrestrial origin — in the same way that the "animist" peoples claimed that the vital principle was a serpent from the cosmos.
I had never heard of Crick's hypothesis, called "directed panspermia," but I knew that I had just found a new correspondence between science and the complex formed by shamanism and mythology.
I sat down in the armchair and plunged into Life itself: Its origin and nature.
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Crick concludes that the organized
complexity found at the cellular level "cannot have arisen by pure chance." |
Crick, writing In the early 1980s, criticizes the usual scientific theory on the origin of life, according to which a cell first appeared in the primitive soup through the random collisions of disorganized molecules. For Crick, this theory presents a major drawback:
- It is based on ideas conceived in the nineteenth century, long before molecular biology revealed that the basic mechanisms of life are identical for all species and are extremely complex — and when one calculates the probability of chance producing such complexity, one ends up with inconceivably small numbers.
The DNA molecule, which excels at stocking and duplicating information, is incapable of building itself on its own.
- Proteins do this, but they are incapable of reproducing themselves without the information contained in the DNA.
- Life, therefore, is a seemingly inescapable synthesis of these two molecular systems.
- Moving beyond the famous question of the chicken and the egg, Crick calculates the probability of the chance emergence of one single protein (which could then go on to build the first DNA molecule).
- In all living species, proteins are made up of exactly the same 20 amino acids, which are small molecules.
- The average protein is a long chain made up of approximately 200 amino acids, chosen from those 20, and strung together in the right order.
- According to the laws of combinatorials, there is 1 chance in 20 multiplied by itself 200 times for a single specific protein to emerge fortuitously.
- This figure, which can be written 20200, and which is roughly equivalent to 10260, is enormously greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe (estimated at 1050 ).
These numbers are inconceivable for a human mind.
- It is not possible to imagine all the atoms of the observable universe and even less a figure that is billions of billions of billions of billions of billions (etc.) times greater.
- However, since the beginning of life on earth, the number of amino acid chains that could have been synthesized by chance can only represent a minute fraction of all the possibilities.
According to Crick:
- “The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time. These calculations take account only of the amino acid sequence. They do not allow for the fact that many sequences would probably not fold up satisfactorily into a stable, compact shape. What fraction of all possible sequences would do this is not known, though it is surmised to be fairly small.”
Crick concludes that the organized complexity found at the cellular level “cannot have arisen by pure chance.”
The earth has existed for approximately 4.5 billion years.
- In the beginning it was merely a radioactive aggregate with a surface temperature reaching the melting point of metal.
- Not really a hospitable place for life. Yet there are fossils of single-celled beings that are approximately 3.5 billion years old.
- The existence of a single cell necessarily implies the presence of DNA, with its 4-letter "alphabet" (A, G, C, T), and of proteins, with their 20-letter "alphabet" (the 20 amino acids), as well as a "translation mechanism" between the two — given that the instructions for the construction of proteins are coded in the language of DNA.
[19][19] See Crick (1981, pp. 51, 52-53, 70).
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Crick writes:
- “It is quite remarkable that such a mechanism exists at all and even more remarkable that every living cell, whether animal, plant or microbial, contains a version of it.” [19]
Crick compares a protein to a paragraph made up of 200 letters lined up in the correct order.
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Life as described by Crick was based
on a miniature language that had not changed a letter in four billion years, while multiplying itself in an extreme diversity of species. |
- If the chances are infinitesimal for one paragraph to emerge in a billion years from a terrestrial soup, the probability of the fortuitous appearance, during the same period, of two alphabets and one translation mechanism is even smaller.
When i looked up from Crick's book, it was dark outside.
- I was feeling both astonished and elated. Like a myopic detective bent over a magnifying glass while following a trail, I had fallen into a bottomless hole.
- For months I had been trying to untangle the enigma of the hallucinatory knowledge of Western Amazonia's indigenous people, stubbornly searching for the hidden passage in the apparent dead end.
- I had only detected the DNA trail two weeks previously in Harner's book.
- Since then I had mainly developed the hypothesis along intuitive lines.
- My goal was certainly not to build a new theory on the origin of life; but there I was — a poor anthropologist knowing barely how to swim, floating in a cosmic ocean filled with microscopic and bilingual serpents.
- I could see now that there might be links between science and shamanic, spiritual and mythological traditions, that seemed to have gone unnoticed, doubtless because of the fragmentation of Western knowledge.
With his book, Francis Crick provided a good example of this fragmentation.
- His mathematics were impeccable, and his reasoning crystalline; Crick was surely among twentieth-century rationality's finest.
- But he had not noticed that he was not the first to propose the idea of a snake-shaped vital principle of cosmic origin.
- All the peoples in the world who talk of a cosmic serpent have been saving as much for millennia.
- He had not seen it because the rational gaze is forever focalized and can examine only one thing at a time.
- It separates things to understand them, including the truly complementary.
- It is the gaze of the specialist, who sees the fine grain of a necessarily restricted field of vision.
- When Crick set about considering cosmogony from the serious perspective of molecular biology, he had long since put out of his analytical mind the myths of archaic peoples.
From my new point of view, Crick's scenario of "directed panspermia," in which a spaceship transports DNA in the form of frozen bacteria across the immensities of the cosmos, seemed less likely than the idea of an omniscient and terrifying cosmic serpent of unimaginable power.
- After all, life as described by Crick was based on a miniature language that had not changed a letter in four billion years, while multiplying itself in an extreme diversity of species.
- The petals of a rose, Francis Cricks brain, and the coat of a virus are all built out of proteins made up of exactly the same 20 amino acids.
- A phenomenon capable of such creativity was surely not going to travel in a spaceship resembling those propelled containers imagined by human beings in the twentieth century.
"A painting on hardboard of the Snake of
the Marinbata people of Arnhem Land." From Huxley (1974, p. 127). |
This meant that the gaze of the Western specialist was too narrow to see the two pieces that fit together to resolve the puzzle.
