Rethink Health - October 2008

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Intelligent Debate?

The recent resignation of the Director for Education at the Royal Society provoked considerable bluster last month. The issue was whether Creationism should be addressed in school science lessons, if a pupil raised it. I was at the time engaged in writing a series of articles defining and describing health, and the heated debate was irritating.

Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has become a received wisdom that you question on pain of ridicule and worse. It proposes that evolution proceeds by selection not only of the fittest species, but of their fittest genes. Professor Richard Dawkins is the self-appointed High Priest of this Faith, which is what it is. As science, it leaves quite a lot to be desired.

One of the debating tactics used by Neo-Darwinists is to propose an alternative – Creationism – in a form which many will judge ridiculous. This is the proposition that the world and all its contents were created as a whole, in a relatively short time, rather as proposed in the first two chapters of the Old Testament Book of Genesis. Most Creationists also believe that humans were created separately, and put in charge of the rest of the world. As a scientific proposition none of this is indefensible, and the Neo-Darwinists know it. But to admit of no other more reasonable proposition is disingenuous, because they clearly do not have it all their way.

Genes are the codes in the nuclei of all the cells of a given organism. They divide identically every time cells divide, whether to mature from an egg into the adult creature or to replace cells in its body as they wear out. So the genetic library of every cell in your body is identical to that in every other. From that library your cells know how to make all the constituent molecules the cell should contain, and quite a few more that it may secrete into the fluid and blood stream outside the cells.

The physical properties of molecules like proteins also determine, to a large extent, the shape they will adopt in the cell. But nothing in the genetic library is capable of determining anything else about the spatial arrangement of molecules within the cell, still less the shape of the whole cell and its special functions. In other words, Neo-Darwinists cannot tell you why a cell in your head differs in form and function from one in your little toe. So how is it that your body has such a sophisticated shape, instead of being a bag of identical and formless clones? How is it unique, even among humans?

Zoom out a bit further, and compare different species. Rabbits and humans have similarities, for sure, but they are also very different from each other. Yet their genetic endowments are very similar – upwards of 90% of human genes being identical to those of many other animals. So what ordains our differences?

There has to be an influence over-arching genes, providing them with some sort of map to copy. This does not imply a Santa-Clause-like God, in some celestial workshop, crafting our different shapes – the image sneered at by opponents of Intelligent Design. Physics offers alternatives. Scalar fields, for example, are a hard-nosed product of quantum mechanics theory, and can encode vast quantities of information readable at all points in the field but differing gradually between those points. Holographic images are examples of scalar fields. I favour scalar fields as vehicles for the body-maps I propose, and suspect that coiled DNA strands will prove to be (among other things) aerials capable of receiving scalar field information as electro-magnetic emissions.

All this should be blindingly obvious to any member of the Royal Society. The reason it isn’t is simple: physicists and physicians are trained in entirely different ways, and have great difficulty talking to each other. Each appears unwilling to admit that they do not understand the other’s way of thinking - or worse, that they do not see any point in trying. Yet a bit of sharing would quickly come up with what I have said, and put much more flesh on its bones than I can.

You may still wonder how scalar fields acquired their information, of course. That would lead you towards a much more intelligent idea of Godhead. You would need to consider what wholes are, how they relate, and why they want to relate. Somewhere in there you will find a glue which I call health. It is the force that counterbalances the tendency to divide and differentiate – which biologists call ontogeny, the evolution of the individual from its egg-cell. So health is, at one level, at least the equal and opposite of ontogeny.

I go further, and define health as the ability to participate in creation. That makes every living thing a facet of “god”, relating as part of the entire natural universe which is all bent on the same creative process. Perhaps the Universe, as we know it and as we don’t, exists to display and express Creation, God, Love, Unity – whichever word turns you on. They are all names for a process, not a condition or person – that has been our mistake. Life is a journey, not a destination. It is how we travel that counts, not what we have or have not.

If you would like the full text of my recent efforts and are not members of the Good Gardeners’ Association, e-mail me and I will send you the text after it is published this autumn. Alternatively send me a stamped self-addressed envelope and I will post it to you, complete with diagrams: these are too large to send by e-mail.