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Francis Crick and the Missing Biblical Rib

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Francis Crick and the Missing Biblical Rib Edward G. BELAGA Institut de Recherche Mathématique Avancée C. N. R. S., Université Louis Pasteur 7, rue René Descartes F-67084 Strasbourg Cedex FRANCE Téléphone : 33 (0)3 90 24 02 35. Fax : (33) (03) 90 24 03 28 http://www-irma.u-strasbg.fr/~belaga ; e-mail: [email protected] _______________________________________________________________________________________________ July 2007 Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib Ever since the creation of the world, the invisible existence of God and His everlasting power have been clearly seen by the mind’s understanding of created things. Epistle of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Romans 1:20 Abstract. The main purpose of the present paper is — proceeding from a real-life showcase particularly rich in scientific and epistemological implications — to discern, expose, interpret, and thus, to contribute to both the rehabilitation and the renewal of a mysterious but indubitable unity of both «objective» and «subjective» factors of the scientific knowledge acquisition, — the unity so manifestly present at the very heart of the scientific pursuit of Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, or, for that matter, of Albert Einstein, but resolutely passed over if not openly scorned by modern science. To be more precise, by the objective factor we understand the sum of all realities important for the outcome of the scientific quest, the realities related both to a particular researcher’s competence and skills and to science at large — science understood, at a given historical juncture, as (1) the sum of already acquired knowledge, experimental skills, theoretical methods, applied know-how and (2) cultural traditions of public institutions preserving, promoting, teaching and otherwise guiding, disseminating, developing, and applying these skills, methods and knowledge. And by the subjective factor we understand here all cultural preferences, theological, ontological, and epistemological insights, as well as intellectual and spiritual receptiveness, strength, vulnerability, and perplexities of a researcher facing the unknown, unintelligible, unspeakable, unthinkable — and especially those insights, receptiveness, etc., which are rooted in the Judaeo-Christian «Weltanschauung», the original inspirational and working framework of modern science. The chosen here showcase of a tragic but fruitful (dis)unity of these two factors might help us both to climb down the abstract, pseudo-philosophical fence of the mainstream professional epistemological discourse and to back up our biological guesswork by some basic Judaeo-Christian theological insights into the origins of man. We hope, among other things, that a theologian would find here some novel lines of the biblical exegesis inspired, if not, more realistically speaking, «forced on» us by «mad pursuit» of the scientific truth by an agnostic biologist, and that a biologist, agnostic or not, would find here, in his turn, some novel, theologically inspired scientific insights, — even if as yet formally unspeakable, unthinkable, unbelievable, — into the biological origins and nature of man. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 1 out of 22 23/07/07 §1. Francis Crick’s both tragic and propitious failure : his first and only intrusion into biblical exegesis. 1°. The eminent biologist and Nobel laureate Francis Harry Compton Crick (1916-2004), co- discoverer of the double helix, the genetic blueprint of life known commonly as DNA, possessed an insatiable curiosity about life and a rare creativity of mind. As a colleague of his writes in an obituary : not satisfied with his first success, «he put these qualities to work in an attempt to find the neural correlate of consciousness, a problem he defined as the search for the link between the mind and the brain». (Press Release of Salk Institute for Biological Studies, July 29, 2004.) Crick was also an outspoken enemy of «religion». Indeed, in his last interview, in 2004, he said that «my distaste for religion was one of my prime motives in the work that led to the sensational 1953 discovery» 1 : I went into science because of these religious reasons, there's no doubt about that. I asked myself what were the two things that appear inexplicable and are used to support religious beliefs : the difference between living and nonliving things, and the phenomenon of consciousness. Similar opinions were expressed by John Watson, Crick's co-discoverer of the DNA, in their common interview with The Telegraph. One should know Crick’s story to respect Crick’s intellectual integrity and, as the present author does, to empathize with him in the real source of his intellectual obsession, coloured as it tragically was by his militant atheism : the obsession to find out the ultimate — which, for Crick, meant scientific — truth about the essence of both life and consciousness. As a matter of fact, Crick tells this story himself in his absorbing autobiography of 1988 2, What a mad pursuit : a personal view of scientific discovery, referred henceforth to as [Crick 1988], the first half of its title being borrowed from an ode by John Keats. There is however, as we shall argue below, an unexpected, amazing, both theological and scientific follow-up to Crick’s drama. Unfortunately, — but understandably and, probably, inevitably, — it has been discovered too late to be shared with the author and hero of What a mad pursuit. 2°. A spectacular failure of Crick’s youthful biblical exegesis. The Lord God said : «It is not right that the man should be alone. I shall make him a helper.» … So the Lord cast a deep sleep upon the man and he slept ; and He took one of his ribs and He filled in flesh in its place. And the Lord God built the rib [ in Hebrew, which also could be translated as side, or aspect] which he took from Adam into a woman, and brought her to the man. And the man said : «This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh ! She is to be called Woman [ in Hebrew], because she was taken from Man [ in Hebrew].» Genesis 2:18,21-23 A man of an almost pathological intellectual pride, Crick is very forthcoming about how, why, and to what effect he became a militant unbeliever, although raised in an English middle-class Christian family [Crick 1988] (p. 10), to whose intimate customs and religious traditions he was ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 2 out of 22 23/07/07 sincerely attached as a child : I was familiar with the account in Genesis in which God makes Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. […] It was only some years later, probably when I was an undergraduate, that I let slip to a friend of mine, a medical student, that I understood that women had one more rib than man. (p. 11) One could easily imagine the rest, with the friend «falling off his chair with laughter», after being presented with Crick's biblical exegesis … Still, according to Crick’s story, one might expect that a friend’s laughter should not be of a great importance to Crick — since, as he recounts it beforehand, his «biblically inspired» understanding of women’s anatomy at the time of this incident was just an accidentally survived atavism of his already dead and buried childish faith : My parents were religious in a rather quiet way. … At exactly which point I lost my early religious belief I am not clear, but I suspect I was then about twelve years old. … I imagine that my growing interest in science and the rather lowly intellectual level of the preacher and his congregation motivated me … Whatever the reason, from then on I was a sceptic, an agnostic with a strong inclination toward atheism. ([Crick 1988] pp. 10, 11) And yet, the shame at being caught by an apparently respected older friend to still profess such a sham was never forgotten, and the sting of the momentary discovery of such a flagrant betrayal of his childhood spiritual and intellectual trust was never forgiven. Figure 1. What are they believe in, before and after university biology courses (cf. Note 5). So, whom to blame — family, community, God, or his own ignorance of things spiritual ? Youngsters rarely have a natural capacity to look for intellectual, historical, or psychological excuses or deeper explanations. Today, such explanations are discussed, for example, by Professor Janet Stein Carter on her Web-site Number of Ribs 3, at the demand, as she tells it, of her students, ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Francis Crick and the missing Biblical rib, by Edward G. BELAGA page 3 out of 22 23/07/07 probably as young as Francis Crick once was, and wondering about the same theology versus biology discrepancy, but in a much more confident, plausible, and non-violent way. Thus, it is apparently not without reason that, in four years, the Number of Ribs site has been accessed more than 82000 times, — even if it is difficult to realistically appreciate
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