- The distance between molecular biology and shamanism/mythology was an optical illusion produced by the rational gaze that separates things ahead of time, and as objectivism fails to objectify its objectifying relationship, it also finds it difficult to consider its presuppositions.
The puzzle to solve was: Who are we and where do we come from?
 "Cosmovision." From Gebhart-Sayer (1987, p. 26). |
I went on to look for the connection between the cosmic serpent — the master of transformation of serpentine form that lives in water and can be both extremely long and small, single and double — and DNA.
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Your personal DNA is
long enough to wrap around the earth 5 million times. |
I found that DNA corresponds exactly to this description.
- If one stretches out the DNA contained in the nucleus of a human cell, one obtains a two-yard-long thread that is only ten atoms wide.
- This thread is a billion times longer than its own width.
- Relatively speaking, it is as if your little finger stretched from Paris to Los Angeles.
A thread of DNA is much smaller than the visible light humans perceive.
- Even the most powerful optical microscopes cannot reveal it, because DNA is approximately 120 times narrower than the smallest wavelength of visible light.[5]
The nucleus of a cell is equivalent in volume to 2-millionths of a pinhead.
- The two-yard thread of DNA packs into this minute volume by coiling up endlessly on itself, thereby reconciling extreme length and infinitesimal smallness, like mythical serpents.
 "Aspects of Ronín." From Gebhart-Sayer (1987, p. 34). |
The average human being is made up of 100 thousand billion cells, according to some estimates.
- This means that there are approximately 125 billion miles of DNA in a human body — corresponding to 70 round-trips between Saturn and the Sun.
- You could travel your entire life in a Boeing 747 flying at top speed and you would not even cover one hundredth of this distance.
- Your personal DNA is long enough to wrap around the earth 5 million times.[6]
[5] - [7][5] Each human cell contains approximately 6 billion base pairs (= 6 × 109, meaning 6 followed by 9 zeros).
De Duve (1984) writes:
[6] Wills (1989) writes that the nucleus of a cell “is about two millionths of the volume of a pinhead” (p. 22).
However, there is no consensus on this figure.
To calculate the total length of the DNA in a human body, I chose the figure that seems to be the most widely used, and that is halfway between the extremes.
Finally, a Boeing 747 traveling for 75 years at 1,000 km/h would travel 657 million kilometers,
[7] Most cells contain between 70 and 80 percent water.
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All the cells in the world contain DNA — be they animal, vegetal, or bacterial — and they are all filled with salt water, in which the concentration of salt is similar to that of the worldwide ocean.
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DNA is the informational
molecule of life |
- We cry and sweat what is essentially seawater.
- DNA bathes in water, which in turn plays a crucial role in establishing the double helix's shape.
- As DNA's four bases (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) are insoluble in water, they tuck themselves into the center of the molecule where they associate in pairs to form the rungs of the ladder; then they twist up into a spiraled stack to avoid contact with the surrounding water molecules.
- DNA's twisted ladder shape is a direct consequence of the cell's watery environment.[7]
- DNA goes together with water, just like mythical serpents do.
 From Watson (1968, p. 165). |
The DNA molecule is a single long chain made up of two interwoven ribbons that are connected by the four bases.
- These bases can only match up in specific pairs — A with T, G with C.
- Any other pairing of the bases is impossible, because of the arrangement of their individual atoms: A can bond only with T, G only with C.
This means that one of the two ribbons is the back-to-front duplicate of the other and that the genetic text is double:
- It contains a main text on one of the ribbons, which is read in a precise direction by the transcription enzymes.
- And a backup text, which is inverted and most often not read.
The second ribbon plays two essential roles.
- It allows the repair enzymes to reconstruct the main text in case of damage.
- And, above all, it provides the mechanism for the duplication of the genetic message.
- It suffices to open the double helix as one might unzip a zipper, in order to obtain two separate and complementary ribbons that can then be rebuilt into double ribbons by the duplication enzymes.
- As the latter can place only an A opposite a T and vice versa, and a G opposite a C, and vice versa, this leads to the formation of two twin double helixes, which are identical in every respect to the original.
- Twins are therefore central to life, just as ancient myths indicate, and they are associated with a serpentine form.
Without this copying mechanism, a cell would never be able to duplicate itself, and life would not exist.
DNA is the informational molecule of life, and its very essence consists in being both single and double, like the mythical serpents.
DNA and its duplication mechanisms are the same for all living creatures. The only thing that changes from one species to another is the order of the letters.
- This constancy goes back to the very origins of life on earth.
- According to biologist Robert Pollack:
- “The planet's surface has changed many times over, but DNA and the cellular machinery for its replication have remained constant. Schrödinger's 'aperiodic crystal' understated DNA's stability: no stone, no mountain, no ocean, not even the sky above us, have been stable and constant for this long; nothing inanimate, no matter how complicated, has survived unchanged for a fraction of the time that DNA and its machinery of replication have coexisted.” [8]
[8][8] Pollack (1994, pp. 29-30).
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At the beginning of its existence, some 4.5 billion years ago, planet earth was an inhospitable place for life.
- As a molten lava fireball, its surface was radioactive.
- Its water was so hot it existed only in the form of incondensable vapor.
- And its atmosphere, devoid of any breathable oxygen, contained poisonous gases such as cyanide and formaldehyde.
Approximately 3.9 billion years ago, the earth's surface cooled sufficiently to form a thin crust on top of the molten magma.
- Strangely, life, and thus DNA, appeared relatively quickly thereafter.
- Scientists have found traces of biological activity in sedimentary rocks that are 3.85 billion years old, and fossil hunters have found actual bacterial fossils that are 3.5 billion years old.
During the first 2 billion years of life on earth, the planet was inhabited only by anaerobic bacteria, for which oxygen is a poison.
- These bacteria lived in water, and some of them learned to use the hydrogen contained in the H2O molecule while expelling the oxygen.
