The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge
by Jeremy Narby
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Book Reviews of The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge
Book Review: Dr. Narby's Wild Ride
Summary: 2 Stars
Jeremy Narby's The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, started out decently enough with Narby reminiscing about his days doing field work in the Amazon Basin and from there he goes over some interesting ideas regarding DNA and Serpent Myths but then all goes down hill as he suddenly becomes a follower of Intelligent Design and makes an all out attack on Darwinian Evolution and Science itself.
A number of Narby's ideas regarding DNA and Shamanism are intriguing enough but he has apparently decided that all Shamanism is based on Molecular Biology, while he freely admits that he is being very reductionist on this point, I still see many problems with his view that Shamanism is based on Molecular Biology at heart. His argument mostly surrounds the symbol of the Serpent/Dragon which is present in many different mythologies often with connections to water and associations with twins. He decides that this is in actually a representation of DNA as viewed by Shamans and believes that all serpents in mythology and shamanic visions are actually DNA. Since DNA emits photons and this has been shown to possibly play a part in cell communication (along with the traditional chemical communication) Narby believes that in shamanic trances the shaman becomes able to see the light emitted by DNA (which often show up as snakes) and the shaman communicates with the individual bits of DNA (which is conscious) and the entire linked network of DNA based life. As justification for this argument he points out that some groups hold that spirits are beings of pure light, to him this is almost literally correct as the spirits are actually DNA and communicate through light as "spirits".
From there he goes on to say that all ladders, staircases, and ropes in shamanic quests are representations of DNA and when the shaman uses them he is travelling along DNA and similarly when the shaman goes to the underworld he is sinking down to the world of Molecular Biology (although since one can apparently work with and see DNA in the middle world one must ask why one would need to shrink down). While these views might make for some interesting theological discussion about some shamanic practices, Narby seems to have ignored the psychological aspects of visions and quests and any elements other than snakes or other things that just happen to be long and thin. Given Narby's view of spirits as DNA one must ask what spiritual helpers/allies are? Is someone's spiritual guides DNA in some bacteria on my hand? Will I kill Yahweh by washing my hands with anti-bacterial soap (hey maybe that's why Jesus decided that washing one's hands was bad!)?
A lot of his proof is like the proof of Erich von Däniken except that where Däniken saw aliens and spacecraft, Narby sees DNA and Molecules. Take for example this Däniken-esque proof from the book:
"The second was a rock painting of the Rainbow Snake. I looked at it more closely and saw two things: All around the serpent there were sorts of chromosomes, in their upside-down "U" shape, and underneath it there was a kind of ladder!" (p. 79)
By Chapter 10, entitled Biology's Blind Spot, Narby has decided that Evolution is Wrong and all of Science must be toppled. This bit seems to have come out of nowhere like someone spliced a Pro-Intelligent Design rant into a book where it didn't belong and as with all Pro-ID and Creationist literature we get the same old faulty attacks again and again. Attacks such as Evolution being based on a Circular argument because the most fit species survive to spread their genes and therefore are more fit. Yes, that is the definition of fitness, and sometimes the basis of things start as tautologies such as the Theory of Gravity but like Gravity Natural Selection and evolution is justified and testable by looking at it's predictive power. Population genetics and mathematics shows clearly that natural selection is very predictive and has so far not been falsified. Similarly, we can also look at the fossil record in geological strata for evidence of evolutionary change over time.
After that attack Narby then attacks the Central Dogma (Which is how transcription of DNA to proteins works) by misinterpreting what Francis Crick meant. Crick never meant the word Dogma in Central Dogma to be taken in the sense it is used in religion instead he meant it as a joke name for a grand hypothesis that he had at the time little actual experimental evidence for. Narby misinterprets Crick's joke to argue that evolution is apparently Faith based, since this argument has no basis in reality it falls flat immediately.
