The past half-century has seen the most astonishing concentration of scientific discoveries in history. In physical terms, from the Big Bang to the Double Helix, our understanding of the universe, of life and ourselves has been extended with an intensity and on a scale that may never be repeated. And in terms of cracking the riddle of what allows ourselves and all other species to function, no discoveries held more promise than the unravelling of the genetic code which drives all life and of those workings of the human brain uncovered by neuroscience. But in each case, as Dr James Le Fanu shows in his enthralling book, these have brought us up against a dead end.

Having decoded the genome which we imagined might help to explain, inter alia, why we are different from monkeys, mice and sea urchins, we make the startling discovery that genetically we are all but identical. So what is it that determines that much the same genetic coding can produce such an infinite variety of life forms? Clearly there is some other hugely important factor at work here, some ‘formative impulse’ which science has not yet begun to comprehend.

Similarly the more our scanners have been able to tell us about the operations and structures of the human brain, the more it becomes clear that we cannot even fully understand how it works physically, let alone how it gives rise to all that non-material dimension of ‘mind’ which encompasses almost everything of who we are and how we think, feel and behave.

As a medical doctor, Le Fanu argues that what we have been seeing here is the culmination of a process which has for so long driven our attempts to explain who we are and how we came to be on this earth in purely material terms. The watershed moment in this story was the publication, in 1859, of The Origin of Species, in which Charles Darwin laid out his thesis that the evolution of life could be explained solely by the process of natural selection, whereby an infinite series of minute variations gradually turned one form of life into another.

The greatest stumbling block to this argument was that evolution has repeatedly taken place in leaps forward so sudden and so complex that they could not possibly have been accounted for by the gradual process he suggested — the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of new life forms, the complexities of the eye, the post-Cretaceous explosion of mammals. Again and again some new development emerged which required a whole mass of interdependent changes to take place simultaneously, such as the transformation of reptiles into feathered, hollow-boned and warm-blooded birds.

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