- This opened up new and more efficient metabolic pathways.
- The gradual enrichment of the atmosphere with oxygen allowed the appearance of a new kind of cell, capable of using oxygen and equipped with a nucleus for packing together its DNA.
- These nucleated cells are at least thirty times more voluminous than bacterial cells.
- According to biologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan:
- “The biological transition between bacteria and nucleated cells … is so sudden it cannot effectively be explained by gradual changes over time.”
From that moment onward, life as we know it took shape. Nucleated cells joined together to form the first multicellular beings, such as algae.
- The latter also produce oxygen by photosynthesis.
- Atmospheric oxygen increased to about 21 percent and then stabilized at this level approximately 500 million years ago — thankfully, because if oxygen were a few percent higher, living beings would combust spontaneously.
- According to Margulis and Sagan, this state of affairs “gives the impression of a conscious decision to maintain balance between danger and opportunity, between risk and benefit.” [9]
[9] - [10][9] Both quotes are from Margulis and Sagan (1986, pp. 115-116, 111).
[10] Lewontin (1992) writes:
For estimates regarding the current number of species, see:
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Around 550 million years ago, life exploded into a grand variety of multicellular species, algae and more complex plants and animals, living not only in water, but on land and in the air.
- Of all the species living at that time, not one has survived to this day.
- According to certain estimates, almost all of the species that have ever lived on earth have already disappeared, and there are between 3 million and 50 million species living currently.[10]
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DNA is a master of transformation, just like mythical serpents.
- The cell-based life DNA informs made the air we breathe, the landscape we see, and the mind-boggling diversity of living beings of which we are a part.
- In 4 billion years, it has multiplied itself into an incalculable number of species, while remaining exactly the same.
Inside the nucleus, DNA coils and uncoils, writhes and wriggles.
- Scientists often compare the form and movements of this long molecule to those of a snake.
- Molecular biologist Christopher Wills writes: “The two chains of DNA resemble two snakes coiled around each other in some elaborate courtship ritual.” [11]
[11][11] Wills (1991, p. 36).
|
To sum up, DNA is
- a snake-shaped master of transformation
- that lives in water and
- is both extremely long and small, single and double.
Just like the cosmic serpent.
|
DNA and the cell-based life it codes for are
an extremely sophisticated technology that far surpasses our present-day understanding. DNA was initially developed elsewhere than on earth — which it radically transformed on its arrival some four billion years ago. |
One sunny afternoon that spring I was sitting in the garden with my children. Birds were singing in the trees, and my mind began to wander.
- There I was, a product of twentieth-century rationality, my faith requiring numbers and molecules rather than myths.
- Yet I was now confronted with mythological numbers relative to a molecule, in which I had to believe.
- Inside my body sitting there in the garden sun were 125 billion miles of DNA.
- I was wired to the hilt with DNA threads and until recently had known nothing about it.
- Was this astronomical number really just a “useless but amusing fact,” [1] as some scientists would have it?
- Or did it indicate that the dimensions, at least, of our DNA are cosmic?
Some biologists describe DNA as an “ancient high biotechnology,” containing “over a hundred trillion times as much information by volume as our most sophisticated information storage devices.” Could one still speak of a technology in these circumstances?
- Yes, because there is no other word to qualify this duplicate, information-storing molecule.
- DNA is only ten atoms wide and as such constitutes a sort of ultimate technology:
- It is organic and so miniaturized that it approaches the limits of material existence.[2]
[1] - [3][1] Jones (1993) writes:
[2] Margulis and Sagan (1986) write:
[3] Luna and Amaringo (1991, pp. 33-34). |
Shamans, meanwhile, claim that the vital principle that animates all living creatures comes from the cosmos and is minded. As ayahuasquero Pablo Amaringo says:
- “A plant may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that is conscious, that sees everything, which is the soul of the plant, its essence, what makes it alive.”
According to Amaringo, these spirits are veritable beings, and humans are also filled with them:
- “Even the hair, the eyes, the ears are full of beings. You see all this when ayahuasca is strong.” [3]
During the past weeks, I had come to consider that the perspective of biologists could be reconciled with that of ayahuasqueros and that both could be true at the same time. According to the stereoscopic image I could see by gazing at both perspectives simultaneously,
- DNA and the cell-based life it codes for are an extremely sophisticated technology that far surpasses our present-day understanding
- And that was initially developed elsewhere than on earth — which it radically transformed on its arrival some four billion years ago.
|
It was as if the instructions were to
remain hidden from their beneficiaries, as if we were wired in such a way that we could not see the wires. |
I did not know what to make of these thoughts.
- Staring blankly at the lawn in front of me, I started following a shiny, black ant making its way across the thick blades of grass with the determination of a tank.
- It was heading toward the colony of aphids in the tree at the bottom of the garden.
- This was an ant belonging to a species that herds aphids and "milks" them for their sweet secretions.
I began thinking that this ant had a visual system quite different from my own that apparently functioned every bit as well.
- Despite our differences in size and shape, our genetic information was written in the same language — which we were both incapable of seeing, given that DNA is smaller than visible light, even to the eyes of an ant.
I found it interesting that the language containing the instructions for the creation of different visual systems should be itself invisible. It was as if the instructions were to remain hidden from their beneficiaries, as if we were wired in such a way that we could not see the wires. …
Why?
I tried reconsidering the question from a "shamanic" point of view. It was as if these beings inside us wanted to hide. … But that's what the Ashaninca say! They call the invisible beings who created life the "maninkari," literally "those who are hidden"!
|
I ended up with a hypothesis
suggesting that a human mind can communicate in defocalized consciousness with the global network of DNA-based life. |
I began my investigation with the enigma of "plant communication."
- I went on to accept the idea that hallucinations could be a source of verifiable information.
- And I ended up with a hypothesis suggesting that a human mind can communicate in defocalized consciousness with the global network of DNA-based life.
- All this contradicts principles of Western knowledge.
