James Fanu - Why Us? - How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves

It would thus seem a mistake to prioritise scientific knowledge as being the more ‘real’, or to suppose its findings to be the more reliable. But, to put it simply, that is indeed what happened. Before the rise of science, the philosophic view necessarily prevailed, including the religious intimation from contemplating the wonders of the natural world and the richness of the human mind that there was ‘something more than can be known’.

From the late eighteenth century onwards the burgeoning success of science would progressively challenge that inference through its ability to ‘reduce’ the seemingly inscrutable complexities of the natural world to their more readily explicable parts and mechanisms: the earth’s secrets surrendered to the geologist’s hammer, the intricacies of the fabric of plants and animals to the microscopist’s scrutiny, the mysteries of nutrition and metabolism to the analytical techniques of the chemist. Meanwhile, the discovery of the table of chemical elements, the kinetic theory of heat, magnetism and electricity all vastly extended the explanatory powers of science. And, most significant of all, the theory of biological evolution offered a persuasive scientific explanation for that greatest of wonders – the origins and infinite diversity of form and attributes of living things.

The confidence generated by this remorseless expansion in scientific knowledge fostered the belief in its intrinsic superiority over the philosophic view, with the expectation that the universe and everything within it would ultimately be explicable in terms of its material properties alone. Science would become the ‘only begetter of truth’, its forms of knowledge not only more reliable but more valuable than those of the humanities. This assertion of the priority of the scientific view, known as scientific materialism (or just ‘materialism’), marked a watershed in Western civilisation, signalling the way to a future of scientific progress and technical advance while relegating to the past that now superseded philosophical inference of the preceding two thousand years of there being ‘more than we can know’. That future, the scientific programme of the twentieth century, would be marked by a progressively ever deeper scientific penetration into the properties of matter, encompassing the two extremes of scale from the vastness of the cosmos to the microscopic cell from which all living things are made. It began to seem as if there might be no limits to its explanatory power.

The genome projects and the Decade of the Brain represent the logical conclusion of that supposition. First, the genome projects were predicated on the assumption that unravelling the Double Helix would reveal ‘the secret of life’, as if a string of chemicals could possibly account for the vast sweep of qualities of the wonders of the living world; and second, the assumption of the Decade of the Brain that those brain scanning techniques would explain the mind, as if there could be any equivalence between the electrical firing of neurons and the limitless richness of the internal landscape of human memory, thought and action. In retrospect, both were no more likely to have fulfilled the promise held out for them than to suppose the ‘second order’ chemical composition of water might account for its diverse ‘first order’ states of rain, snow, oceans, lakes, rivers and streams as we know them to be.

This necessarily focuses our attention on what that potent ‘missing force’ must be that might bridge the gap between those two ‘orders of reality’, with the capacity to conjure the richness of human experience from the bare bones of our genes and brains. This is an even more formidable question than it might appear to be, for along the way those genome projects have also, inadvertently, undermined the credibility of the fundamental premise of what we do know about ourselves – that the living world and our uniquely human characteristics are the consequence of a known, scientifically proven, process of biological evolution. Certainly, the defining feature of the history of the universe, as outlined earlier, is of the progressive, creative, evolutionary transformation from the simplest elements of matter to ever higher levels of complexity and organisation. Over aeons of time the clouds of gas in intergalactic space evolved into solar systems such as our own. Subsequently the inhospitable landscape of our earth evolved again into its current life-sustaining biosphere, and so on. Thus the whole history of the cosmos is an evolutionary history. That is indisputable, but the biological theory of evolution goes further, with the claim to know the mechanisms by which the near-infinite diversity of forms of life (including ourselves) might have evolved by a process of random genetic changes from a single common ancestor.

It is, of course, possible that the living world and ourselves did so evolve, and indeed it is difficult to conceive of them not having done so. But the most significant consequence of the findings of the genome projects and neuroscience is the transformation of that foundational evolutionary doctrine into a riddle. The dramatic discovery of Lucy’s near-complete skeleton, already described, provides compelling evidence for man’s progressive evolutionary ascent over the past five million years. Why then, one might reasonably ask, is there not the slightest hint in the Human Genome of those unique attributes of the upright stance and massively expanded brain that so distinguish us from our primate cousins?

The ramifications of the seemingly disappointing outcomes of the New Genetics and the Decade of the Brain are clearly prodigious, suggesting that we are on the brink of some tectonic shift in our understanding of ourselves. These issues are nowhere more sharply delineated than in an examination of the achievements of the first human civilisation which marked the arrival of our species, Homo sapiens, thirty-five thousand years ago.

‘Alone in that vastness, lit by the feeble beam of our lamps, we were seized by a strange feeling. Everything was so beautiful, so fresh, almost too much so. Time was abolished, as if the tens of thousands of years that separated us from the producers of these paintings no longer existed. It seemed as if they had just created these masterpieces. Suddenly we felt like intruders. Deeply impressed, we were weighed down by the feeling that we were not alone; the artists’ souls and spirits surrounded us. We thought we could feel their presence.’

Jean-Marie Chauvet on discovering the world’s oldestpaintings, from 30,000 BC

The beginning for ourselves, Homo sapiens – modern, thoughtful, argumentative, reflective, creative man – can be pinpointed with remarkable accuracy to 35,000 BC, or thereabouts, in south-west Europe. Here, in the shadow of the snow-topped Pyrenees that separate what is now southern France from northern Spain, flourished the first and most enduring of all human civilisations, a vibrant, unified, coherent culture, transmitted from generation to generation for an astonishing twenty-five thousand years. This palaeolithic (Stone Age) civilisation, created by the first truly modern Europeans, was more long-lasting than any that have succeeded it: ten times longer than the 2,500-year reign of the pharaohs in Egypt, twenty-five times longer than the thousand years of Graeco-Roman antiquity.

The historical lineage of our species stretches much further back, into the almost unimaginably distant past of five or six million years ago, but those more ancient predecessors left nothing behind other than some precious and much-argued-over skulls, bones and teeth, and the stone implements, scrapers, blades and axe-heads with which they hunted and butchered their prey.