sorry about the spurious characters  -  I blame Gates

R



http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=70
                                  October 16, 2004

                  EVOLUTIONARY FIGURE
                            Francis Crick, 1916-2004


      Francis Crick is dead and gone. He has certainly not ’Äúpassed on’Äù
-  and, if he has, he’Äôll be extremely annoyed about it.  As a 12-year old
English schoolboy, he decided he was an atheist, and for much of  the rest
of his life worked hard to disprove the existence of the soul.

      In between, he ’Äúdiscovered the secret of life’Äù, as he crowed to
the barmaids and regulars at The Eagle, his Cambridge pub, on a triumphant
night in 1953.  The opening sentence of his paper,  written with his
colleague Jim Watson, for Nature on April 25th   that year put it more
modestly:

       We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of  deoxyribose nucleic
acid.

        That’Äôs DNA to you and me. And it’Äôs thanks to Crick and Watson
that we know the acronym and that it’Äôs passed into the language as the
contemporary shorthand for our core identity. Your career choice? ’ÄúShe
says being a part of academia seemed to be  hard-wired into her DNA because
her father was a professor at the  University of Virginia.’Äù (The Chicago
Tribune)  Socio-economic inequality? ’ÄúIncome distribution appears to be
hard-wired into  the DNA of a nation.’Äù (The Washington Post)  New trends
in rock  video? ’ÄúStaying cool is hard-wired into the DNA of MTV.’Äù (The
Los Angeles Times)

         Francis Crick was the most important biologist of the 20th
century.  Like Darwin, he changed the way we think of ourselves.  First,
with Watson, he came up with one of the few scientific blueprints known to
the general public ’Äì the double-helix structure of DNA (though he left it
to Mrs Crick, usually a painter of nudes, to create the model).  Later,
with Sydney Brenner, he  unraveled the universal genetic code. Today,
Crick’Äôs legacy includes all the thorniest questions of our time - genetic
fingerprinting, stem-cell research, pre-screening for hereditary  diseases,
the ’Äúgay gene’Äù and all the other ’Äúgenes of the week’Äù. In  Britain,
they’Äôre arguing about a national DNA database; on the  Continent,
anti-globalists are protesting genetically modified crops; in America, it
was traces of, um, DNA on Monica’Äôs blue dress that obliged Bill Clinton
to change his story.  If you’Äôre really determined, you can still just
about ignore DNA ’Äì the OJ jury did ’Äì but, increasingly, it’Äôs the
currency of the age. Crick called his home in Cambridge the Golden Helix,
and it truly was golden ’Äì not so much for him personally but for the
biotechnology industry, something of a contradiction in terms
half-a-century ago but now a 30-billion-a-year bonanza.

       ’ÄúWe were lucky with DNA,’Äù he said. ’ÄúLike America, it was just
waiting to be discovered.’Äù But Crick was an unlikely Columbus.  The son
of a boot factory owner, he grew up in the English  Midlands, dabbling in
the usual scientific experiments of small boys ’Äì blowing up bottles, etc
’Äì but never really progressing  beyond. Indeed, as a scientist, he
wasn’Äôt one for conducting experiments.  What he did was think, and even
then it took him a  while to think out what he ought to be thinking about.
His studies were interrupted by the war, which he spent developing mines at
the British Admiralty’Äôs research laboratory. Afterwards, already 30 and
at a loose end, he mulled over what he wanted to do and decided his main
interests were the ’Äúbig picture’Äù questions, the  ones arising from his
rejection of God, the ones that seemed beyond the power of science. Crick
reckoned that the ’Äúmystery of life’Äù could be easily understood if you
just cleared away all the  mysticism we’Äôve chosen to surround it with.

           That’Äôs the difference between Darwin and Crick. Evolution,
whatever offence it gives, by definition emphasizes how far man has come
from his tree-swinging forebears. DNA, by contrast, seems reductive. Man
and chimp share 98.5% of their genetic  code, which would be no surprise to
Darwin.  But we also share 75% of our genetic make-up with the pumpkin. The
pumpkin is just a big ridged orange lump lying on the ground all day, like
a fat  retiree on the beach in Florida.  But other than that he has no
discernible human characteristics until your kid carves them into   him.

         Yet the point of DNA is not just to prove that the pumpkin is our
kin but to pump him for useful information. According to Monise Durrani, a
BBC science correspondent, the genetic blueprint of the humble earthworm is
proving useful in the study of Alzheimer’Äôs.  Do worms get Alzheimer’Äôs?
And, if they do, what difference does it  make?  As Ms Durrani says,
’ÄúAlthough we like to think we are special, our genes bring us down to
Earth... We all evolved from  the same soup of chemicals.’Äù It turns out
there is a fly in my soup, and a chimp and a worm and a pumpkin.

          Having found ’Äúthe secret of life’Äù, what do you do for an
encore?  Crick disliked celebrity, and had a standard reply card printed to
fend off his fellow man: ’ÄúDr. Crick thanks you for your letter but
regrets that he is unable to accept your kind invitation to’Ķ’Äù There
then followed a checklist of options with a tick by the relevant item: send
an autograph, provide a photograph, appear on your  radio or TV show, cure
your disease, etc. This is a view of man as  75% pumpkin but capable of
crude, predictable, repetitive  patterns of imposition on more advanced
forms of life. Dr Crick  also turned down automatically honorary degrees
and disdained the  feudal honours offered by the British state. Presumably
the hyper-rationalist in him consigned monarchical mumbo-jumbo to the same
trash can of history as religion, though he eventually  relented and
accepted an invitation by the Queen to join her most elite Order of Merit.
         Religion he never let up on.  The university at which he practiced
his science is filled with ancient college chapels, whose presence so irked
Crick that, when the new Churchill College invited him to become a Fellow,
he agreed to do so only on condition that no chapel was built on the
grounds. In  1963, when a benefactor offered to fund a chapel and Crick’Äôs
fellow Fellows voted to accept the money, he refused to accept the argument
that many at the college would appreciate a place of  worship and that
those who didn’Äôt were not obliged to enter it. He offered to fund a
brothel on the same basis, and, when that was  rejected, he resigned.

