The Blackberry Walk

A lecturer I had yesterday was talking about DNA; specifically how only around 2% of our DNA actually codes for proteins. He misspoke and said "of course the rest must do something", until he noted his unscientific blunder and corrected himself. What my lecturer slipped on was an ancient mediaeval banana peel: that nature can have no vacuums. The sky has to have birds, lest nothing would live there; the Earth must be filled with animals; the seas must be teeming with fish. It then follows that in the high air, air too high for the birds to fly (since for mediaevals the sky extended to the moon), there must be daemons to fill it; and in the aether beyond the moon there are angels. As Chalcidius put it, "lest the perfection of the universe should anywhere go limping". This mediaeval vision of the cosmos as being in perfect ratio (ratio being the Latin word for reason) is the divine wedding of the classical philosophical heritage with Jewish scripture to form the truly novel idea of theology. Here, the Jewish notion of the goodness of God's creation from Genesis is partnered with the Platonic insistence that Beauty, Goodness, and Truth be alloyed together, producing a world where the created world must be designed with good ratio, balance, and perfection. My lecturer, likely unbeknownst to him was thinking in this mediaeval way; just as the sky should have birds, so should the "junk" DNA be populated with purpose. Why? Lest the perfection of creation go limping, of course. According to the ethos of science, this kind of pre-modern "superstitious" thinking is taboo. To the deft and loyal scientist, for the DNA to have purpose should be just as acceptable as for it to be as purposeless as an appendix. No matter how much scientific brain-marinading we attempt, the vision of perfection etched yet weathered on each of our retinas remains. We can attempt to scrub it off with the soap and lather of facts and logic, but the gentle yet passionate collective memory of a perfect world remains. Calling to us, we want to find perfection everywhere in nature, in the birds, the trees, and the clouds. Yet as Darwin noted: what do we say about the parasitic worm which burrows into brains, turning their host into a fertile nest - is that part of the beauty of creation? Science in many ways has looked too deeply into the world, dissociating our sense of goodness and beauty from our sense of truth and nature. Where in the past we saw perfection as existing prior to imperfection, we now see mild improvement arising from total chaos. This Whiggish historicism is almost a mirror opposite to that the mediaeval mind saw. The Whiggish Victorian view, which we remain stuck in today, was of a base world on the up improving - yet by virtue of improving, when we look into the past we only see horror and barbarity. The mediaevals, however, saw their base world declining - so their heroes and saints of the past were all the more celebrated. Whatever Whiggishness we attempt to impress ourselves with, we struggle to avoid acknowledging the beauty of the past richly held in the mediaeval system. Even if elements of the world we perceive don't appear to be in concord with the evident beauty of nature, it's our responsibility to attempt to understand why that is. Just like my lecturer, we all have this intuition of good ratio, order, meaning, and purpose; so when the modern cosmology offered by science doesn't accommodate this root human intuition, we reject it as unnatural and alien. Where the scientific model doesn't fit man's experience of the world, the next model will have to. It's germ is being discussed in certain academic circles today; but it is the responsibility of our generation to help it bloom.