As even Darwin himself acknowledged, these jumps in the story might have seemed to render his thesis ‘absurd’. He might therefore have hypothesised that some other critically important factor seemed to be at work, some ‘organising power’ which had allowed these otherwise inexplicable leaps to take place. But so possessed was he by the elegant simplicity of his theory that, waving such thoughts aside, he made a leap of faith that it must be right, regardless of the evidence — and in the increasingly materialistic mid-19th century, his thesis was an idea whose time had come. Thus has his belief that life evolved solely through a material process continued to possess the minds of scientists to this day.

What is psychologically fascinating about the mindset of the Darwinians is their inability to recognise just how much they do not know. As Le Fanu observes in a comment which might have served as an epigraph to his book, ‘the greatest obstacle to scientific progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge’. Blinkered in their vision, armoured in the certainty that they have all the answers when they so obviously don’t, neo-Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins rest their beliefs just as much on an unscientific leap of faith as the ‘Creationists’ they so fanatically affect to despise.

But the significance of what has happened in recent years, Le Fanu suggests, is that it has shown us where this fatally limited vision has led us to. In terms of giving us any deeper understanding of who we really are, the deciphering of the genome and of the neural pathways of the brain, astonishing achievements though they may be in themselves, have both turned out to be blind alleys. Above all they have brought home to us just how much has been shut out by that reductionist perversion of science which seeks significance only in the material world.

What Le Fanu calls for is a ‘paradigm shift’, where scientific enquiry can once again be liberated to put us back in touch with so much of what makes us fully human — with the workings not just of the brain but of the mind, with that spiritual sense of awe at the wondrously constructed unity of nature which was never better exemplified than in Isaac Newton, the greatest physical scientist who ever lived. One of the glories of Le Fanu’s scientifically erudite and beautifully written book is that such a sense of wonder is evident on every page, even as he lucidly analyses the limitations of that narrow intellectual prison in which science has languished too long.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP