The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve, c. 1825. Watercolour on wood. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Steve Jones is a revisionist, but in a good sense. One of his earlier books, Darwin's Ghost, was a chapter-by-chapter update of The Origin of Species: Explaining key concepts of Darwinian evolution with more up-to-date examples and data than Darwin had at hand.
His new book, The Serpent's Promise: The Retelling of the Bible Through the Eyes of Modern Science takes off from Scripture-although not in as deliberate a fashion as his earlier venture. (I note that the book's subtitle, oddly, is inconsistent in Amazon's listing.)
And in any case, that's not the author's main interest.
In Serpent, Jones, a professor emeritus of genetics at University College of London, takes a few key passages from the Bible to launch into scientific discussions of some of the questions that occupied the authors of the books of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (mostly the former)-but providing the insights that modern science can now offer them.
In the preface to the American edition, he writes:
This volume tries to interpret the Good Book not from the point of view of an atheist (which I happen to be) but to read parts of it as an early attempt to make sense of the physical world and hence as an ancestor of today's science. What have we found out in the past two millennia and more about the origin of life, about inborn fate, about the visions of the prophets or even about religion itself? Can science ever hope to explain why we do 'unto others' by acting in a way that diminishes our own prospects while benefitting those of our fellows?
In nine chapters, Jones discusses what genetics tells us about the first humans; nature vs. nuture; sex; how we age; human migrations across the globe; the human diet; the spread of contagious diseases; the great deluges (there were more than a few and no doubt many to come); and finally spirituality and the brain-all matters of great importance that recur throughout the Bible and the rest of human literature since we became self-aware enough to appreciate and fear our own mortality.
The great deluges, for example, have a particular resonance in these days of concern over climate change and what the future may bring. One doesn't have to believe in Noah to appreciate the real events that must have inspired the Biblical narrative:
The first tsunami to be recorded came in around 1620 BC with the explosion of Thera. The eruption - its remains now the island of Santorini - was more powerful than that of Krakatoa and generated a wall of water that swept across the Mediterranean. It was once thought to be responsible for the extinction of the Minoans on Crete but now it seems that an earlier burst of ash gave them time to flee. The Egyptians spoke of fire and floods, the Greeks - upwind of the explosion - of a noisy battle as the gods threw great stones, while in Turkey the Hittites, who saw no more than smoke, remembered a giant who touched the sky. [Ch. Five]
Or, in Chapter Eight, Zwingli's Sausages, where Jones discusses the crucial importance of cooking in human evolution:
The plight of the great uncooked shows how much Homo sapiens has come to depend on fire. Anthropologists have a fatal tendency to decide what made us human - we are, they say in their various ways, the upright, the grasping, the naked (or the well-dressed) ape; the handy , the thoughtful, the babbling or the dishonest primate. Those attributes are no doubt important, but the kitchen has been as central to human origins as were any of them. From Stone Age to Aga Stove gastronomy has been a social adhesive. From its first days, life's basic chore became a shared set of talents rather than an individual action. Our thick-browed forebear Homo erectus, who flourished from some two million years ago, had already evolved small jaws and teeth and rather large brains, as had the Neanderthals, whose unbrushed fossil teeth still bear the remnants of cooked grains . All this hints that even our distant predecessors spent less time around the table than did their primate kin.
Then there are the enviously long life spans granted to the patriarchs by the authors of the Book of Genesis, perhaps inspired by more than a touch of wishful thinking. 'In biblical times,' Jones writes in Chapter Four, 'average life expectancy was not much more than around thirty (and much of that came from infant mortality) and every moment was filled with threat.'
In the modern world?
Since the middle of the nineteenth century longevity in the developed world has gone up at the extraordinary rate of six hours a day, unchecked through peace and war, boom and slump. Across Europe, nations have come together in the patterns of survival. As recently as 1960, Portuguese men died seven years younger than did their fellows in Spain, but now the difference is two years (and Spain does better than Britain). If such progress continues, most children born in Western Europe since the millennium will see [a hundred] in the twenty-second century and a few might make it to a hundred and twenty.
Some people suggest that even that might be an underestimate. Demographers have often failed to forecast the rate at which lives will lengthen. As recently as 1977 they estimated that a British male born in 2010 could expect to survive to 71, but that figure has already risen by almost a further decade. Optimists claim that the first person to celebrate his or her thousandth birthday has already been born.
The Serpent's Promise is billed as a book that does not 'take sides' in the God and Science debate, but that's a bit misleading. Like many of his colleagues who write popular science books, Jones sees religion in largely negative terms (he also turns his nose up at philosophy without ever explaining why).
As Marx might also have predicted, across the world there is a precise fit between social unfairness and the power of the priesthood. In countries whose governments are fair and effective, the influence of the clergy fades. The most devout nations have more crime, more infant deaths, more mental illness and less social mobility than do those in which dogma plays a lesser part. Their citizens trust their God more and each other less and the Churches gain as a result. Chaos and credulity go together. [from the epilogue]
The ultimate solution to the antagonisms caused by religion, he argues, is science. 'The lesson from history,' he writes, 'is that in these connected times humankind could form a society that stretches beyond its own mental neighbourhood to embrace the globe into a single system of shared values.'
Further:
As the obstacles of speech, race and distance that once divided us are overcome, the time has come to abandon the last great restraint, William Blake's 'mind-forg'd manacles' of organised religion, which does so much more to divide than to unite. When those shackles are at last struck from their wrists, men and women, wherever they are, will no longer depend on the dubious promises of a serpent. Instead they will be free to form a single community united by an objective and unambiguous culture whose logic, language and practices are permanent and universal. It is called science.'
Perhaps. But in one important sense, the connection fails, I think, because what the Serpent of Genesis promised Eve ultimately was knowledge of Good and Evil-not knowledge of the natural order.
Good and -perhaps especially- evil are matters that many philosophers and scientists have concluded are beyond rational explanation. And so Jones's prediction that in the increasingly global village of our species, men and women will no longer need pastors or depend on the Bible (or other books of wisdom) is short-sighted.
Still, it's evident throughout his engaging book that Jones has an appreciation for Scripture that he finds bafflingly absent in many self-described Christians who belong to what he dryly calls the Church of the Holy Metaphor.
'Sceptic as I may be,' he writes, 'I have more faith in the Bible than many Christians do.'
He's not alone. The Serpent's Promise is well worth adding to your reading list.
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