Nevertheless, my hypothesis is testable.
- A test would consist of seeing whether institutionally respected biologists could find biomolecular information in the hallucinatory world of ayahuasqueros.
- However, this hypothesis is currently not receivable by institutional biology, because it impinges on the discipline's presuppositions.
Biology has a blind spot of historical origin.
|
It wasn't until the 1950s and
the discovery of the role of DNA that the theory of natural selection became generally accepted among scientists. |
My hypothesis suggests that what scientists call DNA corresponds to the animate essences that shamans say communicate with them and animate all life forms.
- Modern biology, however, is founded on the notion that nature is not animated by an intelligence and therefore cannot communicate.
This presupposition comes from the materialist tradition established by the naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
- In those days, it took courage to question the explanations about life afforded by a literal reading of the Bible.
- By adopting a scientific method based on direct observation and the classification of species, Linnaeus, Lamarck, Darwin, and Wallace audaciously concluded that the different species had evolved over time — and had not been created in fixed form six thousand years previously in the Garden of Eden.
Wallace and Darwin simultaneously proposed a material mechanism to explain the evolution of species.
- According to their theory of natural selection, organisms presented slight variations from one generation to the next, which were either retained or eliminated in the struggle for survival.
- This idea rested on a circular argument: Those who survive are the most able to survive.
- But it seemed to explain both the variation of species and the astonishing perfection of the natural world, as it retained only the improvements.
- Above all, it took God out of the picture and enabled biologists to study nature without having to worry about a divine plan within.
For almost a century, the theory of natural selection was contested.
- Vitalists, like Bergson, rejected its stubborn materialism, pointing out that it lacked a mechanism to explain the origin of the variations.
- It wasn't until the 1950s and the discovery of the role of DNA that the theory of natural selection became generally accepted among scientists.
- The DNA molecule seemed to demonstrate the materiality of heredity and to provide the missing mechanism.
- As DNA is self-duplicating and transmits its information to proteins, biologists concluded that information could not flow back from proteins to DNA; therefore, genetic variation could only come from errors in the duplication process.
- Francis Crick termed this the “central dogma” of the young discipline called molecular biology.
[1][1] Crick (1981, p. 58).
|
- “Chance is the only true source of novelty,” he wrote.[1]
|
The materialist approach in molecular
biology … rested on the unprovable presupposition that chance is the only source of novelty in nature, and that nature is devoid of any goal, intention, or consciousness. |
The discovery of DNA's role and the formulation in molecular terms of the theory of natural selection gave a new impetus to materialist philosophy.
- It became possible to contend on a scientific basis that life was a purely material phenomenon.
- Francis Crick wrote: “The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry” (original italics).
- François Jacob, another Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist, wrote:
- “The processes which occur in living beings at the microscopic level of molecules are in no way different from those analyzed by physics and chemistry in inert systems.” [2]
The materialist approach in molecular biology went from strength to strength — but it rested on the unprovable presupposition that chance is the only source of novelty in nature, and that nature is devoid of any goal, intention, or consciousness.
- Jacques Monod, also a Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist, expressed this idea clearly in his famous essay Chance and necessity:
- “The cornerstone of the scientific method is the postulate that nature is objective. In other words, the systematic denial that 'true' knowledge can be reached by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes — that is to say, of 'purpose'. … This pure postulate is impossible to demonstrate, for it is obviously impossible to imagine an experiment proving the nonexistence anywhere in nature of a purpose, or a pursued end. But the postulate of objectivity is consubstantial with science, and has guided the whole of its prodigious development for three centuries. It is impossible to escape it, even provisionally or in a limited area, without departing from the domain of science itself” [3] (original italics).
|
… such coding systems were considered
up until the discovery of the genetic code as “exclusively human phenomena” — that is, phenomena that require the presence of an intelligence to exist. |
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.
[2] - [4][2] Crick (1966, p. 10) and Jacob (1974, p. 320). [3] Monod (1971, pp. 30-31). [4] Jakobson (1973, p. 61). He also writes:
|
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.
|
One of the facts that troubled me most
was the astronomical length of the DNA containedin a human body: 125 billion miles. |
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 physiochemical 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.”
[5] - [6][5] Calladine and Drew (1992) write:
[6] Piaget (1975) writes:
|
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.
|
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. |
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]
[7] - [8][7] Scott quoted in Freedman (1994), whose article inspired this paragraph.
[8] Calladine and Drew (1992, p. 37).
|
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.” [8]
|
How could nature not be conscious if our
own consciousness is produced by nature? |
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 cells 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 companions.
- How could this “amazing, stately pavane” [9] occur without some form of intention?
[9] - [11][9] Margulis and Sagan (1986, p. 145).
[10] Wade (1995a) writes:
[11] Trémolières (1994, p. 138) considers that
|
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? [11]
|
The rational approach tends to
minimize what it does not understand. |
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]
[12] - [13][12] Hunt (1996) writes:
[13] Monod (1971, p. 18).
|
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.
|
It would have been just as easy
to call it mystery DNA, for instance. |
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.
[14] - [15][14] According to several recent studies, non-coding DNA might actually play a structural role and display the characteristics of a language, the meaning of which remains to be determined.
[15] The twenty amino acids used by nature to build proteins vary in shape and function.
|
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]
|
In a burst of creativity like nothing
before nor since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole of the animal kingdom. … |
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?
[16] - [18][16] Wesson (1991, p. 15). [17] Trémolières (1994, p. 51).
[18] Nash (1995, 68, 70). |
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]
|
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 … |
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.” [21]
[19] - [22][19] See Wesson (1991, p. 52).
[20] Mayr (1988, pp. 529-530).
[21] Shapiro (1996, p. 64). [22] Mycoplasma genitalium is the smallest genome currently known, at 580,000 base pairs.
|
In the middle of the 1990s, biologists sequenced the first complete genomes of free-living organisms.
