March 06, 2003

To understand evil, start with DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid. It's the building block of all life on this particular planet. Everything that you are physically, and a good deal of who you are as a personality, is determined by this molecule. DNA makes up genes, which make up chromosomes, and humans have 23 of those. DNA is a polymer, and it's made up of a repeating pattern of just four compounds, called nucleotides: Adenine, Guanine, Thymine, and Cytosine. Each nucelotide is in turn made up of varying arrangements of just three sorts of atoms: Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen. That's it. A particular arrangement of those four nucleotides contains every bit of information needed to make a bacterium, a clam, a tree, a gorilla, or a human being. Four compounds, arranged just so, mean that you got your father's nose and your mother's hips. Four compounds, arranged just so, determine the risk of disease, the propensity for certain behaviors, and the length of life. Four compounds, contained in genetic material exchanged between two people and then combined into a new arrangement, create a child--new life.

But that life wouldn't happen without another nifty property of this particular polymer: it can replicate itself. Hundreds of billions of times, with near perfect accuracy. It does this with the help of two other chemical compounds, called enzymes: a helicase, and two DNA polymerases. In today's world of cloned sheep, alien-human hybrids with bad teeth, and bio-tech company logos, the twisted-ladder "double helix" shape of the DNA molecule is familiar to us all. In actuality, the "twisted-ladder" is spiralled and coiled up in on itself, so picture the double-helix curled up into a kind of compact little wad, nestled within protective proteins called histones. In the middle of each rung of the curled-up ladder is a hydrogen bond, a weak electrical attraction that holds the molecules of the two sides together.

The weakness of that attraction is key: when DNA replicates, a helicase "unzips" the double helix, splitting it in two by breaking the hydrogen bond in the middle of each "rung" of the wadded-up twisted ladder. As this occurs, a DNA polymerase binds to one of the newly-unzipped half-strands and uses it as a template for re-creating the now-missing half of the double helix. Another DNA polymerase binds itself to the other half-strand and, with the help of yet another enzyme called DNA ligase, works to synthesize the missing half of the double helix and then stiches them together. When this molecular construction project is complete, there are two exact duplicates of the original DNA molecule, each composed of one new half-strand and one old half-strand.

It gets better. The average human chromosome contains 150 million nucleotide pairs, a nucleotide pair being, roughly, one "rung" of the ladder. If all of the unzipping and synthesizing and restitching had to start at one end of the double helix and proceed to the other, each replication would take a month. But it only takes an hour. Why? Because the unzipping and synthesizing and restitching can take place at many different places along the strand simultaneously. Different sections are taken apart, and come back together, all at the same time: molecules swimming around, atoms swapping electrons and realigning themselves, chaos! one would think. But no. The error rate is around ten to the negative tenth per base pair for each round of replication. That means that, each time a single nucleotide pair is replicated, it has around a one in 100 billion chance of replicating incorrectly. For reference, that's 4,000 times more unlikely than being killed by having an airplane fall on you.

The latest estimate is that this replication process has been going on here for somewhere around 3.85 billion years.

And that, my friends, is an amazing thing. For the moment, forget about seeking an explanation for this molecular dance. Don't be tempted to ascribe it to the powers of God or natural selection. Just contemplate the mere fact of it. The staggering elegance of 150 million nucleotides engaging in this near perfect pattern, the busy activity of the enzymes as they shuttle along the coiled double helix strands, working with machine-like precision as they dissassemble and reassemble infinitesimal structures at a rate of 50 base pairs a second. Call it elegant. Or even beautiful. But one thing that this process most certainly illustrates is creative order.

This process is at the fundamental base of all the created beauty you might care to appreciate. Bach's Trio Sonatas? DNA made them possible. The rose windows of the cathedral at Chartre? DNA girds every sparkling piece of glass. The elegant lines of well-written computer code? Impossible without the master molecular code of DNA. It drives every attempt to order the raw stuff of our world: sharpening a flint to stab at the heart of a bison; digging a ditch to bring water to our first crops; pressing mud and straw into brick molds baking in the noonday sun to form the walls of our towns; tearing iron ore from the depths of the earth and refining it into strong, lightweight beams that loft our gleaming towers toward the sky; transforming common silicon into circuitry pathways one one-thousandth the width of a human hair, to power our computers...all of this symmetry and beauty that we humans have wrought from the very stuff of the cosmos depends upon the sucessful and ordered completion of the molecular dance outlined above.

Entropy and the second law of thermodynamics aside, the tendency of the "stuff" on this planet and in the universe at large for the past twelve billion years or so has been an attempt to order itself, to achieve creative synthesis. Whenever we, as manipulators of the matter around us, creatively reshape the world, whenever we create that which is aesthetically pleasing because it suggests refinement and order to our senses, whenever we create new life, we are echoing that basic, fundamental tendency. When a flautist causes her breath to vibrate a column of air within a tube of refined metal as she plays the aria from Bach's Cantata number 208, she is participating in the very essence of creation. Likewise, when Bach dipped his quill made from the feather of a goose into an ink prepared from gum arabic, copperas, gall apples, and water, and then set the symbolic representations of each notes pitch and duration down upon parchment made from animal skin, he participated in that essence. When I hear those black blots transformed from static symbols into moving air, decoded from pits in a thin layer of aluminum by a tiny point of coherent laser light, I, too, am participating.

We are, each of us, surrounded by the essence of creation, which is creation, the continual ordering and reordering of the stuff of matter by human beings, who are in themselves made up of the most finely-ordered matter. Every building we raise, every object we make, every idea we refine and put down upon paper or preserve within the binary patterns of magnetic media...all of this is participation in creative order. Again: don't seek the soul, here, not just yet; instead, appreciate the mere fact of the human tendency to create, to order the world around us. Even our most destructive atomic endeavors spring from a desire to be able to organize the stuff of matter at its most elementary level. We are creatures who exist by virture of order on a monumental yet molecular scale, and this can be expressed by our behavioral tendencies. The more we resemble that cause of our very being, the more we approach a kind of harmony with our small world and with the cosmos at large.

Likewise, the less we resemble that cause, the more we approach disharmony. The more deliberately we seek destruction, the disordering and the unmaking of things, the ending of lives and the snuffing out of potential unfoldings, the farther away we are from the essence of creation. We then turn ourselves towards an unfathomable absence of being. We face the Ancient Kind, in an unknowable time before time, a place of no place, where there is no creation and no existence.

The farther away we are from the essential nature of creation, the closer we are to evil.

[First in a series.]