The Cosmic Serpent (21 page)

In the middle of the 1990s, biologists sequenced the first complete genomes of free-living organisms. So far, the smallest known bacterial genome contains 580,000 DNA letters.
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This is an enormous amount of information, comparable to the contents of a small telephone directory. When one considers that bacteria are the smallest units of life as we know it, it becomes even more difficult to understand how the first bacterium could have taken form spontaneously in a lifeless, chemical soup. How can a small telephone directory of information emerge from random processes?

The genomes of more complex organisms are even more daunting in size. Baker's yeast is a unicellular organism that contains 12 million DNA letters; the genome of nematodes, which are rather simple multicellular organisms, contains 100 million DNA letters. Mouse genomes, like human genomes, contain approximately 3 billion DNA letters.

By mapping, sequencing, and comparing different genomes, biologists have recently found further levels of complexity. Some sequences are highly conserved between species. For example, 400 human genes match very similar genes in yeast. This means these genes have stayed in a nearly identical place and form over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, from a very primitive form of life to a human being.
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Some genetic sequences, known as “master genes,” control hundreds of other genes like an on/off switch. These master genes also seem to be highly conserved across species. For example, flies and human beings have a very similar gene that controls the development of the eye, though their eyes are very different. Geneticist André Langaney writes that the existence of master genes “points to the insufficiency of the neodarwinian model and to the necessity of introducing into the theory of evolution mechanisms, either known or to be discovered, that contradict this model's basic principles.”
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Recent gene mapping has revealed that, in some areas of the DNA text, genes are thirty times more dense than in other areas, and some of the genes appear to clump together in families that work on similar problems. In some cases, gene clumps are highly conserved across species, as in the X chromosome of mice and humans, for example. In both species, the X chromosome is a giant molecule of DNA, some 160 million nucleotides long; it is one of the pair of chromosomes that determine whether an offspring is male or female. The mapping of the X chromosome has shown that genes are bunched together mostly in five gene-rich regions, with lengthy, apparently desert regions of DNA in between, and that mice and humans have much the same set of genes on their X chromosomes even though the two species have followed separate evolutionary paths for 80 million years.
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Recent work on genetic sequences is starting to reveal much greater complexity than could have been conceived even ten years previous to the data's emergence. How are scientists going to make sense of the overwhelming complexity of DNA texts? Robert Pollack proposes “that DNA is not merely an informational molecule, but is also a form of text, and that therefore it is best understood by analytical ways of thinking commonly applied to other forms of text, for example, books.”
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This seems to be a sensible suggestion, but it begs the question: How can one analyze a text if one presupposes that no intelligence wrote it?

Despite these essential contradictions, which I sum up here in a few lines but which could fill entire books, the theory of natural selection remains firmly in place in the minds of most biologists. This is because it is always possible to claim that the appropriate mutations occurred by chance and were selected. But this un-demonstrable proposition is denounced by an increasing number of scientists. Pier Luigi Luisi talks of the “tautology of molecular Darwinism . . . [which] is unable to elicit concepts other than those from which it has been originally constructed.”

The circularity of the Darwinian theory means that it is not falsifiable and therefore not truly scientific. The “falsifiability criterion” is the cornerstone of twentieth-century scientific method. It was developed by philosopher Karl Popper, who argued that one could never prove a scientific theory to be correct, because only an infinite number of confirming results would constitute definitive proof. Popper proposed instead to test theories in ways that seek to contradict, or falsify, them; the absence of contradictory evidence thereby becomes proof of the theory's validity. Popper writes: “I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a
metaphysical research programme
—a possible framework for testable scientific theories.... It is metaphysical because it is not testable”
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(original italics).

Biology is currently divided between a majority who consider the theory of natural selection to be true and established as fact and a minority who question it.

However, the critics of natural selection have yet to come up with a new theory to replace the old one and institutions sustain current orthodoxies by their inertia. A new biological paradigm is still a long way off.

 

PRESUPPOSITIONS, POSTULATES, and circular arguments pertain more to faith than to science. My approach in this book starts from the idea that it is of utmost importance to respect the faith of others, no matter how strange, whether it is shamans who believe plants communicate or biologists who believe nature is inanimate.

I do not intend to attack anybody's faith, but to demarcate the blind spot of the rational and fragmented gaze of contemporary biology and to explain why my hypothesis is condemned in advance to remain in that spot. To sum up: My hypothesis is based on the idea that DNA in particular and nature in general are minded. This contravenes the founding principle of the molecular biology that is the current orthodoxy.

“WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?”

In Rio, the governments of the world signed treaties that recognize the ecological knowledge of indigenous people, as well as the importance of compensating it “equitably.” However, as I think I have shown in this book, the scientific community is not ready to engage in a true dialogue with indigenous people, as biology cannot receive their knowledge owing to several epistemological blocks.

Paradoxically, this is an advantage for indigenous people, because it gives them time to prepare themselves. If the hypothesis presented in this book is correct, it means that they have not only a precious understanding of specific plants and remedies, but
an unsuspected source of biomolecular knowledge,
which is financially invaluable and mainly concerns tomorrow's science.

