ETCHING WITH UNIVERSAL ACID

For a period that is supposed to have rejected grand narratives, our current interest in them verges on the obsessive. If literal belief in the old biblical grand narrative of Genesis has waned (at least in educated circles) it has been replaced by the scarcely less all-encompassing narrative of evolution. For Daniel Dennett, the mechanism Darwin attempted to describe in his Origin of Species can now be used (as Darwin never did) to explain almost every feature of the universe from the Big Bang onwards. That mechanism, or ‘algorithm’, is natural selection.

For Dennett and his militantly atheist sociobiological allies, such as Richard Dawkins, or A.O. Wilson, the triumphant narrative of natural selection has not merely obliterated, but replaced the Judeo-Christian narrative of the creation and destiny of humanity. In his metaphorical terminology, there are many ‘cranes’ but no ‘skyhooks’ in the ascent of man. Life has pulled itself up from primordial slime with no aids from above. Science has displaced religion, not just conceptually, but rhetorically as well.

For Dennett that Darwinian algorithm of natural selection constitutes a ‘universal acid’ – a fantasy common to many schoolchildren when they begin to study chemistry. Once invented, universal acid is, by definition, uncontainable.