- So far, the smallest known bacterial genome contains 580,000 DNA letters.[22]
- This is an enormous amount of information, comparable to the contents of a small telephone directory.
- When one considers that bacteria are the smallest units of life as we know it, it becomes even more difficult to understand how the first bacterium could have taken form spontaneously in a lifeless, chemical soup.
- How can a small telephone directory of information emerge from random processes?
|
… the existence of master genes points to
the insufficiency of the neodarwinian model and to the necessity of introducing into the theory of evolution mechanisms, either known or to be discovered, that contradict this model's basic principles. |
The genomes of more complex organisms are even more daunting in size.
- Bakers yeast is a unicellular organism that contains 12 million DNA letters;
- The genome of nematodes, which are rather simple multicellular organisms, contains 100 million DNA letters.
- Mouse genomes, like human genomes, contain approximately 3 billion DNA letters.
By mapping, sequencing, and comparing different genomes, biologists have recently found further levels of complexity.
- Some sequences are highly conserved between species.
- For example, 400 human genes match very similar genes in yeast.
- This means these genes have stayed in a nearly identical place and form over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, from a very primitive form of life to a human being.[23]
[23] - [25][23] See Butler (1996) on the 12 million base pair genome of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
[24] Langaney (1997, p. 122).
[25] See Hilts (1996, p. C19) on genes “that appear to clump together in families that work on similar problems.”
|
Some genetic sequences, known as "master genes," control hundreds of other genes like an on/off switch.
- These master genes also seem to be highly conserved across species.
- For example, flies and human beings have a very similar gene that controls the development of the eye, though their eyes are very different.
- Geneticist André Langaney writes that the existence of master genes “points to the insufficiency of the neodarwinian model and to the necessity of introducing into the theory of evolution mechanisms, either known or to be discovered, that contradict this model's basic principles.” [24]
Recent gene mapping has revealed that, in some areas of the DNA text, genes are thirty times more dense than in other areas, and some of the genes appear to clump together in families that work on similar problems.
- In some cases, gene clumps are highly conserved across species, as in the X chromosome of mice and humans, for example.
- In both species, the X chromosome is a giant molecule of DNA, some 160 million nucleotides long; it is one of the pair of chromosomes that determine whether an offspring is male or female.
- The mapping of the X chromosome has shown that genes are bunched together mostly in five gene-rich regions, with lengthy, apparently desert regions of DNA in between, and that mice and humans have much the same set of genes on their X chromosomes even though the two species have followed separate evolutionary paths for 80 million years.[25]
|
How can one analyze a text if one
presupposes that no intelligence wrote it? |
Recent work on genetic sequences is starting to reveal much greater complexity than could have been conceived even ten years previous to the data's emergence.
- How are scientists going to make sense of the overwhelming complexity of DNA texts? Robert Pollack proposes “that DNA is not merely an informational molecule, but is also a form of text, and that therefore it is best understood by analytical ways of thinking commonly applied to other forms of text, for example, books.” [26]
This seems to be a sensible suggestion, but it begs the question: How can one analyze a text if one presupposes that no intelligence wrote it?
Despite these essential contradictions, which I sum up here in a few lines but which could fill entire books, the theory of natural selection remains firmly in place in the minds of most biologists.
- This is because it is always possible to claim that the appropriate mutations occurred by chance and were selected.
- But this un-demonstrable proposition is denounced by an increasing number of scientists.
- Pier Luigi Luisi talks of the “tautology of molecular Darwinism … [which] is unable to elicit concepts other than those from which it has been originally constructed.”
[26] - [27][26] Pollack (1997, p. 674). [27] Luisi (1993, p. 19) and Popper (1974, pp. 168, 171).
|
The circularity of the Darwinian theory means that it is not falsifiable and therefore not truly scientific.
- The “falsifiability criterion” is the cornerstone of twentieth-century scientific method.
- It was developed by philosopher Karl Popper, who argued that one could never prove a scientific theory to be correct, because only an infinite number of confirming results would constitute definitive proof.
- Popper proposed instead to test theories in ways that seek to contradict, or falsify, them; the absence of contradictory evidence thereby becomes proof of the theory's validity. Popper writes:
- “I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme — a possible framework for testable scientific theories. … It is metaphysical because it is not testable” [27] (original italics)
Biology is currently divided between a majority who consider the theory of natural selection to be true and established as fact and a minority who question it.
However, the critics of natural selection have yet to come up with a new theory to replace the old one and institutions sustain current orthodoxies by their inertia.
- A new biological paradigm is still a long way off.
|
My hypothesis is based on the idea
that DNA in particular and nature in general are minded. |
Presuppositions, postulates, and circular arguments pertain more to faith than to science.
- My approach in this book starts from the idea that it is of utmost importance to respect the faith of others, no matter how strange, whether it is shamans who believe plants communicate or biologists who believe nature is inanimate.
I do not intend to attack anybody's faith, but to demarcate the blind spot of the rational and fragmented gaze of contemporary biology and to explain why my hypothesis is condemned in advance to remain in that spot.
To sum up:
- My hypothesis is based on the idea that DNA in particular and nature in general are minded.
- This contravenes the founding principle of the molecular biology that is the current orthodoxy.
|
The shamanism of which the indigenous
people of the Amazon are the guardians represents knowledge accumulated over thousands of years in the most biologically diverse place on earth. |
Meanwhile, the Ashaninca people I knew in the Pichis claimed that the best shamans were Shipibo-Conibo (who live in the same area as Amaringo).
- Ruperto Gomez, the ayahuasquero who initiated me, did his apprenticeship with the Shipibo-Conibo, and this conferred undeniable prestige on him.
- So it would seem that studies "abroad" are considered better and that the high place of Amazonian shamanism is always somewhere other than where one happens to be.[6]
Shamanism resembles an academic discipline (such as anthropology or molecular biology); with its practitioners, fundamental researchers, specialists, and schools of thought — it is a way of apprehending the world that evolves constantly.