He then argues that ants and other animals are fully conscious because they do amazing things that seem to require forethought and they tap into DNA like shamans to do things. Higher animals are smart and may have consciousness but ants are pretty dumb. One is reminded of Edward Selous and others' ideas about thought-transference to explain how flocks of birds move and how ants and termites build hives, as it turns out birds flocking behaviour operates on simple instinctual rules (clustering, maintaining speed, and appropriate distance) and so are Ant Nesting behaviours. One proof of this is to put food just out of the reach of ants, and some dirt underneath, while they understand how to move earth and tunnel they will never purposely move earth to build ramps, bridges, or tunnels to reach a goal. The birds who flew in flocks and the ancestors of ants who had developed nesting behaviour managed to survive better and so these behaviours somehow became instincts and persisted.
Now Narby makes the extremely tired argument that life is too complicated to be determined by chance alone, and he is correct on this matter. Too bad there is more than chance guiding evolution, we also have Natural Selection guiding the process, to quote Richard Dawkins: "Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators." The combinations which work survive and prosper and are kept in the population. Narby argues "How can a small telephone directory of information emerge from random processes?" (P. 142) to answer this I wish to quote a bit of Michael Shermer's 25 Creationists' Arguments and 25 Evolutionists' Answers which nicely illustrates how natural selection can produce Shakespeare's Hamlet quickly from random letters:
"Natural selection is not "random" nor does it operate by "chance." Natural selection preserves the gains and eradicates the mistakes. The eye evolved from a single, light-sensitive cell into the complex eye of today through hundreds if not thousands of intermediate steps, many of which still exist in nature. In order for the monkey to type the first 13 letters of Hamlet's soliloquy by chance, it would take 26 to the power of 13 number of trials for success. This is 16 times as great as the total number of seconds that have elapsed in the lifetime of the solar system. But if each correct letter is preserved and each incorrect letter eradicated, the process operates much faster. How much faster? Richard Hardison constructed a computer program in which letters were "selected" for or against, and it took an average of only 335.2 trials to produce the sequence of letters TOBEORNOTTOBE. This takes the computer less than 90 seconds. The entire play can be done in about 4.5 days!"
Narby also tries to argue that gaps in the fossil record such as in whale evolution and other places where there are few or no intermediate forms indicate that evolution has not occurred. This however just means that in this instance there are gaps in the fossil record because the fossils have not been found yet. Narby also points to the seemingly rapid appearance of species in the fossil record as an argument against evolution. Apparently Narby has never heard of Punctuated Equilibrium.
Narby stunningly also tries to argue that because large portions of DNA is identical over many different species that this somehow indicates design, unfortunately for Narby a lot of these identical sequences of DNA code for the basic processes of life. A human who couldn't cope with oxygen or a fox which could not metabolize energy would not last long in this world. The fact that these sequences are identical is actually a point for evolution because the same processes have been preserved and we even see similar basic skeletal structures in animals even when it is not efficient or useful such as digits in the fins of dolphins or the appendix in humans.
Finally, we come back full circle to his argument about Natural Selection being a form of circular logic and he ties to paint Evolution as unfalsifiable (No, we can test it's predictions in such fields as Genetics and Palaeontology) and being denounce by an increasing number of scientists (not at all true).
All in all while Narby has some interesting nuggets of information and ideas in The Cosmic Serpent he ultimately seems to squander these ideas by jumping around in random directions and to strange conclusions based on very little evidence.
Book Review: Wedding bells for reason and fancy
Summary: 4 Stars
The Cosmic Serpent, by Jeremy Narby
I remember my personal shift from poetic to philosophical or scientific language. That was more than twenty years ago. I then paid more attention to the things themselves through rigorous analysis rather than relying intuitively on fanciful images that have a vague, questionable, kinship with these things.
In evolving so, I increasingly showed a typical prejudice of the Western, rational mind. I turned my back on all manner of mythological narratives where intuition and imagination share the same bed and beget strange, perplexing mental creations, open to a multitude of interpretations. Admittedly, this prejudice is warranted to the extent that purely rational or factual accounts that relate clear, if limited, realities with words directly appropriate to these realities are more intelligible and reliable. Having said this, it can become a serious impediment in the study of so-called primitive cultures. Their wisdom is an indiscriminate blend of profound truths, rooted in experience (sometimes expanded by psychoactive agents found in certain plants), and quirky anthropomorphic projections or poetic assimilations.