        His militant atheism was good-humoured but fierce, and it drove
him away from molecular biology. As the key to the mystery of life, DNA
seems a small answer to the big picture, so Crick pushed on, advancing the
theory of ’ÄúDirected Panspermia’Äù, which is not a  Clinton DNA joke but
his and his colleague Leslie Orgel’Äôs explanation for how life began.
Concerned by the narrow time  frame ’Äì to those of a non-creationist bent
- between the cooling of  the earth and the rapid emergence of the
planet’Äôs first life forms,  Crick determined to provide another
explanation for the origin of life. As he put it, bouncing along a tenuous
chain of probabilities:

          The first self-replicating system is believed to  have arisen
spontaneously in the ’Äòsoup,’Äô the weak solution of organic chemicals
formed in the oceans, seas, and lakes by the action of sunlight and
electric storms. Exactly how it started we do not know’Ķ

           The universe began much earlier. Its exact age is  uncertain but
a figure of 10 to 15 billion years  is not too far out’Ķ

          Although we do not know for certain, we suspect that there are in
the galaxy many stars with  planets suitable for life’Ķ

         Could life have first started much earlier on the planet of some
distant star, perhaps eight to 10 billion years ago? If so, a higher
civilization, similar to ours, might have developed from it at about the
time that the Earth was formed’Ķ Would they have had the urge and the
technology t spread life through the wastes of space and seed these sterile
planets, including our own?..

         For such a job, bacteria are ideal. Since they are  small, many of
them can be sent. They can be stored almost indefinitely at very low
temperatures, and the chances are they would multiply easily in the
’Äòsoup’Äô of the primitive ocean’Ķ

         ’ÄúWe do not know’Ķ uncertain’Ķ not too far out’Ķ we do not
know for  certain’Ķ we suspect’Ķ chances are’Ķ’Äù And thus the Nobel
prize winner embraces the theory that space aliens sent rocketships to seed
the earth. The man of science who confidently dismissed God at  Mill Hill
School half a century earlier appears not to have noticed  that he’Äôd
merely substituted for his culturally inherited monotheism a weary variant
on Graeco-Roman-Norse pantheism ’Äì  the gods in the skies who fertilise
the earth and then retreat to the  heavens beyond our reach. To be sure, he
leaves them as anonymous aliens showering seed rather than Zeus adopting
the form of a swan, but nevertheless Dr Crick’Äôs hyper-rationalism  took
50 years to lead him round to embracing a belief in a celestial creator of
human life, indeed a deus ex machina.

          He didn’Äôt see it that way, of course.  His last major work, The
Astonishing Hypothesis, was a full-scale assault on human feeling. ’ÄúThe
Astonishing Hypothesis," trumpeted Crick, ’Äúis that’ÄòYou,’Äô your joys
and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal
identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast
assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.  As Lewis
Carroll’Äôs Alice might have  phrased it: ’ÄòYou’Äôre nothing but a pack of
neurons.’Äô’Äù

           It’Äôs not a new idea. Round about the time Dr Crick was working
on  his double-helix, Cole Porter wrote a song for a surly Soviet lass
fending off the attentions of an amorous American:

             When the electromagnetic of the he-male
             Meets the electromagnetic of the female
             If right away she should say this is the male
             It’Äôs A Chemical Reaction, That’Äôs All.

                         Of course, in the film of Silk Stockings, Cyd
Charisse eventually succumbs to Fred Astaire and comes to understand her
thesis is not the final word. Even if the Astonishing Hypothesis ’Äì that
there’Äôs no’ÄúYou’Äù, no thoughts, no feelings, no falling in love, no
free will -  is true, it’Äôs so all-encompassing as to be useless except to
the  most sinister eugenicists. And in the end Francis Crick’Äôs own life
seems to disprove it: He was never a dry or pompous scientist, he liked
jokes and costume parties, he was an undistinguished man pushing 40 with
one great obsession. Perhaps the combination of  human quirks and sparks
that drove him to chase his double-helix  are merely a chemical formula no
different in principle from that which determines variations in the pumpkin
patch. But, even if
 Francis Crick is 75% the same as a pumpkin, the degree of  difference
between him and even the savviest Hubbard squash suggests that as a unit of
measurement it doesn’Äôt quite capture the  scale of difference.

           It is too late to retreat now. Francis Crick set us on the path
to a  biotechnological era that may yet be only an intermediate stage to a
post-human future. But, just as a joke that’Äôs explained is no
 longer funny, so in his final astonishing hypothesis Dr Crick  eventually
arrived at the logical end: you can only unmask the  mystery of humanity by
denying our humanity.
                                 The Atlantic Monthly, October 2004

                                                                        ~
Read Mark's "Post Mortem" column every month
                                                                        in
the print edition of The Atlantic Monthly. This

month Mark writes about William Mitchell, the

collossus of Cool-Whip - on sale now.