Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves. James Fanu Le
fly, how confidently across the pathless sea at night!
And while we might rightly wonder how the Arctic tern knows how to navigate by the stars, it seems almost more wonderful still that the salmon should find its way from the depths of the ocean back to the same small stream from whence it set out, detecting through its highly developed sense of smell the waters of its spawning ground; or that the common European eel should cross the Atlantic twice, first from its breeding grounds off the North American coast to the rivers of Europe – and then back again. ‘The number of [such] admirable, more or less inexplicable traits that one might cite is limited not by the inventiveness of nature,’ writes biologist Robert Wesson, ‘but rather by the ability of scientists to describe them.’ There are, he points out, an estimated twenty thousand species of ant, of which only eight thousand have been described. So far biologists have got round to studying just one hundred of them in depth, each of which has its own unique, bizarre pattern of behaviour – such as ‘the female of a parasitic ant which on finding a colony of its host, seizes a worker, rubs it with brushes on her legs to transfer its scent making her acceptable to enter the host colony’. How did there come to be such sophisticated and purposive patterns of behaviour in such minute creatures?
And yet that near-infinite diversity of life is permeated by an underlying unity, where everything connects in the same web of self-renewing life. The rain falling on the mountains feeds the springs that fill the streams. Those streams become rivers and flow to the sea, the mists rise from the deep and clouds are formed, which break again as rain on the mountainside. The plants on that mountainside capture the rainwater and, warmed by the energy of the sun, transform the nutrients of the soil, by some extraordinary alchemy, into themselves. A grazing animal eats that same plant to set up another complex web of connections, for it in turn is eaten by another, and its remains will return to the earth, where the microbes in the soil cannibalise its bones, turning them back into their constituent chemicals. And so the process of reincarnation continues. Nothing is lost, but nothing stays the same.
Wheels within wheels; and across that vast landscape of living things, from the highest to the lowest, the survival and prosperity of man is yet, as J. Arthur Thomson, Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen University reminds us, completely dependent on the labours of the humble earthworm, without whose exertions in aerating the dense, inhospitable soil there could never have been a single field of corn.
When we pause to think of the part earthworms have played in the history of the earth, they are clearly the most useful of animals. By their burrowing, they loosen the earth, making way for the plant rootlets and the raindrops; by bruising the soil in their gizzards they reduce the mineral particles to more useful forms; they were ploughers before the plough. Five hundred thousand to an acre passing ten tons of soil every year through their bodies.
So, the world ‘will never starve for want of wonders’, the more so for knowing and wondering how the sky above and the earth below and ‘all that dwell therein’ – including the human mind, with its powers of reason and imagination – originated as a mass of formless atoms in that ‘moment of singularity’ of the Big Bang fifteen billion years ago.
The poet William Wordsworth, seeking to catch the enfolding delight of that sky above and earth below, called it ‘the sublime’,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky,
A spirit that impels and rolls through all things.
The feelings evoked by nature and ‘the sublime’ were, for the American poet Walt Whitman as for so many poets and writers, the most powerful evidence for a hidden, mystical core to everyday reality.
‘There is, apart from mere intellect,’ he wrote, ‘a wondrous something that realises without argument an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space of the whole of this multifariousness we call the world; a sight of that unseen thread which holds all history and time, and all events like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter.’
That sublime nature has always provided the most powerful impetus to the religious view, its celebration a central feature of all the great religions. For the German theologian Rudolph Otto (1869–1937), the ‘sublime’ was a ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’: both awesome, in whose presence we feel something much greater than our insignificant selves, and also fascinating, compelling the human mind to investigate its fundamental laws.
This brings us to the second of the dual meanings of ‘wonder’ suggested at the close of the preceding chapter, to ‘wonder why’, which, as the Greek philosopher Plato observed, ‘is the beginning of all knowledge’.
‘The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so,’ wrote the nineteenth-century French mathematician Henri Poincaré. ‘He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living … I mean the intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts and which a pure intelligence can grasp.’
The greatest (probably) of all scientists, Isaac Newton, seeking to comprehend that ‘harmonious order of parts’, would discover the fundamental laws of gravity and motion, that, being Universal (they hold throughout the universe), Absolute (unchallengeable), Eternal (holding for all time) and Omnipotent (all-powerful), he inferred, offered a glimpse into the mind of the Creator. Newton captured this dual meaning of wonder, to ‘wonder at’ and to ‘wonder why’, in his famous confession that the most he could hope to achieve was to illuminate the workings of some small part of that sublime world: ‘I do not know what I may appear to the world,’ he wrote, ‘but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, diverting myself now and then, finding a smoother pebble than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’
The wonders of the world are so pervasive that to the seemingly less sophisticated minds of earlier ages (such as Newton’s) they were best understood as ‘natural miracles’. To be sure, the undeviating and punctual sun, the cycle of life, the infinite variety of living things, their interconnectedness to each other, these are all part of nature, and are faithful to its laws. They are ‘natural’. But the totality of it all, its beauty and integrity and completeness, that ‘great undiscovered ocean of truth’, lie so far beyond the power of the human mind to properly comprehend, they might as well be ‘a miracle’. Thus science and religion were cheerfully reconciled, the scientist seeing his task as a holy calling, where Robert Boyle, the founder of modern physics, would perceive his role as ‘a priest in the temple of nature’.
This is scarcely the modern view. Most people, of course, acknowledge the beauty and complexity of the world and find it admirable, even uplifting – but you could search in vain for a textbook of biology or zoology, astronomy or botany, or indeed of any scientific discipline, which even hints that there is something astonishing, extraordinary, let alone ‘miraculous’, about its subject. Science no longer ‘does’ wonder, which is more readily associated nowadays with the incurious mysticism and incense of the New Age. Science prefers to cultivate an aura of intellectual neutrality, the better to convey its disinterested objectivity, its commitment to the ‘truth’. Hence the highly technical, and to the outsider often impenetrable, prose of its texts and learned journals, from which any sense of wonder is rigorously excluded.
There are, as will be seen, several important reasons for this modern-day lack of astonishment, but the most important is undoubtedly the general perception that science, since Newton’s time, has revealed those ‘natural miracles’ to have a distinctly non-miraculous, materialist explanation – culminating in that firestorm of scientific discovery of the past fifty years, which has integrated into one coherent narrative the entire history of the universe from its origins to the present day. To be sure, science