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Andrew M. Davis-Gray Dry Bones by Andrew M. Davis-Gray To: JLS * * * "There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.” Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Naval Treaty * * * “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” Sir Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 20 (1982) * * * “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker * * * “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Romans 1:20 * * * Chapter 1 Professor Emeritus Roger Limine, esteemed guest lecturer at Compass University’s 8:00 a.m. Introductory Biology class, transitioned to the conclusion, and his favorite part, of his annual observance on the principles of evolution. The handful of attentive students among the other several hundred heavy-lidded attendees—most of whose major preoccupation, other than staying awake, was struggling unsuccessfully to find a comfortable lie in the auditorium’s molded plastic seats—sensed an even greater stiffening of Professor Limine’s perennially rigid posture and the excited tension in his arms and legs as he launched into what he considered his screed’s epiphanous revelation. Here, he thought (as he habitually noted each time he reached this spot), is where these young minds, stuffed with sentiment and mythology, meet the truth. Let the pleasant fictions fall! Although zealous to impart his lesson, Professor Limine took no pleasure in any bewildered displacement that his audience might feel as a result of the demolition of innocence he imagined himself poised to deliver. To the contrary, his brain’s sympathy reflex was keenly stimulated by his expectation that the students would suffer a rude psychological eviction from their cozy mental constructs, but he deemed such disquiet to be the necessary price for their clear-thinking—something he had once romanticized to a colleague as the “birth pangs of enlightenment.” Only from the ground zero of broken illusions could one begin to build an authentic world view, much like bulldozing a ramshackle shanty of quaint, historic interest to raise a modern, streamlined structure. “In the beginning, class, we saw how the laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest, operating along with mutation and variation over long periods of time, led to the evolution of all life, from the simplest to the most complex. Your ancestors swung in trees; their ancestors 1 swam in seas; and everything ultimately calls father to random, chance pairings of lifeless amino acids floating haphazard in a primordial soup. All this you no doubt know, but I wonder whether you fully appreciate all the implications. “Most people mistakenly conclude that evolution has what one might call the admirable goal of improving everything, of making living things better and better, so that eventually, a million years hence, humanity will have become a more advanced and perfected race, with enhanced intelligence and perhaps even additional fantasized abilities, such as augmented insight or telepathy. Bunk and nonsense! Evolution is a blind, purposeless, undirected activity. It has no goal. Its sole effect is to maximize the next generation’s ability to survive in the environment in which the prior generation reproduced—nothing more. Whether that’s achieved with slime mold or supermen is irrelevant to evolution. Neither is preferable or superior, except to the extent that one may be better suited to reproduce. So please, disabuse yourself of any faulty notion that we humans are the pinnacle, the favored child, the ultimate aim of evolution. Far, far from it. “Instead”—his voice rising as he leaned forward on the lectern—“each of you, and everything you think of as making up the quintessential you, are nothing more than an external shell, a husk as it were, for the protection, propagation and perpetuation of the DNA residing in your cells. All of life, all of its apparent diversity, exists for this sole reason—because, under the insensible influence of natural selection, evolution of living organisms promoted the survival, not so much of the organisms themselves, but of the organisms’ DNA. At its core, evolution is propelled by nothing more and nothing less than the reproduction of the molecule we call DNA. “So why do the so-called higher animals even exist? Indeed, why is there any form of life more complex than a single strand of DNA? For one and only one reason—the brute force 2 of natural selection favored the creation of such animals because, by securing itself within them, DNA’s chances of survival and reproduction were increased. “Every aspect of human development, existence and behavior is the simple story of DNA surrounding itself with living shells that enhance its likelihood of survival. To illustrate just one of the far-reaching ramifications: why did what we call ‘morality’ evolve? Well, for DNA to survive, its human host must survive, and a human has a better chance of surviving in a community, and to get along in communities, humans need to have inbred rules of conduct, from which evolved what we have named ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘good’ and ‘evil’—all just coincidences or conveniences of adaptation. Thus the edicts we call the Ten Commandments codified behavioral conventions that were favored through natural selection because they aided the survival of the communities that observed them. But if it would have enhanced the survival of the species, and therefore of its DNA, conduct that we would today condemn as uttermost evil, at least when viewed through our presently configured moral lens, could just as easily have evolved into the highest form of nobility. Everything,” Professor Limine proclaimed with reverent awe, “everything serves only one master—natural selection, before which all things are relative and to which the only canon is the reproduction of DNA. I say to you, as shocking as it sounds, that if torturing infants for sport had given the human species—and therefore its instilled DNA—a greater chance of survival, then we might just as easily count such conduct a virtue!” He paused to signal a transition to an even more ferocious swing of the wrecking ball. “It is elementary that nature gave us eyes because sightless creatures were less likely to survive long enough to breed. We have ears because deaf creatures would be similarly challenged. All that’s a given. I’d like to talk now about something one step beyond, about evolution’s dominion over more than just flesh and blood. I’d like to talk now about evolution’s 3 sovereignty over the personal self that seems to reside in your head, over the so-called ‘real you’—not just your kidneys or your lungs or your liver, but your sensation of existing as a self- aware mental entity with a uniquely individual consciousness, identity, outlook, personality and all the other psychic underpinnings that constitute the person, the ‘you,’ that you think you are. I’m talking about what might, in earlier days, have been called your ‘soul.’” A smatter of derisive hoots issued from the audience’s aspiring sophisticates. “We assume this ‘real you’ is the prize that evolution protects and that the body is just a house to contain it,” and here he confidentially bent closer towards them as if sharing a stunning secret, “but we are wrong. At best, your inner self serves, not sits on, the throne occupied by DNA, and the reason for its existence is no different from a spleen’s: because such an arrangement favored the survival, not of the being you consider to be the ‘real you,’ but of the DNA for which natural selection sculpted you, body and soul, to function as a home, a host, if you will, thereby raising DNA’s prospects of reproduction. “Why and how did this happen? Why and how did natural selection create this complex collection of brain processes that give rise to what you perceive as the inner, the real you? Nothing more than survival of the fittest. Compared to other animals, a human’s body is weak. Chimps are stronger; lions are faster; reptiles are tougher. Even disregarding the risk posed by predators, a naked human’s prospect for survival in a jungle wilderness is iffy at best. The DNA embedded in those ancient, pre-human hosts needed something to offset those physical deficiencies. To that end, the mind took center stage. Those members of the troupe who were better at drawing conclusions from sensory input could fare better in the demanding environment for which their relatively frail bodies were unfit. Perhaps they were slightly more adept at deducing the presence of dangerous animals from telltale signs. Perhaps they could more readily 4 determine where to find edible plants. Perhaps they were more creative at sheltering themselves or using natural materials for protection from harsh conditions.

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