- One thing is certain: Both indigenous and mestizo shamans consider people like the Shipibo-Conibo, the Tukano, the Kamsá, and the Huitoto as the equivalents to universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and the Sorbonne;[7] they are the highest reference in matters of knowledge.
- In this sense, ayahuasca-based shamanism is an essentially indigenous phenomenon.
- It belongs to the indigenous people of Western Amazonia, who hold the keys to a way of knowing that they have practiced without interruption for at least five thousand years.
- In comparison, the universities of the Western world are less than nine hundred years old.
[6] - [7][6] See Taussig (1987, p. 179). [7] Chaumeil (1992) writes:
|
The shamanism of which the indigenous people of the Amazon are the guardians represents knowledge accumulated over thousands of years in the most biologically diverse place on earth.
- Certainly, shamans say they acquire their knowledge directly from the spirits, but they grow up in cultures where shamanic visions are stored in myths.
- In this way mythology informs shamanism: The invisible, life-creating maninkari spirits are the ones whose feats Ashaninca mythology relates, and it is also the maninkari who talk to Ashaninca shamans in their visions and tell them how to heal.
An indigenous culture with sufficient territory, and bilingual and intercultural education, is in a better position to maintain and cultivate its mythology and shamanism.
- Conversely, the confiscation of their lands and imposition of foreign education, which turns their young people into amnesiacs, threatens the survival not only of these people, but of an entire way of knowing.
- It is as if one were burning down the oldest universities in the world and their libraries, one after another — thereby sacrificing the knowledge of the worlds future generations.
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I decided to tell my story in an
attempt to create an account that would be comprehensible across disciplines and outside the academy. |
In this book I chose an autobiographical and narrative approach for several reasons.
- First, I do not believe in an objective point of view with an exclusive monopoly on reality.
- So it seemed important to expose the inevitable presuppositions that any observer has, so that readers may come to their opinion in full knowledge of the setting.[8]
In this sense I belong to the recent movement within anthropology that views the discipline as a form of interpretation rather than as a science.
[8] - [9][8] Rosaldo (1980) writes:
[9] "Learned analysis" often escapes the understanding not only of those who are its object, but of many Western individuals.
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- However, even among my colleagues who work in this fashion, listening to people carefully, recording and transcribing their words, and interpreting them as well as they can, there remains a problem I have tried to avoid — namely, the compartmentalization of knowledge into disciplines, which means that the discourse of a given specialist is only understandable to his or her immediate colleagues.[9]
- In my opinion, subjects such as DNA and the knowledge of indigenous people are too important to be entrusted solely to the focalized gaze of academic specialists in biology or anthropology; they concern indigenous people themselves, but also midwives, farmers, musicians, and all the rest.
- I decided to tell my story in an attempt to create an account that would be comprehensible across disciplines and outside the academy.
This decision was inspired by shamanic traditions, which invariably state that images, metaphors, and stories are the best means to transmit knowledge.
- In this sense, myths are "scientific narratives," or stories about knowledge (the word "science" comes from the Latin scire, "to know").
I was fortunate to choose this approach, because it was in telling my story that I discovered the real story I wanted to tell.
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I draw my inspiration from shamanism,
which restsnot on doctrine, but on experience. |
There was a price to pay for implicating myself in my work like this.
- I spent many sleepless nights and put a strain on my personal life.
- I was truly bowled over by working on this book.
- At the time, I felt sure it was going to change the world.
- It took months of talking with numerous friends to understand that my hypothesis was not even receivable by official science, despite the scientific elements it contains.
- Since then, I've calmed down and no longer talk away for hours.
We live in a time when it is difficult to speak seriously about ones spirituality.
- Often one only has to state one's convictions to be considered a preacher.
- I, too, support the idea that everybody should be free to believe what they want and that it is nobody's business to tell others what they should believe.
- So I will not describe in detail the impact of my work on my own spirituality, and I will not tell readers what to think about the connections I have established.
Here, too, I draw my inspiration from shamanism, which rests not on doctrine, but on experience.
- The shaman is simply a guide, who conducts the initiate to the spirits.
- The initiate picks up the information revealed by the spirits and does what he or she wants with it.
- Likewise, in this book, I provide a number of connections, with complete references for those who wish to follow a particular trail.
- In the end, it is up to the readers to draw the spiritual conclusions they see fit.
Is there a goal to life? Do we exist for a reason?
- I believe so, and I think that the combination of shamanism and biology gives interesting answers to these questions.
- But I do not feel ready to discuss them from a personal point of view.
The microscopic world of DNA, and its proteins and enzymes, is teeming inside us and is enough to make us marvel.
- Yet rational discourse, which holds a monopoly on the subject, denies itself a sense of wonder.
- Current biologists condemn themselves, through their beliefs, to describe DNA and the cell-based life for which it codes as if they were blind people discussing movies or objective anthropologists explaining the hallucinatory sphere of which they have no experience: They oblige themselves to consider an animate reality as if it were inanimate.
By ignoring this obligation, and by considering shamanism and biology at the same time, stereoscopically, I saw DNA snakes. They were alive.
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Scientific discovery often originates
from a combination of focalized and defocalized consciousness. |
The origin of knowledge is a subject that anthropologists neglect — which is one of the reasons that prompted me to write this book.
- However, anthropologists are not alone; scientists in general seem to have a similar difficulty.
- On closer examination, the reason for this becomes obvious: Many of science's central ideas seem to come from beyond the limits of rationalism.
- René Descartes dreams of an angel who explains the basic principles of materialist rationalism to him;
- Albert Einstein daydreams in a tram, approaching another, and conceives the theory of relativity;
- James Watson scribbles on a newspaper in a train, then rides his bicycle to reach the conviction (having "borrowed" Rosalind Franklin's radiophotographic work) that DNA has the form of a double helix.[10] And so on.
[10] - [12][10] For a detailed discussion of the role of intuition, dreaming, imagination, and illumination in the history of scientific discoveries, see Beveridge (1950).
