The Cosmic Serpent

by Jeremy Narby

  8 Rosaldo (1980) writes: “Doing oral history involves telling stories about stories people tell about themselves. Method in this discipline should therefore attend to ‘our’ stories, ‘their’ stories, and the connections between them” (p. 89). Rosaldo (1989) writes: “Such terms as objecivity, neutrality, and impartiality refer to subject positions once endowed with great institutional authority, but they are arguably neither more nor less valid than those of more engaged, yet equally perceptive, knowledgeable social actors” (p. 21, original italics). He adds: “Because researchers are necessarily both somewhat impartial and somewhat partisan, somewhat innocent and somewhat complicit, their readers should be as informed as possible about what the observer was in a position to know and not know” (p. 69).

  9 ”Learned analysis” often escapes the understanding not only of those who are its object, but of many Western individuals. Anthropologists have written so many unreadable texts that the literary critic Pratt (1986) writes: “For the lay person, such as myself, the main evidence of a problem is the simple fact that ethnographic writing tends to be surprisingly boring. How, one asks constantly, could such interesting people doing such interesting things produce such dull books? What did they have to do to themselves?” (p. 33).

  10 For a detailed discussion of the role of intuition, dreaming, imagination, and illumination in the history of scientific discoveries, see Beveridge (1950). Watson (1968) writes: “Afterwards, in the cold, almost unheated train compartment, I sketched on the blank edge of my newspaper what I remembered of the B pattern. Then as the train jerked towards Cambridge, I tried to decide between two- and three-chain models. As far as I could tell, the reason the King’s group did not like two chains was not foolproof. It depended upon the water content of the DNA samples, a value they admitted might be in great error. Thus by the time I had cycled back to college and climbed over the back gate, I had decided to build two-chain models. Francis would have to agree. Even though he was a physicist, he knew that important biological objects come in pairs” (p. 166). The “B structure” mentioned by Watson refers to an X-ray photograph of DNA taken by Rosalind Franklin, whose work was thus central to Watson and Crick’s discovery, but who received no mention when the Nobel Prize was awarded. That she was a woman, and that things should have occurred this way, was surely no coincidence.

  11 Beveridge (1950, p. 72). He adds: “The most important prerequisite is prolonged contemplation of the problem and the data until the mind is saturated with it. There must be a great interest in it and desire for its solution. The mind must work consciously on the problem for days in order to get the subconscious mind working on it.... An important condition is freedom from other problems or interests competing for attention, especially worry over private affairs.... Another favourable condition is freedom from interruption or even fear of interruption or any diverting influence such as interesting conversation within earshot or sudden and excessively loud noises.... Most people find intuitions are more likely to come during a period of apparent idleness and temporary abandonment of the problem following periods of intensive work. Light occupations requiring no mental effort, such as walking in the country, bathing, shaving, travelling to and from work, are said by some to be when intuitions most often appear. . . . Others find lying in bed most favourable and some people deliberately go over the problem before going to sleep and others before rising in the morning. Some find that music has a helpful influence but it is notable that only very few consider that they get any assistance from tobacco, coffee or alcohol” (p. 76). Mullis (1994) discusses in his Nobel lecture how he conceived the polymerase chain reaction while driving along a moonlit mountain road with his driving companion asleep next to him. The polymerase chain reaction allows one to amplify DNA from a few cells to vat fulls of cells in a few hours; it spawned the genetic engineering revolution.

  12 Artaud (1979, p. 193). The French original is “Je me livre à la fièvre des rêves, mais c’est pour en retirer de nouvelles lois.”

  13 The contents of this famous soup are problematic. In 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey did an experiment that was to become famous; they bombarded a test tube containing water, hydrogen, ammonia, and methane with electricity, supposedly imitating the atmosphere of the primitive earth with its permanent lightning storms; after a week, they had produced 2 of the 20 amino acids that nature uses in the construction of proteins. This experiment was long cited as proof that life could emerge from an inorganic soup. However, in the 1980s, geologists realized that an atmosphere of methane and ammoniac would rapidly have been destroyed by sunlight and that our planet’s primitive atmosphere most probably contained nitrogen, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and traces of hydrogen. When one bombards the latter with electricity, one does not obtain biomolecules. So the prebiotic soup is increasingly considered to be a “myth” (see Shapiro 1986).

