Modern Mind

was essentially in
The Naked Ape,
but by the leading scientists themselves. These books each contained a fair amount of complex biology, but they had wider ambitions too.
    The first appeared in 1970 in French and a year later in English. Its author was Jacques Monod, part of a three-man team that had won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for uncovering the mechanism by which genetic material synthesises protein. In
Chance and Necessity,
Monod sought to use the latest biology, since Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix, to define life, and in considering what life itself is, went on to consider the implications that might have for ethics, politics, and philosophy. The book is almost certainly more impressive now, at the end of the century and with the benefit of hindsight, than when it was first published (it was republished by Penguin in 1997). This is because Monod’s thinking foreshadowed many of the ideas promulgated by biologists and philosophers who are now much better known than Monod, authors like E. O. Wilson, Stephen J. Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett.
    Although a biologist, Monod’s underlying insight was that life is essentially a physical and even mathematical phenomenon. His initial purpose was to show how entities in the universe can ‘transcend’ the laws of that universe while nevertheless obeying them. Or, as he put it, evolution does not confer ‘the obligation’ to exist but it does confer ‘the right’ to exist. For Monod, two of the great intellectual successes of the twentieth century, the free market and the transistor, share an important characteristic with life itself: amplification. The rules allow for the constituent parts to spontaneously – naturally – produce
more
of whatever system they are part of. On this reasoning there is nothing in principle unique about life.
    In the technical part of his book, Monod showed how proteins and nucleic acids, the two components which all life is made from,
spontaneously
adopt certain three-dimensional forms, and that it is these three-dimensional forms which predetermine so much else. It is this spontaneous assembly that, for Monod, is the most important element of life. These substances, he says, are characterised by physical – and therefore mathematical – properties. ‘Great thinkers, Einstein among them, have often … wondered at the fact that mathematical entities created by man can so faithfully represent nature even though they owe nothing to experience.’ Again Monod implies that there is nothing especially ‘wonder’-ful about this – life is just as much about mathematics and physics as it is about biology. (This foreshadowed work we shall be considering in the last chapter.)
    He went on to argue that evolution can only take place at all because of the ability of nucleic acids to reproduce themselves
exactly,
and this therefore means that only accident can produce mutations. In that sense, the universe was and is accidental (statistical and, therefore, again mathematical). This too, he felt, had profound implications. To begin with, evolution did not apply only to living things: adaptation is another expression of time, no less than another function of the second law of thermodynamics. Living things, as isolated, self-contained energetic systems, seem to operate against entropy, except that it is inconceivable for evolution – being a function of time – to go backwards. This implies that life, being an essentially physical phenomenon, is
temporary:
different life forms will battle against each other until a greater disorder takes over again.
    No less controversially, but a good deal less apocalyptically, and anticipating the work of E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and others, Monod felt that ideas, culture, and language are survival devices, that there is survival value in myth (he avoided use of the term
religion),
but that they will in time be replaced. (He thought Christianity and Judaism more ‘primitive’ religions in this sense than, say, Hinduism, and implied that the latter would outlast Judaeo-Christianity.) And he felt that the scientific approach, as epitomised in the theory of evolution, which is a ‘blind’ process, not leading to any teleological conclusion, is the most ‘objective’ view of the world, in that it does not involve any one set of individuals having greater access to the truth than any other group. In this sense he thought that science disproves and replaces such ideas as