[11] Beveridge (1950, p. 72).
[12] Artaud (1979, p. 193).
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Scientific discovery often originates from a combination of focalized and defocalized consciousness.
- Typically, a researcher spends months in the lab working on a problem, considering the data to the point of saturation, then attains illumination while jogging, daydreaming, lying in bed making mental pictures, driving a car, cooking, shaving, bathing — in brief, while thinking about something else and defocalizing.
- W. I. B. Beveridge writes in The art of scientific investigation:
- “The most characteristic circumstances of an intuition are a period of intense work on the problem accompanied by a desire for its solution, abandonment of the work perhaps with attention to something else, then the appearance of the idea with dramatic suddenness and often a sense of certainty. Often there is a feeling of exhilaration and perhaps surprise that the idea had not been thought of previously.” [11]
During this investigation I complemented months of straightforward scholastic work (reading, note taking, and categorizing) with defocalized approaches (such as walking in nature, nocturnal soliloquies, dissonant music, daydreaming), which greatly helped me find my way.
- My inspiration for this is once again shamanic.
- But shamans are not the only ones to seek knowledge by cultivating defocalization.
- Artists have done this throughout the ages.
- As Antonin Artaud wrote: “I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.” [12]
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How can one explain these similarities
with a concept other than chance? |
Did I see imaginary connections in my fever?
- Am I wrong in linking DNA to these cosmic serpents from around the world, these sky-ropes and axis mundi?
- Some of my colleagues will think so. Here's one of the reasons:
In the nineteenth century the first anthropologists set about comparing cultures and elaborating theories on the basis of the similarities they found.
- When they discovered, for instance, that bagpipes were played not only in Scotland, but in Arabia and the Ukraine, they established false connections between these cultures.
- Then they realized that people could do similar things for different reasons.
- Since then, anthropology has backed away from grand generalizations, denounced “abuses of the comparative method,” and locked itself into specificity bordering on myopia.
- This is why anthropologists who study Western Amazonia's hallucinatory shamanism limit themselves to specific analyses of a given culture — failing to see the essential common points between cultures.
- So their fine-grained analyses allow them to see that the diet of an apprentice ayahuasquero is based on the consumption of bananas and/or fish.
- But they do not notice that this diet is practiced throughout Western Amazonia, and so they do not consider that it may have a biochemical basis — which in fact it does.
By shunning comparisons between cultures, one ends up masking true connections and fragmenting reality a little more, without even realizing it.
Is the cosmic serpent of the Shipibo-Conibo, the Aztecs, the Australian Aborigines, and the Ancient Egyptians the same?
- No, will reply the anthropologists who insist on cultural specificity; to believe otherwise, according to them, comes down to making the same mistake as Mircea Eliade four decades ago, when he detached all those symbols from their contexts, obliterated the sociocultural aspect of phenomena, mutilated the facts, and so on.
- The critique is well known now, and it is time to turn it on its head.
- In the name of what does one mask fundamental similarities in human symbolism — if not out of a stubborn loyalty to rationalist fragmentation?
- How can one explain these similarities with a concept other than chance — which is more an absence of concept than anything?
- Why insist on taking reality apart, but never try putting it back together again?
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According to my hypothesis,
shamans take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to biomolecular information. |
According to my hypothesis, shamans take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to biomolecular information.
- But what actually goes on in the brain/mind of an ayahuasquero when this occurs?
- What is the nature of a shamans communication with the animate essences of nature?
- The clear answer is that more research is needed in consciousness, shamanism, molecular biology, and their interrelatedness.
Rationalism separates things to understand them.
- But its fragmented disciplines have limited perspectives and blind spots.
- And as any driver knows, it is important to pay attention to blind spots, because they can contain vital information.
- To reach a fuller understanding of reality, science will have to shift its gaze.
- Could shamanism help science to defocalize?
- My experience indicates that engaging shamanic knowledge requires looking into a great number of disciplines and thinking about how they fit together.
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We do not have the slightest idea
about how life got started. |
Finally, a last question: Where does life come from?
Over the last decade, scientific research has come up against the impossibility that a single bacterium, representing the smallest unit of independent life as we know it, could have emerged by chance from any kind of "prebiotic soup." [13]
- Given that a cosmic origin, such as the one proposed by Francis Crick in his “directed panspermia” speculation, is not scientifically verifiable, scientists have focused almost exclusively on terrestrial scenarios.[14]
- According to these, precursor molecules took shape (by chance) and prepared the way for a world based on DNA and proteins.
- However, these different scenarios — based on RNA, peptides, clay, undersea volcanic sulfur, or small oily bubbles — all propose explanations relying on systems that have, by definition, been replaced by life as we know it, without leaving any traces.[15]
- These, too, are speculations that cannot be verified scientifically.[16]
The scientific study of the origins of life leads to an impasse, where agnosticism seems to be the only reasonable and rigorous position.
- As Robert Shapiro writes in his book Origins: A skeptic's guide to the creation of life on Earth:
- “We do not have the slightest idea about how life got started. The very particular set of chemicals that were necessary remains unknown to us. The process itself could have included an improbable event, as it could have happened according to a practically ineluctable sequence. It could have required several hundred million years, or only a few millennia. It could have happened in a tepid pool, or in a hydrothermal source at the bottom of the ocean, in a bubble in the atmosphere, or somewhere else than on Earth, out in the cosmos.” [17]
Any certitude on this question is a matter of faith.
- So what do shamanic and mythological traditions say in this regard? According to Lawrence Sullivan, who has studied the indigenous religions of South America in detail:
- “In the myths recorded to date, the majority of South American cultures show little extended interest in absolute beginnings.” [18]
[13] - [19][13] The contents of this famous soup are problematic.
