The DNA Evidence for Nonduality

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
(September 1, 1939, by W.H. Auden)

And the world continues on its mad way, while occasionally a few begin to question their quiet desperation and ask, What else? There is nothing else. It's all right here. You are what you are looking for, as St. Francis said. Or, what you are looking for is not behind you, as Jean Klein quipped. When this is realized, when only that day dawns to which we are awake, as Thoreau put it, life changes for the better.

That is not so much mystical mumbo-jumbo. The understanding is available as you go about the bustle of your daily life.

A scientific slant on what I mean can be found in the material below. But I provide this because it is not just about DNA; it is about you. DNA is an object, something observed as a word in print or thought, or under a fluorescence microscope. You are not an object.

Richard Dawkins, apostle of materialism and atheism, argues that DNA uses organisms to perpetuate itself and that we exist to serve it. That is, he means we are objects, you and I, and he is big-hearted enough to include himself among us. Although his The Selfish Gene is a brilliantly clever book, it manipulates evidence, as Mary Midgley has noted. Here is a counterpoint to his view. The author I quote, John Stevenson*, speaks outside the centuries-entrenched scientific paradigm, and with regard to DNA and deathless one-life he has this to say:

~Tradition is very strong in human thinking. A lifetime of learning that life consists of being born, having offspring and then dying produces a mind set. Relationships within families such as sister, mother, father, etc. are fundamental in our thinking. A human, we believe, is an individual, another human is a separate life. Conclusion 5 presents an entirely different story. It says that all life in all living things is the same life. This violates all previous teachings about life.

Mary Midgley & The Solitary Self

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Among moral philosophers Mary Midgley has a razor-sharp mind, and when she speaks I listen. Her new book is The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene. As the title suggests, in the book she takes up her long-standing disagreement with Richard Dawkins and his The Selfish Gene, an extremely important book which nonetheless appeals to a rather limited understanding of Darwin, according to Midgley. In the video below, she points out that Dawkins' title is anthropomorphic and therefore off the mark.

In the video she discusses the linkage between a rather shallow but prevalent societal view of individualism and Darwin's concerns about evolution and human morality. I will add that in the USA, both the politics of economics and politics in general are based on a flawed, Spencerian understanding of human nature. What do I mean? In The Descent of Man, Darwin points out that humans are aware of their life as a whole and the effect of their actions, good or bad, upon the entire culture, unlike other animals. This is Darwin's understanding of human nature and it does not imply modern market economics ideology in which Ayn Rand's Nietzschean and wealthy superheroes save the masses from themselves. (19th Century America "unfortunates" have become "losers" in the 21st, so to distinguish them from the only other possibility, "winners.")

The Selfish Gene, Midgley argues, represents an extreme neo-Darwinism. She allows that Dawkins didn't invent this view, but piggy-backed upon a Spencerian survival-of-the-fittest myth prevalent in society since the Nineteenth Century. (These are not her words, but I am sure she would concur.) The success of Dawkins' book stems from its resonance with  post-industrial myth.

She challenges a reduction of human motivation to self-interest. Human psychology is not so neat, she says. Instead, reductionist individualism can be traced to the Eighteenth Century and, before that, Thomas Hobbes' contribution to Enlightenment thought. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged represents a heroic independence that is not a realistic aim for Homo sapiens. Darwin called it right. As natural selection reveals over and over, "fittest" does not mean "strongest," but an ability to adapt, often through "cooperation" with other organisms. We humans evolved to cooperate, to interact constantly with one another and as a dependent and tiny part of complex and huge ecosystems. Too bad that a more enlightened understanding of human nature has not found its way into economics and politics.Tweet