  14 Reisse (1988) writes about panspermia “that this theory presents a major defect. No acceptable criterion allows one to measure its quality: by essence it cannot be refuted. Moreover, panspermia in its modern version displaces the location where life originated but leaves the fundamental problem of its origin intact” (p. 101). De Duve (1984) writes: “If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacterial cell to that of the chance assembly of its component atoms, even eternity will not suffice to produce one for you. So you might as well accept, as do most scientists, that the process was completed in no more than 1 billion years and that it took place entirely on the surface of our planet, to produce, as early as 3.3 billion years ago, the bacteriumlike organisms revealed by fossil traces” (p. 356). Watson et al. (1987) write in their chapter on the origins of life: “In this chapter, we will assume, as do the vast majority of practicing biologists, that life originated on Earth” (p. 1098).

  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: If RNA is also an enzyme, it could perhaps replicate itself without the help of proteins. An RNA that is both gene and catalyst would solve the old chicken-and-egg problem that has haunted the debate on the origin of DNA and proteins. Scientists went on to formulate the theory of the “RNA world,” according to which the first organisms were RNA molecules that learned to synthesize proteins, facilitating their replication, and that surrounded themselves with lipids to form a cellular membrane; these RNA-based organisms then evolved into organisms with a genetic memory made of DNA, which is more stable chemically. However, this theory is not only irrefutable, it leaves many questions unsolved. Thus, to make RNA, one must have nucleotides, and for the moment, no one has ever seen nucleotides take shape by chance and line up to form RNA. As Shapiro (1994b) writes, the “experiments conducted up until now have shown no tendency for a plausible prebiotic soup to build bricks of RNA. One would have liked to discover ribozymes capable of doing so, but this has not been the case. And even if one were to discover any, this would still not resolve the fundamental question: where did the first RNA molecule come from?” (pp. 421-422). He adds: “After ten years of relentless research, the most common and remarkable property of ribozymes has been found to be the capacity to demolish other molecules of nucleic acid. It is difficult to imagine a less adapted activity than that in a prebiotic soup where the first colony of RNA would have had to struggle to make their home” (p. 421). Kauffman (1996) writes: “The dominant view of life assumes that self-replication must be based on something akin to Watson-Crick base pairing. The ‘RNA world’ model of the origins of life conforms to this view. But years of careful effort to find an enzyme-free polynucleotide system able to undergo replication cycles by sequentially and correctly adding the proper nucleotide to the newly synthesized strand have not yet succeeded” (p. 497). Laszlo (1997) writes: “The origin of life is more a question of metaphysics than a scientific problem. The experimental facts gleaned by different well-established authors allow
only for scenarios, in an unlimited number, all of which are fictive” (p. 26). Regarding clay-based speculations, see Cairns-Smith (1983); regarding oily bubbles, see Morowitz (1985); regarding self-replicating peptides, see Lee et al. (1996).

  16 Trémolières (1994) writes: “Despite these terrible paradoxes, the scientific world agrees that there must have existed something before the current organization of life, and more precisely that there were ‘living’ or ‘pre-living’ forms that did not yet contain the genetic code, or in any case, not the code that we know. And science has strangely developed its branches in a direction where nothing exists any longer; this is the contrary of futurology—which is apparently a science—or of science fiction, which is an art” (p. 70). Shapiro (1986) writes: “Scientific explanations flounder, however, and possibilities multiply when we ask how this first cell arose on earth. Competing theories abound—which seems always the case when we know very little about a subject. Some theories, of course, come labeled as The Answer. As such they are more properly classified as mythology or religion than as science” (p. 13).

  17 Shapiro (1994a, p. II). Watson et al. (1987) write: “Unfortunately, it is impossible to obtain direct proof for any particular theory of the origin of life. The sobering truth is that even if every expert in the field of molecular evolution were to agree on how life originated, the theory would still be a best guess rather than a fact” (p. 1161). Wade (1995c) writes: “With a handful of trivial exceptions, all forms of life have the same, apparently arbitrary code through which DNA specifies protein molecules. If life arises so spontaneously, why don’t we see a variety of different codes and chemistries in earth’s creatures? The universal nature of the genetic code implies a one-time event, some narrow gateway through which only a single entity or family of related life forms was able to pass. One possibility is that life evolved independently several times on earth and creatures with our genetic code destroyed those based on all other codes. But there’s no evidence for such a code war. Or maybe the emergence of life is indeed so improbable that it only happened once. Strange, then, that life seems to have arisen at the earliest moment possible, almost immediately after the primitive earth had cooled enough” (pp. 22-23).

  18 Sullivan (1988, p. 33).

  19 Chuang-Tzu (1968, p. 43).

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