[14] Reisse (1988) writes about panspermia
[15] In the early 1980s, researchers discovered that certain RNA molecules, called "ribozymes," could cut themselves up and stick themselves back together again, acting as their own catalysts. This led to the following speculation:
[16] Trémolières (1994) writes:
[17] Shapiro (1994a, p. II).
[18] Sullivan (1988, p. 33). [19] Chuang-Tzu (1968, p. 43) |
Where does life come from?
- Perhaps the answer is not graspable by mere human beings.
- Chuang-Tzu implied as much a long time ago, when he wrote:
- “There is a beginning.
There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning.
There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning.
There is being.
There is nonbeing.
There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing.
There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing.
Suddenly there is nonbeing.
But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing.
Now I have just said something.
But I do not know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something.” [19]
All things considered, wisdom requires not only the investigation of many things, but contemplation of the mystery.
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Amaringo, Pablo Anaconda Ancon, Laureano Ant Artaud, Antonin Avíreri Axis of the world Ayahuasca |
58-59, 78-79, 87, 121 49-50, 55, 65, 67, 73-75, 85, 89 67, 85 8, 108 125 23-24, 53, 82 54, 72-74, 78, 87, 97 1, 4, 6-8, 11, 18-19, 21, 24, 28-32, 37, 44-47, 49-52, 55, 57-59, 73, 79, 84, 86-87, 90, 94, 97-98, 115, 121-122 |
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Bergson, Henri Beveridge, W. I. B. Biophoton Bourdieu, Pierre Brain |
103 125 97-101 14, 41 11-12, 38, 43-45, 48-50, 52, 80, 90-91, 93-94, 107 |
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Calladine, Chris Campbell, Joseph Castaneda, Carlos Chaumeil, Jean-Pierre Chuang-Tzu Chucano Santos, José Consciousness Crick, Francis Curare |
77, 106 55-56, 59 1, 5 51 66, 83, 128 73 11, 42-43, 45, 49, 57, 90-91, 94, 99, 101-102, 104, 107-108, 125, 127 61-63, 103-104, 128 36-37, 57, 84, 93 |
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Darwin, Charles Descartes, René Devereux, George Dimethyltryptamine DNA Drew, Horace |
12, 103, 111-113 125 15 11, 44, 94-95, 98-99, 101 48-49, 51-63, 68-72, 74, 76-79, 82-85, 89-91, 94-99, 101-107, 109, 111-115, 77, 106 |
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Education, bilingual Einstein, Albert Eliade, Mircea Frank-Kamenetskii, Maxim Franklin, Rosalind |
118-119, 122 125 17, 54, 59, 72, 74, 87, 126 72, 101 125 |
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Gaia Gebhart-Sayer, Angelika Geertz, Clifford Gomez, Ruperto Gurvich, Alexander Harner, Michael Heraclitus Ho, Mae-Wan Holmes, Sherlock Huxley, Francis |
56 57, 65 18 4, 84, 122 100 47-51, 59, 63 74 99 42 64 |
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Jacob, François Jakobson, Roman “Junk” DNA Kekulé, August Koch-Grünberg, Theodor |
104 104 77, 101, 109 87 72 |
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Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Langaney, André Lévi-Strauss, Claude Linnaeus, Carl von LSD Luisi, Pier Luigi Luna, Luis Eduardo |
103 112 13-15, 17, 53 103 44, 94-96 113 18, 58 |
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Malinowski, Bronislaw Maninkari Margulis, Lynn Mayr, Ernst Métraux, Alfred Monod, Jacques Mundkur, Balaji Nash, J. Madeleine Nicotine |
12 23-24, 28, 31, 81-82, 90, 122 70 111 54, 71 104, 108 88 110 90-93, 98-99, 101 |
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Perez Shuma, Carlos Piaget, Jean Pollack, Robert Popp, Fritz-Albert Popper, Karl Quartz Radio waves Receptor Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo |
19, 40, 54, 74, 82, 86, 90, 94, 97, 117, 119 105 70, 113 99, 113 113 55, 100-101 28-29, 89, 97 43, 91-93, 95-96, 98, 100-101, 106, 109 49-50, 57, 100 |
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Sagan, Dorion Schultes, Richard E. Scott, Alwyn Serotonin Serpent Shapiro, James Shapiro, Robert Shingari, Abelardo Snake Stereogram Strassman, Rick Sullivan, Lawrence |
70 11, 38, 73 106 43, 45, 52, 95 49-51, 53-57, 59, 61, 63-69, 71-74, 78, 81, 85, 87-90, 119, 126 111 128 25 1, 7-8, 19, 21, 27, 29-32, 34, 44-45, 49-51, 55-56, 58, 63-67, 71, 73, 85-89, 93, 124 41-42, 46 94 128 |
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Tangoa, Luis Television Tobacco Townsley, Graham Twins Twisted language Tylor, Edward Visual system |
65, 67 4, 60, 84, 95 7, 20, 24, 8-29, 31-32, 90-93, 97-98, 100 52, 74-75 51, 53, 59, 69, 82 75, 77 12 43, 80-81 |
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Wallace, Alfred Watson, James Weiss, Gerald Wesson, Robert Wilbert, Johannes Wills, Christopher Yahweh Zeus |
103 61, 125 23-24, 72, 82 110 93 7 56 56 |
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|
Wade (1995a) Wagner (1969) Wan et al. (1991) Watson (1968) Watson et al. (1987) Weiss (1969) Wesson (1991) Whitten (1976) |
107-[10] 96-[17] 91-[4] 125-[10] 77-[23], 77-[24], 77-[25], 23-[2], 24-[3], 24-[4], 80-[4], 91-[3], 108-[13]. 52-[1], 52-[2] |
Wilbert (1972) Wills (1989) Wilson (1984) Wright (1992) Yielding and Sterglanz (1968) Yoon (1995) Zhang and Nicklas (1996) |
93-[9] 68-[6], 106-[8] 85-[9], 88-[17], 108-[12] 11-[2] 96-[17], 96-[18] 112-[24] 107-[9] |
