LITMIR.BIZ

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sized brain whose potential to comprehend the workings of the universe appears so disproportionate to the needs of the life of a hunter gatherer. It seems obvious that man’s sophistication and intelligence would have conferred some biological advantage, but all living things – birds, bats, dolphins and so on – have their own highly specialised sort of intelligence, different from our own, but which nonetheless maximises their chances of survival. The question, rather, as the biologist Robert Wesson puts it, is why the human brain should come with those striking mental powers, such as the capacity to compose symphonies or to solve abstruse mathematical theorems, that ‘are not of the kind likely to be rewarded by numbers of descendants’.

      The further subsidiary and related riddle is why, for the best part of 150 years, the scientific orthodoxy has prevailed that we know the answer, at least in principle, to that riddle of the Ascent, when, as the palaeontologist Ian Tattersall acknowledges, ‘we have only the dimmest perception of how that dramatic history unfolded’. It has taken just a few pages to draw out the contradictions, at every turn, in the prevailing scientific certainty of ‘natural selection’ as the driving force of the Ascent of Man. There is, of course, no more self-evident truism than that nature ‘selects’ the strong and the fit at the expense of the weak and less than perfect. But that mechanism, by the same logic, can scarcely be invoked to account for standing upright and that massively enlarged brain which, by rights, should have so gravely compromised the survival prospects of those distant ancestors. There is nothing obscure in the observations outlined above: the anatomical implications of the upright stance and the obstetric hazards of that enlarging brain are well documented. Yet there is not the slightest hint in standard evolutionary texts or in the graphic museum displays of the Ascent that they might be problematic – while those who might think so are derisively dismissed, as we have seen, as ‘stupid, ignorant or insane’.

      Most people get by well enough without the slightest inclination to speculate about their origins – and if they do, there is much consolation in that reassuring image first captured by Thomas Huxley of our onward and upward ascent. Still, it is surprising how that history of our origins becomes instantly so much more fascinating and intriguing the moment one reflects, for example, on the marvels of the composite integrity of the human skeleton, or the hidden complexities of grammar that can nonetheless be grasped by a two-year-old child. This discrepancy between the beguiling simplicities of the evolutionary theory and the profundity of the biological phenomena it seeks to explain is very striking. Its claims can never be ‘put to the test’ of experimental verification, as there is no way of telling one way or the other whether the process of natural selection really does account for those extraordinary biological events millions of years ago. The standard evolutionary explanation is, in short, irrefutable – or was irrefutable, until the uncompromising verdict of the genome projects, where the random genetic mutations that might set us apart from our primate cousins, mice, flies or worms are nowhere to be found.

      It can, admittedly, be very difficult to see what all this might add up to, but clearly the ramifications of those seemingly ‘disappointing’ outcomes of the New Genetics and the Decade of the Brain run very deep indeed. We need to know why we have been seduced into supposing that science knows so much more than is clearly the case – and that means exploring further that seemingly unbridgeable gap between those two ‘Orders of Reality’ to seek out the forces that might conjure the beauty and complexity of the natural world from the monotony of those chemical genes, and the richness of human thought and imagination from the electrical activity of the brain.

      But for that we need a yet broader, more Olympian perspective still, to take the full measure of the scope (and limits) of scientific knowledge as so recently revealed, and of how, paradoxically, those ‘disappointing’ outcomes turn out to reveal profound truths about the nature of genetic inheritance and the human mind, so long concealed from view.

      There is no better way to start than through that most fruitful insight into the nature of things that comes with the experience of ‘wonder’, whose dual meaning those Cromagnons would instinctively have appreciated. They would have ‘wondered at’ the pervasive beauty and integrity of the natural world, inferring there was a greater significance to their existence than they could know. They would have responded, too, to the human imperative to ‘wonder why’, seeking out in the regularity of the movement of the stars and the diversity of form of living things those causes, patterns and explanations of the natural world that are ‘the beginning of all knowledge’.

       3 The Limits of Science 1:The Quixotic Universe

      ‘The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.’

       G.K. Chesterton

      The world is so full of wonder, it is a wonder we do not see it to be more so. Every dawn the ‘undeviating and punctual’ sun rises on the horizon to flood our lives with the light and warmth that drive the great cycle of organic life – thirty million times more natural energy in a single second than that generated by manmade power stations in a whole year. And punctually at dusk, its setting brings the day to a close with a triumphant explosion of purple, red and orange streaked across the sky. ‘Of all the gifts bestowed upon us,’ wrote the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, ‘colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.’ Those limitless nuances of colour and light that suffuse our daily lives mark too the procession of the seasons, a constant reminder of the profound mystery of self-renewing life.

      And there is nothing so full of wonder as life itself, the more so now we know that the vital actions of even the humblest bacterium, smaller by far than the full stop at the end of this sentence, involve the concerted action of thousands of separate chemical reactions, by which it transforms the nutrients absorbed from soil and water into the energy and raw materials with which it grows and reproduces itself. But life there is, and marching down through the ages in such an abundance of diversity of shape, form, attributes and propensities as to encompass the full range and more of what might be possible. And what variety! ‘No one can say just how many species there are in these greenhouse-humid jungles,’ writes naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough of the forests of South America.

      There are over forty different species of parrot, over seventy different [species of] monkeys, three hundred [species of] humming birds and tens of thousands of [species of] butterflies. If you are not careful, you can even be bitten by a hundred different kinds of mosquito … Spend a day in the forest, turning over logs, looking beneath bark, sifting through the moist litter of leaves and you will collect hundreds of different kinds of small creatures: moths, caterpillars, spiders, long-nosed bugs, luminous beetles, harmless butterflies disguised as wasps, wasps shaped like ants, sticks that walk, leaves that open wings and fly … One of these creatures at least will almost certainly be undescribed by science.

      And the millions of species with which we share the planet themselves represent a mere 1 per cent of those that have ever been, each form of life the opportunity for a further myriad of subtly different variations on a theme. Why should the extraordinary faces of the bat family, whose near-blindness should make them indifferent to physical appearances, nonetheless exhaust the possibilities of the design in the detailed geometry of their faces? Why should the many thousands of species of birds yet be so readily distinguishable one from the other by their pattern of flight or the shape of their wing, the colour of their plumage or the notes of their song?

      But birds, as the American naturalist Frank Chapman once observed, are ‘nature’s highest expression of beauty, joy and truth’, whose annual migration exemplifies that further recurring mystery of the biological world, those idiosyncrasies of habits and behaviour that defy all reason – like the Arctic tern, that every year traverses the globe, setting out from its nesting grounds in northern Canada and Siberia, winging its way down the coasts of Europe and Africa to the shores of the Antarctic, only to turn round and return

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