Open-mindedness here implies a renewed tolerance toward fanciful myths to rediscover the truth hidden in them, as that of ancient mythologies.
The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby - a brilliantly written and solidly documented book that is a pleasant read into the bargain - is an invitation to reunite with our intuitive, imaginative self and conciliate it with our Western, rational mind.
Likewise, in my own intellectual journey, I have finally chosen to be not a philosopher (fond of the scientific method) instead of a poet, in the name of reason and clarity, but both a philosopher and a poet. Reality is indeed best apprehended by means of all our mental faculties: mnemonic, associative, intuitive, imaginative, conceptive or other.
Having said this, Jeremy Narby in the Cosmic Serpent goes further than other anthropologists who strive to salvage the old myths by showing their secret relevancy to the real world. In establishing a connection between intertwined cosmic serpents as the universal principle of life (which is a foundational element of the so-called primitive knowledge) and the DNA double helix (which is the prized discovery of our scientific age), he opens a door that some may never have imagined even existed. Is the world truly animistic, where everything down to the smallest thing has a spirit? Thanks to some special training or special psychoactive agents, can humans, who are preeminently spiritual beings, communicate with the spirits of such large molecules as DNA molecules and through this process learn from and about them? Shamans apparently do. This would account for their knowledge of these molecules, represented metaphorically by intertwined cosmic serpents (or such like imagery as a cosmic ladder), outside the arena of science.
Let me conclude with a recommendation: read this book. Thrilling and informative, wonderfully unsettling.
Laurent Grenier
author of the book A REASON FOR LIVING
- The way to fulfillment against great odds -
Book Review: Interesting speculation
Summary: 3 Stars
I found this book very interesting, but quite bizarre. The author states that South American shamans taking an orally active dimethyltrptamine preparation and then seeing various visions or hallucinations, are actually seeing the structure of DNA (which to them appears as snakes). The author further reviews world myth, where snakes often appear, and then states that DNA has communcated with various shamans throughout the world. There is some attempt to show that the molecular biology of DNA somehow supports this idea, but most of the author's sources are conversations with aquaintances who have some knowledge of molecular biology. The recent observations that DNA very weakly emitts photons under some conditions is taken as a molecular mechanism by wich shamans under the infulence of dimethyltryptamine see snakes - or "see" DNA and the "knowledge" that it's out to impart. Without knowing it, the author is part of a long line of scientists and laymen who have tried to find unusual and mystical aspects of the DNA molecule, almost, but not always, without sucess. The author lacks the trainig in molecular biology to understand that these photons may represent oxidation reactions and nothing more. Similarly his ideas about the function of repeditive DNA sequences in the mammalian genome are speculative and nonsensical. I found this book fun to read, but speculative in the extreme. How photons emitted from DNA can be seen by humans under the influence of a hallucinogen is not mentioned. Or how the photons manage to move through solid matter and be "seen" through any mechanism. In fact, very few of the ideas set forth in this book are supported, particularly those that relate to science.
I still rate the book highly as the author is willing to put together two very different areas and he does have some interesting ideas. However, he is absolutely out of his depth when he tries to relate the structure of DNA to dimethyltryptamine visions. Snakes and DNA are both relatively linear, but that's as far as the comparison can really go. If shamans saw molecular biology, why don't they see DNA polymerase? Any vision could be called molecular biology. One could for example, say that shamans also saw "round things". Round things things could be ribosomes. Ribosomes are both nucleic acids and proteins....I think I have a book here. For what it's worth my science background includes a Ph.D. in molecular biology and medical school. The author is making comparisons that are very hard to take seriously. Still, the book is fun to read and may make one think.