I will continue working with the indigenous organizations of the Amazon and will discuss with them the possible consequences of my hypothesis. I will tell them that biology has become an industry that is guided by a thirst for marketable knowledge, rather than by ethical and spiritual considerations.

It will be up to them to decide which strategy to adopt. Perhaps they will simply try to cash in on their knowledge, by learning about molecular biology and then looking for marketable biological information in the shamanic sphere. After all, the fact that current biology cannot receive indigenous knowledge has not stopped pharmaceutical companies from commercializing parts of it.

Over the last five hundred years, the Western world has demonstrated that it is in no hurry to compensate the knowledge of indigenous people, even though it has used this knowledge repeatedly. The years that have gone past since the Rio treaties have changed nothing in this regard. Under these circumstances, I can only think of advising indigenous organizations to negotiate a hard line.

To start with, this would mean increasing controls on the scientists who wish to gain access to their shamanism. In a world governed by money and the race to success, where everything is patentable and marketable (including DNA sequences), it is important to play the game like everybody else and to protect one's trade secrets.

However, it does not seem probable that molecular biologists will be able to steal the secrets of ayahuasqueros in the near future. There is more to becoming a Western Amazonian shaman than just drinking ayahuasca. One must follow a long and terrifying apprenticeship based on the repeated ingestion of hallucinogens, prolonged diets, and isolation in the forest to master one's hallucinations. This does not seem to be within the reach of most Westerners.
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I, for one, would be incapable of it.

Furthermore, Western culture does not facilitate such an apprenticeship; it considers the main hallucinogenic plants illegal, and most “recreational” users, who disregard the law, fail to practice the required techniques (fasting, abstinence from alcohol and sex, darkness, chanting, etc.). To my mind, a truly hallucinatory session is more like a controlled nightmare than a form of recreation and demands know-how, discipline, and courage.

 

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, my approach has consisted of translating the shamanism of ayahuasqueros to make it understandable to a Western audience. I believe it is in the interest of Amazonia's indigenous people that their knowledge be understood in Western terms, because the world is currently governed by Western values and institutions. For instance, it was not until Western countries realized that it was in their own interest to protect tropical forests that it became possible to find the funds to demarcate the territories of the indigenous people living there. Prior to that, most territorial claims, formulated in terms of the indigenous people's own interests, led to nothing.

My conclusion can be accused of reductionism, as I end up presenting in mainly biological terms practices that simultaneously combine music, cosmology, hallucinations, medicine, botany, and psychology, among others.
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My interpretation, focusing on molecular biology, certainly distorts shamanism's multidimensionality, but it at least attempts to bring together a number of compartmentalized disciplines, from mythology to neurology through anthropology and botany. I do not mean that shamanism is equivalent to molecular biology, but that for us fragmented Westerners, molecular biology is the most fruitful approach to the holistic reality of shamanism, which has become so unfamiliar to us.

 

ELEVEN YEARS AGO, I arrived for the first time as a young anthropologist in the Ashaninca village of Quirishari and quickly struck a deal with its inhabitants. They would allow me to live with them and to study their practices so that I could explain them to the people in my country and become a doctor of anthropology. In exchange I was to teach them an “accounting” course—that is, arithmetic. Their position was clear: An anthropologist should not only study people, but try to be
useful
to them as well.

Carlos Perez Shuma, who took me under his wing, often explained my presence to his companions by saying, “He has come to live with us for two years because he wants to tell the people in his country how we work.” These people had always been told by missionaries, colonists, and governmental agronomists that they knew nothing—and that their so-called ignorance even justified the confiscation of their lands. So they were not displeased at the idea of demonstrating their knowledge. This is the license on the basis of which I wrote this book.

All the Ashaninca I met wanted to participate in the world market, if only to acquire the commodities that make life easier in the rainforest, such as machetes, axes, knives, cooking pots, flashlights, batteries, and kerosene. They also needed money to meet the minimal requirements of “civilization,” namely clothes, school-books, pens and paper, and everyone dreamed of owning a radio or a tape recorder.

Beyond money and commodities, the indigenous people of the Amazon aspire to survival in a world that has considered them, until recently, as little more than Stone Age savages. Now they all demand the demarcation and titling of their territories, as well as the means to educate their children in their own terms.

Western institutions seem finally to have understood, at least in principle, the importance of recognizing indigenous territories—though much remains to be done in practice on this count. However, the indigenous claim to bilingual and intercultural education has yet to be heard, even though it would seem to be a prerequisite to the establishment of a truly rational dialogue with these people. After all, the word “rational” comes from the Latin
ratio,
“calculation.” How can one establish the “equitable” compensation of indigenous knowledge if the majority of indigenous people do not understand the basics of accounting and money management and require training in arithmetic?

This is not a gratuitous question. Research has shown that Western-style education does not work with Amazonian Indians. Theirs is an oral tradition, where knowledge is mainly acquired through practice in nature. When one shuts young Indians into a schoolroom for six hours a day, nine months a year, for ten years, and teaches them foreign concepts in a European language, they end up reaching, on average, a level of second-grade primary school. This means that most of them barely know how to read and write and do not know how to calculate a percentage.