Mind of the Cells

We are before an extraordinary mystery, which could truly be a fairy tale.

The fairy tale of the species.

We set forth from the Galapagos archipelago, where, around 1835, Darwin first conceived his theory of evolution: iguanas are not forever iguanas… nor is man forever a man. We have never been told anything more serious since then-nor more captivating, or let us say more liberating, for it really is a question of finding a way out of captivity. And where is the way out, apart from the explosion of the planet or heavenly, yogic or other salvations which, as we are beginning to see, leave the planet unchanged?

“Salvation is physical,” said she whose adventure in the consciousness of the cells I will narrate. Evolution is materialistic, as it should be, or material in any case. What remains to be seen is, what is this Matter? Closed or open? Darwin opened it, as did his contemporary Jules Verne. Max Planck, Heisenberg and Einstein opened it, as did their impressionist, fauvist or pointillist friends-Matter burst forth on all sides. Sri Aurobindo and Mother belong to that side. Some astrophysicists too. And why should it be closed with the biologists?

Sri Aurobindo was ten years old when Darwin died in 1882; he had already left India for London to learn the lesson of Western materialism; Mother, his future companion, was four years old in Paris, and in Ulm, Einstein was three.

Ever since Darwin we have been told something very serious too, but when this “serious” begins to resemble a prison, we become wary. For the prodigious evolutionary picture since the explosion of the vertebrates, some four hundred million years ago, has oddly leaped from one biology to the next, with some crab, rabbit or orang-utan philosophies on the way. How it leaps is what interests us. Now, in 1953, a team of Anglo-American biophysicists discovered the replicating mechanism of the DNA molecule. This is serious, indeed. The order in the chain of amino acids determines forever whether we will give birth to a mouse or a man, and a certain magical and perfectly scientific molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA determines imperturbably this assembling from father to son, unless some X-rays or cosmic rays (or a little bomb) come along and collide with the chain, causing it to derail at some point … and more likely lead us toward a monstrosity than toward a new species. Even then, all this extends over thousands and thousands of years of imperceptible mutation which might end up, with some luck, releasing some mechanism and sending us headlong at last into another species … if the bomb leaves us the time and if, in the meantime, the four and half billion Homo sapiens on this planet have not bred so many more billions of rat sapiens and devoured the earth. That is to be seen too, for it took thousands of years, after all, to reach the first billion in 1830, whereas a hundred years were enough to reach the second billion, thirty years for the third billion, and only fourteen for the fourth billion!

The problem is urgent. We no longer have thousands of evolutionary years to solve it; perhaps not even ten years. So, despite the Anglo-American team and replicating cells, where is the way out?