Book Review: Visionary Shamanic Trance
Summary: 3 Stars
I have not read this book yet, but I intend to do so immediately, as the information herein pertains greatly to the visions I see when I am in a multidimensional trance state. I see a lot of ignorance here from a lot of people claiming to be rational and intelligent people. What they do not realize is that they are completely unaware of universal truths, that they have not penetrated deeply into the nature of reality, existence, themselves, their spirit, and their connection to all that is. To you people I say that you are missing out on life, in a profound way, you could have ecstatic love, tantric sex, magical experiences, learn the nature of truth & buddahessence. I invite you to open yourselves and your minds, and to not be so judgmental of beings who have actually explored more of life.
I am not a shaman, in this life - as I have had no initiations by a shaman, but I can say that I have had all the same serpentine visions these ayahuasqueros from South America describe, and honestly, the serpent energy connects to the rising of the Kundalini (connection to Tantrism) connects to the activation of all chakras, connects to DNA, connects to Merkabic fields, multidimensional orgasm, electricity/connection... The visions I've had of serpents have looked something like the numbers you see in the Matrix, as they move across the field of vision, where everything you see becomes numbers, except instead of moving from top to bottom, they horizontally, from left to right, and from right to left, back and forth, interweaving green serpentine intertwining row after row, with little red dots undulating.. That is literally what i see every time now. It is the vision I see when I am connected/aligned in pure multidimensional awareness. I have also been met by two rattlesnakes when I was on ayahuasca, in the flesh (they weren't just visions) and let me tell you, I was SCARED.
All I can say is that there is a lot of truth & credibility to the experience of serpents in visionary states - and whether that relates to DNA chains intertwining is anyone's interpretation. I can say that I've read the stories of some indigenous shamans and they say that while in a visionary state you can communicate with plant spirits (which is true) because when you are in an interconnected state, you have access to all the information of the forest - it's just there, immediately, at your fingertips, you just have to become one with the intelligence of the plant spirits.... (which is what ayahuasca does for an ayahuasquero)
Book Review: HOW CAN NATURE NOT BE CONSCIOUS?
Summary: 5 Stars
The central idea of THE COSMIC SERPENT is that shamans have w way of communicating with nature at the molecular level when under the influence of certain drugs or in a trance state. This is a far-fetched idea, one that most scientists would consider so silly that they would not bother to read the book. What the shamans claim is that they communicate with plants, and the plants give them the information that they need to make medicines or poisons such as curare. Sometimes these preparations are made from many different plants, and require complicated preparation. It is also true that some animals, such as chimpanzees, know what plants to eat to help them when they are sick. So where does this knowledge come from if not from nature itself?
What Jeremy Narby is specifically claiming is that shamans communicate with DNA. He points out that throughout the world, and throughout history, intertwined snakes, or a ladder, both of which are reminiscent of DNA, have been symbols of shamanism. Paintings of ayahuasca visions by the Peruvian shamans Luis Eduardo Luna and Pablo Amaringo, and rock paintings of Australian Aborigines, certainly look very much like DNA in its various stages of mitosis. Dr. Narby presents a multitude of other resemblances of the shamans' serpents and DNA. If all of this is mere happenstance, it certainly is astonishing.
Dr. Narby asks the sensible question: "How could nature not be conscious if our own consciousness is produced by nature?" Is this really so much harder to believe than life and human intelligence arising from blind errors in the duplicating process? Obviously, only a tiny percentage of such errors could be beneficial, then these errors would have to escape DNA's self-repair mechanisms, and they would have to somehow manage to pass on future offspring. Could anything be less likely than this? Dr. Narby also presents a fascinating and plausible hypothesis that for the role of the "junk DNA" that constitutes 97% of the genome, namely that it functions as a crystal to amplify photons for communication between DNA molecules.
This might well be one of the most important books on DNA to have ever been written.
(Peter Payne, author of CAPTAIN CALIFORNIA BATTLES THE BEELZEBUBIAN BEASTS OF THE BIBLE)