Why Us?, by James Le Fanu
The past half-century has seen the most astonishing concentration of scientific discoveries in history. In physical terms, from the Big Bang to the Double Helix, our understanding of the universe, of life and ourselves has been extended with an intensity and on a scale that may never be repeated. And in terms of cracking the riddle of what allows ourselves and all other species to function, no discoveries held more promise than the unravelling of the genetic code which drives all life and of those workings of the human brain uncovered by neuroscience. But in each case, as Dr James Le Fanu shows in his enthralling book, these have brought us up against a dead end.
Having decoded the genome which we imagined might help to explain, inter alia, why we are different from monkeys, mice and sea urchins, we make the startling discovery that genetically we are all but identical. So what is it that determines that much the same genetic coding can produce such an infinite variety of life forms? Clearly there is some other hugely important factor at work here, some ‘formative impulse’ which science has not yet begun to comprehend.
Similarly the more our scanners have been able to tell us about the operations and structures of the human brain, the more it becomes clear that we cannot even fully understand how it works physically, let alone how it gives rise to all that non-material dimension of ‘mind’ which encompasses almost everything of who we are and how we think, feel and behave.
As a medical doctor, Le Fanu argues that what we have been seeing here is the culmination of a process which has for so long driven our attempts to explain who we are and how we came to be on this earth in purely material terms. The watershed moment in this story was the publication, in 1859, of The Origin of Species, in which Charles Darwin laid out his thesis that the evolution of life could be explained solely by the process of natural selection, whereby an infinite series of minute variations gradually turned one form of life into another.
The greatest stumbling block to this argument was that evolution has repeatedly taken place in leaps forward so sudden and so complex that they could not possibly have been accounted for by the gradual process he suggested — the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of new life forms, the complexities of the eye, the post-Cretaceous explosion of mammals. Again and again some new development emerged which required a whole mass of interdependent changes to take place simultaneously, such as the transformation of reptiles into feathered, hollow-boned and warm-blooded birds.
As even Darwin himself acknowledged, these jumps in the story might have seemed to render his thesis ‘absurd’. He might therefore have hypothesised that some other critically important factor seemed to be at work, some ‘organising power’ which had allowed these otherwise inexplicable leaps to take place. But so possessed was he by the elegant simplicity of his theory that, waving such thoughts aside, he made a leap of faith that it must be right, regardless of the evidence — and in the increasingly materialistic mid-19th century, his thesis was an idea whose time had come. Thus has his belief that life evolved solely through a material process continued to possess the minds of scientists to this day.
What is psychologically fascinating about the mindset of the Darwinians is their inability to recognise just how much they do not know. As Le Fanu observes in a comment which might have served as an epigraph to his book, ‘the greatest obstacle to scientific progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge’. Blinkered in their vision, armoured in the certainty that they have all the answers when they so obviously don’t, neo-Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins rest their beliefs just as much on an unscientific leap of faith as the ‘Creationists’ they so fanatically affect to despise.
But the significance of what has happened in recent years, Le Fanu suggests, is that it has shown us where this fatally limited vision has led us to. In terms of giving us any deeper understanding of who we really are, the deciphering of the genome and of the neural pathways of the brain, astonishing achievements though they may be in themselves, have both turned out to be blind alleys. Above all they have brought home to us just how much has been shut out by that reductionist perversion of science which seeks significance only in the material world.
What Le Fanu calls for is a ‘paradigm shift’, where scientific enquiry can once again be liberated to put us back in touch with so much of what makes us fully human — with the workings not just of the brain but of the mind, with that spiritual sense of awe at the wondrously constructed unity of nature which was never better exemplified than in Isaac Newton, the greatest physical scientist who ever lived. One of the glories of Le Fanu’s scientifically erudite and beautifully written book is that such a sense of wonder is evident on every page, even as he lucidly analyses the limitations of that narrow intellectual prison in which science has languished too long.